This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
President Trump’s Truth Social posts aren’t moving markets like they used to.
At 8:04 a.m. ET Wednesday, the president posted on his social media platform, “OUR DEAL WITH CHINA IS DONE, SUBJECT TO FINAL APPROVAL WITH PRESIDENT XI AND ME.”
A post like that would’ve moved markets a month ago, as stocks were swinging on any and every trade-related update from the president.
But on Wednesday, futures tied to the major indexes barely budged after Trump’s post. Instead, stocks found their direction from economic data.
At 8:30 a.m. ET, a cooler-than-expected reading of consumer prices for May sent futures higher as investors amped up bets that the Federal Reserve could cut interest rates at least twice this year.
This marked the latest sign that markets have moved on from President Trump’s trade war dictating every move. Instead, the focus is shifting back to the Federal Reserve and the path of the US economy.
“For some period of time, tariffs were the only thing that mattered,” Truist co-CIO Keith Lerner told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday. “And I think we’re finding out [on Wednesday] a lot of other factors matter.”
The unwind of peak trade policy uncertainty certainly served as a catalyst to bring markets off their lows in April.
But as the S&P 500 (^GSPC) has moved back to near-all-time highs over the past two weeks, strategists like Piper Sandler chief investment strategist Michael Kantrowitz have been highlighting that trade policy updates don’t pack the same “oomph” as they did weeks ago. Measures like Bloomberg’s Trade Policy Uncertainty Index, for instance, are well off their recent highs.
The new reality for investors is that tariffs are here to stay.
While the estimated effective tariff rate has fallen from a peak around 25%, it’s still hovering near 15%. Wall Street strategists aren’t raising their price targets on hopes that the effective tariff rate will return to 2.5%, but are instead betting that the US economy will remain resilient through the tariffs.
This puts the focus back on the Fed, the trajectory of economic data, and hopes for more rate cuts from the central bank.
Recession calls have faded over the past month as data has shown a labor market that is cooling but not rapidly deteriorating and inflation pressures continue to ease. This pushes the biggest market question back to the central bank and whether it will be able to ease policy this year for “good reasons,” like cooling inflation, rather than a worsening labor market.
