Why markets are tuning out new US–China trade headlines

00:00 Speaker A

Josh, um, we do have these new trade headlines this morning that in theory should be positive ones for the market with Treasury Secretary Scott Beson saying he’s gonna meet with Chinese counterparts in Stockholm next week, next Monday and Tuesday, to talk about uh further negotiating, maybe extending past an August 12th deadline. That’s the different deadline for China. And you know, if this headline had dropped maybe even a month ago, we would have seen maybe more of a positive reaction in the markets. We did.

00:49 Speaker B

Gradually. So what we’re seeing this morning, it seems to be really just a continuation of a recent trend that we’ve sort of been following and writing a bit about over the past month or so, which is markets just aren’t moving that much on trade deal headlines, on trade news, whether it be Trump sending a letter or some news like we’re getting this morning. So the team over at Goldman Sachs, David Costin and his equity strategy team actually analyzed how the S&P 500 has been reacting to different headlines. You can see in the top there, so the S&P 500 is in green, a basket of tariff risk related stocks is in purple. Of course, that tariff risk related bucket has moved a lot more over the past couple months, right? You can see that big 11% move, 11% drop on Liberation day. But what’s interesting to point out here is the bottom two categories. So tariff letters, and then also other information that came out on July 13th. You saw the tariff basket only move 1% on one of those, 0% on the next one, the S&P 500 basically didn’t move on either of those days either. So what we’re learning right now, it seems to be at least from what the market’s telling us, is the talk of deals and sort of this abstract nature of we’re not really sure what’s happening is no longer moving the market. If you do think what moved the market out of China a couple weeks ago, it was Nvidia, perhaps being cleared to sell those H20 chips again, right? Some tangible fundamental news that we can understand how it would help the company. But the high-level broad stroke, we’re planning on speaking, we’re maybe getting closer to a deal. That just isn’t impacting the markets the way it was in April and in May.