September 11, 2019 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
Ahead of the resumption of U.S.-China trade negotiators next month China has announced a small set of exclusions--on $1.65 billion in U.S. exports to China--from 25% tariffs that were put into place last year. The exempt goods include such minor categories as alfalfa,...
September 1, 2019 | Daily JAM |
... some things in the financial markets will be so similar to what they were before the Labor Day holiday that you might think you were never away at all. Not everything, though. Yes, the U.S.-China trade war will still be hanging fire. And the tariffs on $112...
August 23, 2019 | Daily JAM |
That didn't take long. This afternoon President Donald Trump said he would raise tariffs to retaliation to this morning's move by China to impose a new 10% tariff on $75 billion in U.S. exports to China. Trump's move would increase tariffs already in effect on $250...
August 23, 2019 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term, Volatility |
Xi Jinping and Donald Trump upstaged Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell this morning. Powell's Jackson Hole speech this morning was supposed to be the day's big market event. (More on this speech in a later post.) But this morning China announced that it would...
August 14, 2019 | Daily JAM |
A U.S. economy facing the possibility of a slowdown sure doesn't need troubles in the Farm Belt. But that's exactly what the farm sector is seeing. New figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that farm income in 2018 was about 50% of what it was in 2013....
August 14, 2019 | Daily JAM, Short Term |
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 800.49 points today, or 3.05%; the Standard & Poor's 500 finished 2.93% lower; and the NASDAQ Composite lost 3.02%. One reason for the plunge was an intraday inversion in the Treasury yield curve with the yield on the...
August 13, 2019 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Just in case you were wondering: Nothing matters to the stock market except tariffs. I think today's trading proves that. This morning the Trump administration announced that it would delay new 10% tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese goods set to go into effect on...
August 6, 2019 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
Stocks rallied today on signs that the People's Bank intends to deliver an orderly drop in China's currency. This morning the yuan traded slightly above the critical 7 yuan to the dollar currency band. And the bank said it will sell $4.2 billion in yuan bills in Hong...
August 2, 2019 | Daily JAM, Friday Trick or Trend |
Our regular (or occasional or perhaps occasionally regular) Friday series (actually running on Friday this week) Trick or Trend looks at what might (or might not) be emerging investible trends. Exclusively on JAM. This post won't run anywhere else. Ever. Today,...
August 1, 2019 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, Morning Briefing, Volatility, You Might Have Missed |
So much for any hopes that the resumption of U.S-China trade talks would put an end to the tariff war in anything like the near term. The new round of talks only began on Wednesday, was adjourned after a day, and was scheduled to resume in Washington in September....
July 30, 2019 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
At the least the timing seems odd. Unless, of course, you believe, as President Donald Trump may, that China and its President Xi Jinping can be bullied into a trade deal. Speaking with reporters outside the White House as he headed for Jamestown, Virginia, Trump...
July 24, 2019 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Stock Alerts |
Caterpillar (CAT) reported second quarter earnings this morning of $2.83 a share, well below the $3.11 a share expected by Wall Street analysts. And then, to make the future as grim as the present, Caterpillar rearmed its earnings guidance for the fiscal 2019 year of...
