Hello my friends, today is January 25th and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week was a pretty good weekend market. We have the S&P 500 making you all-time highs. The same time, 10-year yield came down a bit and the dollar softened a bit as well.
The big news was the past week was about the Trump administration. This past week was the first week of the new Trump administration and President Trump signed a whole bunch of executive orders. So let's talk about the tone and some of the orders that President Trump did.
Secondly and related, let's talk a little bit about trade in China. China not too long ago recorded a whopping $1 trillion trade surplus with the rest of the world, which is totally bonkers. So let's talk a little bit about that.
And lastly, this past week we also had the Bank of Japan high creates very uneventful, but still let's see what's happening in Japan. Okay, starting with President Trump. Now many people were worried that President Trump would waltz into the Oval Office and begin to levy tariffs bigly. Now that didn't happen and the market was a little bit relieved.
Though President Trump did sign an order asking federal agencies to study trade practices. And then later on also suggested that starting on February 1st, he would levy tariffs of 25% on Canada, 25% on Mexico, and 10% on China. So big tariffs seem to be coming, but I think there's a process in doing this.
And of course he's still staffing up his administration. From what I hear, it seems to be that the administration is unhappy that a lot of countries like China are setting up factories in Mexico and then sending those goods through the free trade area to the US. And you don't want that.
As President Trump noted in his speech at Davos, he wants companies to build in America. Even if you don't do that and if you want to, let's say, manufacture abroad and then export to the US, you're going to have to pay a tariff. So looking across his executive orders, it seems very clear to me that Trump wants growth.
Now he wants, and you can see this in a number of ways. Again, to get growth, you want to encourage businesses to expand to build. You want people to start businesses. And so you can see this in a number of ways. First off, the past week, very publicly, he was with a masa son from Japan and many other famous investors who all pledged to invest a whole bunch of money in the United States. It seems like the leader of Saudi Arabia, MBS, is also going to be pouring in, let's say, $600 billion into the US.
Now I don't know if they were actually put in all that money. These are very big numbers. But he's making an effort, President Trump is making an effort to go across the world to try to ask people to invest in the US, which I think is very good since a positive term. And it's not what every leader in the world does.
But as a correlator that the White House is doing everything it can to entice businesses to come. Now they talk about having lower corporate tax rates. That's not in their part to give. Although it does seem like Congress will have lower tax rates, do something with tax going forward. But what they are doing, which is within their part to do, has to do with regulatory relief.
Now the executive orders are about reducing regulation. And so that is actually a kind of a big component in attracting businesses. So I think a regulation basically as a cost to a business, it's an amorphous thing. But if you can reduce the regulatory burden, it essentially makes things easier and cheaper for a business.
For example, let's say that you wanted to build a nuclear power plant in the US. As I understand, that takes at least 10 years. And President Trump being a real estate developer obviously knows that building any building requires environmental impacts studies, permits and so forth. So it seems like there is a pledge by the administration that if you invest at least a billion dollars, they will make an effort to try to shorten the time it takes to get these permits. So that is encouraging of course to businesses.
Another related aspect is the executive orders when it comes to drilling and when it comes to withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. Now both of these are related. What the administration wants to do is to lower energy costs. You can get that by encouraging the private sector to drill more. As I understand, President Trump is also asking Saudi Arabia to pump more oil.
I don't know if they'll do that. But they're making an effort to increase the supply of energy. And by withdrawing from a Paris Climate Accord, it makes it easier to encourage the production of fossil fuels.
Now in other countries, for example, in Canada, they have something called a carbon tax in the Euroland. They don't like fossil fuels. They want to do things like wind and solar, which are great energy sources, but of course, also more expensive. So if you look at the cost of electricity across the world, you notice that in the United States, it's a lot cheaper.
Now that's very attractive to energy intensive businesses, like industrial businesses. So we hear many stories about companies in Germany leaving the country because the price of energy has gotten so high that they can't be competitive.
One other aspect the Trump administration is trying to do has to do with migration. Now there's a lot of discussion that Trump doesn't like immigrants, but that's really not what he's saying. Now President Trump is very famous for not liking illegal immigrants. And so he has a deportation effort.
Again, there is a national security aspect to this. And of course, I think he wants to have immigrants that are skilled and able to contribute to the US. Now within Trump world, there's a big debate and we saw it play out publicly in Twitter, where some people in Trump world don't want to have skilled immigrants, whereas others want to.
