By Mike Dolan
LONDON (Reuters) – What matters in U.S. and global markets today
By Mike Dolan, Editor-At-Large, Financial Industry and Financial Markets
Forget about those puts. The White House does not seem concerned enough about crashing global stock prices to reverse its massive trade tariffs, and the Federal Reserve appears in no hurry to deliver rapid interest rate cuts. So the market sell off deepens and threatens to turn into a crash.
I’ll discuss all the market mayhem and then explore some competing history lessons on trade and explain why they may be bad news for U.S. Big Tech mega stocks.
Today’s Market Minute
* On Sunday, Trump indicated he was not concerned about losses that have already wiped out trillions of dollars in value from share markets around the world. “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he said.
* Taiwan stocks plummeted almost 10% on Monday, the biggest one-day percentage fall on record. Taiwan’s president has taken to X to pledge a “golden age” of shared prosperity with the U.S.
* Some hedge funds say they are offloading all or most of their holdings of stocks as U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war wipes out trillions of dollars of market value and forces them to curtail trading using borrowed cash.
* EU countries will seek to present a united front in the coming days against U.S. tariffs, likely approving a first set of targeted countermeasures on up to $28 billion of U.S. imports from dental floss to diamonds.
* Fake cosmetics, massage pillows and sex toys. These are some clues pointing to a suspected Russian-run sabotage plot behind parcel explosions in the UK, Germany and Poland last summer, a person with knowledge of the Polish investigation told Reuters.
Stocks Crater Again, No ‘ifs’ or ‘puts’
Any investor hesitation in offloading expensive U.S. stocks earlier this year was partly due to suspicion that President Donald Trump would pull back or soften his tariff plan in the face of sharp equity market losses.
But after the worst week on Wall Street since the pandemic hit in 2020, Trump effectively doubled down on Wednesday’s tariff sideswipe against the rest of the world. “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he said as he returned from a weekend of golf in Florida.
S&P 500 futures plunged another 4% at one point on Monday, putting the market on course to enter full-blown bear market territory as losses from recent peaks top 20%. With the VIX ‘fear index’ of volatility soaring as high as 60 for the first time since August, the whole financial complex is on edge.
Global stocks in Asia and Europe tanked again today, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng clocking a 13% loss in its biggest one-day drop since the traumatic emerging markets crisis of 1997. It’s now in the red for the year.
Treasury yields, however, backed up, as did the dollar, especially against China’s yuan. Oil prices fell to their lowest in four years, and both gold and Bitcoin fell too, the latter to its lowest since the election in November.
If there is a ‘Trump put’ in the stock market, the strike price would appear to be much lower than Friday’s close. And investors appear set to dump equities until they reach it.
The current Washington tariff plan and the unfolding retaliation, such as China’s 34% tariffs on all U.S. exports, look likely to sow recession at home and abroad, an outcome that was unthinkable to many people at the start of the year.
Goldman Sachs now sees a 45% chance of a U.S. recession this year, effectively a coin toss. JPMorgan last week said there was a 60% chance of a wider global downturn.
Time for a Fed rescue then?
Much like the imagined Trump put, the ‘Fed put’ seems out of sight right now.
On Friday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell outlined concerns about the trade uncertainty and business anxiety, but he put as much emphasis on the potential inflation spur from tariffs as the possible damage to growth. And he said he saw little in the labor market to warrant early rate cuts.
Absent a shift of tone from Trump or Powell or some rowback on promises of trade retaliation, then the most important news for markets in the coming days will come with the corporate earnings season that kicks off in earnest this week.
With such seismic uncertainty, investors are likely to see a sweep of downgraded outlooks and profit warnings, which will only add more fuel to the fire.
And now I’ll explain why U.S. tech firms and banks may find themselves squarely in the crosshairs of this escalating trade war.
Tough Tariff History Lesson for US Tech
The problem with U.S. President Donald Trump using historical grievances to justify a trade war is that others will do likewise, leaving richly-valued U.S. tech firms and banks in the crosshairs of retaliation.
One of the big puzzles about last week’s dramatic stock market plunge following the announcement of the sweeping U.S. tariff hikes was that so few investors seemed prepared for it when it was hiding in plain sight.
Trump’s tariff plans, while at the high end of expectations, were flagged endlessly for months before and after his November 5 election victory. Resulting retaliation from China, Europe, Canada and others was publicly and repeatedly promised too.