It seems very clear that Trump took the side of the pro-legal immigration people and is opened having more H1Bs. Now Elon Musk, of course himself being a skilled immigrant to the US is obviously a big voice on this subject. So it seems like Trump is going to be more open to having more skilled migration. And that of course is helpful to businesses as well.
They're able to get the talent they want to be totally clear. Some businesses do abuse this and it is a way for them to reduce their labor costs. But at the end of the day, if you have more skilled migrants, that is ultimately pro-growth. You have more people and people who are productive. So overall the tone of the first week is very clearly President Trump trying to do everything he can to boost US growth.
Now I think the stance and the stark contrast to what's happening in many other countries in the world, whose leaders are obviously not as business friendly. So when I think about these actions, now it's not going to do much in the near term, but in the medium term, it sets up a very big divergence between the US and other countries.
So if the US is trying to go out and basically steal foreign corporations and have them come into the US, well that's good for the US, but that's going to be a lot of job losses abroad. In addition, what if the US wants to go and steal skilled workers from other countries? Now they've been doing this for some time, but of course this can easily accelerate.
So if you are the exact same job, for example, done in a Euroland versus done in the US, there's a big difference in wages. That same person can literally double or triple their after-tax income doing the exact same job in the US. It's actually really quite stark, even a country like the UK where you would think of it as relatively wealthy, actually has much lower wages.
So this is a big problem for many of these more generous social welfare system countries, because their generous benefits are really dependent upon ongoing economic growth. And if they don't have that, that's a recipe for a lot of political unrest.
I saw an article in the FT today where Manam Lagarde of the ECB is thinking that maybe Europol still has some skilled migrants from the US who just don't like Trump. Well with that kind of, I think, unrealistic thinking, I think other countries that are going to have a tough time in the Trump era.
Now one other thing that I think is really interesting is that Trump seems to be very serious about getting Greenland. Now there is another article in the FT revealing Canada discussions between Trump and Denmark. And it seems to be that Trump is very serious in views, Greenland as basically a national security issue, because as the Arctic becomes more important, the he sees China and Russia expanding into the Arctic and feels that America needs to be there as well.
So maybe that would happen as well. Now one of President Trump's favorite presidents is President McKinley. And President McKinley is famous for doing many things among which is expanding the territory of the US where he took Puerto Rico and also annexed Hawaii.
So I think it's not a subtle hint of what a person in Trump wants to do. We'll see what happens. Okay, the second thing I want to talk about is China. Now looking at this graph, you see that China recently recorded a just a mind-boggling $1 trillion trade surplus with the rest of the world. Now that's China selling a lot more to the rest of the world than they import.
And at the end of the day, be ha $1 trillion wealthier. Now this is totally, totally insane. How do you have a $1 trillion trade surplus? Now if you think about it, if China's making so much cash, then maybe they take that cash and they buy some foreign goods and services. And so maybe the trade deficit should correct in that sense, but that's not happening. Or maybe they import so much stuff, they take that foreign currency, they sell it for R&B and in turn, the R&B appreciates and this makes their exports less attractive. And so that corrects that way, but that's not happening either. So very obviously something is happening here, such that the trade surplus is chronic and it's very clear why.
So first let's talk about why this is happening and secondly what the implications could be. So the reason that the Chinese have a very large trade surplus and people talk about having cheap labor and so forth and that's totally true, but again, it doesn't explain why these corrective mechanisms haven't gone to play. The reason is very easily that it's state policy, right? The managed currency so that it cannot appreciate, so that their goods remain competitive. And of course it has a lot of social levers to limit the purchasing power of the general public, which as they would tell you over there, the Chinese government is rich, but the people are not rich. So they have a very tightly controlled system that's able to produce this outcome. A good example of this of course is the tremendous growth of the Chinese auto industry.
Now not many people associate China with the automotive industry, but recently they've become the world's largest auto exporter. If you look at this chart here, you can see that they've really really built up their industrial export capacity. Now this is a function of basically government policy where the state owned banks give very cheap loans to businesses, build out their supply chain, everything is subsidized across the supply chain, including of course having a cheap currency, and that allows the Chinese to grow as a very, very competitive industry and then go and expert throughout the world at very low prices. Now we don't see Chinese cars in the US because high tariffs prevent their importing, but you do see an increase in Chinese cars in many other countries.