That it took up to last Thursday for markets to begin to factor in a wider recession is bizarre at best, negligent at worst.
Even stranger was that being long U.S. megacap tech stocks was still considered the most crowded trade on the planet as recently as March. And yet by Friday, the once “Magnificent Seven” leaders of the sector were nursing a bear market 25%-plus decline from their post-election peaks in December.
It may simply be a case of the most crowded trades emptying out the quickest. But there are other reasons for Big Tech to turn tail.
The Rest is History
Trump is justifying his decision to impose the highest average U.S. import tariffs in more than a century with a history lesson on how overseas trading partners have “looted, pillaged and raped” America and how often “the friend is worse than the foe.”
Others have similarly dusted off the spreadsheets and history books, but they find a different narrative.
Trump’s widely-criticized tariff formula focused solely on trade in goods, not services. But experts point out that this quid pro quo was precisely how the U.S. chose to design the globalized trading system that it’s now choosing to unravel.
The global dominance of U.S. Big Tech companies, whose stock valuations have skyrocketed for more than a decade, was one of the big prizes Washington secured.
Under Pressure
In a recent article, trade economist Ricardo Hausmann questioned the administration’s sole focus on goods trade, adding that tariff retaliation may be beside the point.
“America’s economic ties to the rest of the world go far beyond goods. Services and investments are equally – if not more – important. And if that’s where its advantages and potential vulnerabilities lie, there is little reason for other countries to retaliate with tariffs.”
Counter-tariffs certainly might come – China already announced measures on Friday – but this is not where the pain would be felt most. The outsized slide in U.S. tech and bank stocks, as a result, reflects more than just recession fears.
Hausmann details how last year’s $1.2 trillion U.S. goods trade deficit is only half the story, as there was nearly a $1 trillion U.S. surplus in services like digital, telecommunications and finance, if the repatriated profits of overseas subsidiaries are added back.
In effect, America’s overall trade is nearly in balance.
But given that the value of U.S. investments abroad is estimated to be $16.4 trillion compared to the $374 billion that foreign companies earned in America last year, the former is a much more valuable target for any tit-for-tat reactions than U.S. goods, he said.
What’s more, U.S. dominance in tech and intellectual property was not an accident. Indeed, it is rooted in the Uruguay Round of trade talks in 1994, when developing countries agreed to enforce rich countries’ IP protections in exchange for goods market access.
If the U.S. is reneging on the latter, the former may be considered fair game.
“While the debate in the U.S. and abroad is focused on tariffs and their impact on prices and exports, other countries will soon begin to wonder whether protecting America’s most valuable economic assets – its IP and the global mechanisms that allow it to be monetized – still serves their interests,” Hausmann wrote.
Emerging economies aside, European leaders – with their multiple grievances against U.S. Big Tech and demands for fairer digital taxation – see this vulnerability too.
France, for one, said its companies should pause investments in the U.S. while the situation is clarified. French Finance Minister Eric Lombard also said Paris was working on “a package of responses that can go well beyond tariffs”.
The European Union’s recently adopted “Anti-Coercion Instrument” allows it to limit offending countries’ access to public procurement tenders, restrict protection of IP rights or limit financial service firms’ access to EU markets.
Too hefty to invoke?
“Donald Trump buckles under pressure, corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he must also feel the pressure – and this pressure must now be exerted from Germany, from Europe,” German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Thursday.
The gloves are off.
Chart of the day
Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng stock index was one of the star performers of the year prior to Trump’s trade sideswipe last week. But it plunged 13% on Monday, falling into the red for the year to date and recording it biggest one-day drop since the traumatic emerging markets crisis of 1997.
Back then, the regional crisis became so severe that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority was eventually forced to intervene to buy equities as part of its defence of the HK dollar peg.
Monday’s drop unfolded despite the fact that a unit of China’s sovereign fund, Central Huijin Investment, bought China-listed stocks to defend market stability.
Meanwhile, the Hang Seng Tech Index plummeted 17%, marking its worst single-day performance since records began, bringing the index close to where it began the year before the DeepSeek-inspired rally.
Today’s events to watch
* U.S. February consumer credit
* Federal Reserve Board Governor Adriana Kugler speaks
Opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence, and freedom from bias.
(By Mike Dolan; Editing by Anna Szymanski and Bernadette Baum)
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