This is an increasingly big problem in Europe for example, because their automotive industry is not competitive with China, but when they put on tariffs on this, that also conflicts with their goal of having a green energy transition, which would lead, now if you wanted green energy of course you would import cheaper electric cars and batteries, right? So there's a conflict between the green movement and having an industrial base, basically protecting jobs. So basically they have the state policy that makes it very difficult for anyone else to compete with them. That leads to a large trade surplus. Now we've seen this recently in the solar panel industry where once upon a time Germany for example was a very big player in the solar panel industry.
Now that whole industry is taken over by China simply because no one can compete when you have a state sponsorship of such a large industry. So that leads us to come on kind of the movement that Trump is trying to do where he wants businesses to build in America rather than import. So as you can see, this is an unsolvable problem because the whole Chinese industrial policy is oriented towards building in China and exporting abroad. And so that there's not going to be an easy solution to the trade war. Now this also leads us to the question of what does China do with those trillions and trillions of dollars, right? They're making trillions of dollars. What do they do with it?
Now this is a puzzle because if you look at the PBOCs, foreign reserves, they really haven't changed that much over the past few years. They've kind of hung around, you know, three, three, three, four trillion dollars. So where's all of that extra cash going? Now Brad Setzer, who is an expert on this, suggests that all this extra money is being hidden in the state banks who then use it for to manage their currency. So a lot of things are opaque in China, but there is tremendous, tremendous amounts of cash there. Some people even think that, you know, maybe part of the reason that we have bullion financial markets and so forth is because all this money has to go somewhere.
So it's a really difficult puzzle, opacity, but the Chinese government has trillions of trillions of dollars and they continue to make more. And we'll see if the trade war does anything to solve that. One I related note, Brad Setzer also has a very interesting piece where he shows that the Chinese government actually changed their methodology to try to hide some of this tremendous trade surplus. Now the one trillion dollar trade surplus is based on customs data, which is how it's done for basically everyone in the world.
Now most recently they've come up with a new revised methodology where the Chinese government has a much smaller trade surplus in this new methodology. And what this methodology does is that it counts goods produced in China that are owned by let's say foreign companies to actually be a foreign import. For example, let's say that if you have an American factory in China making iPhones and when that American factory produces an iPhone in China and sells to the Chinese market, now the Chinese government in these new statistics takes counted as an import simply because the factory is owned by a foreign company.
No other country in the world does this, but when you do this it makes the trade surplus look about 300 billion dollars smaller. Of course that's all nonsense, but it does show that the Chinese government is increasingly sensitive to this tremendous tremendous trade imbalance that it seems like it's probably going to get resolved because it does seem like other countries including the European Union are getting concerned about it. Okay, so the last thing that I want to talk about is the Bank of Japan. Now the Bank of Japan as we all know, hiked rates last summer that seemed to surprise the market and led to this huge carry trade unwind where the markets melted down but quickly recovered.
Now Bank of Japan back then was thinking that they would hiked rates again in October, but they didn't do that and so they kept doing it. Then the market thought maybe December, but finally, finally hiked rates this past week. The market was well prepared for this. The Bank of Japan of course is aware that they don't want to panic the markets. It's no good for them to see the Nikkei go down several percent in a day and so they prepared the market very well by basically leaking it and having BOG officials last week to prepare the market that they're going to hike and wish they did. This was 100 percent priced in and the price reaction wasn't very muted.
Now what was interesting in this meeting was that the BOG released their forecasts and their inflation forecasts went up notably for 2025. Now late last year, their thinking inflation would be about 1.9 percent in 2025, but that's been up to 2.5 percent huge jump upwards. Now that is getting people thinking that the BOG might hike maybe one or two times more this year. Now this is of course a big divergence between the rest of the world where everyone thinks that the direction of travel for the Fed for example is more rate cuts.
The Bank of Japan is forecast to continue the hike rates. Now the yen hasn't moved that much on this news, but it does suggest that these interest rate differentials will continue to narrow and maybe the yen will continue, will begin to strengthen now. So that's all I prepared for today. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll talk to you guys next week is a Fed week. So I'll be back to debrief on the FOMC. Again, this is going to be very uneventful and nothing will happen, but we'll get to hear more about Chair Powell's thoughts about the incoming Trump administration and trade policy. All right, talk to you guys then.