Hello my friends, today is February 8th and this is Markets Weekly. So last week, a ton of things happening so a lot to talk about. Market itself was pretty volatile and personally, I'm beginning to get the sense that the top is in for the entire year. But anyway, first let's have an update on tariffs. Last week we talked about the impending tariffs on Canada and Mexico and now it seems there are new tariffs to worry about this coming week. Secondly, Trump did a whole bunch of stuff last week so let's talk a little bit about the sovereign wealth fund, about doge and about comments from Secretary Bassett. And lastly, we did get some data last week so we got to talk a little bit about the non-farm payrolls.
Alright, starting with tariffs. So last week we were all kind of on the edge thinking whether or not Trump would impose 25% tariffs on Canada, on Mexico and 10% on China. Well, on Monday Trump surprisingly just told everyone that he has a deal with Mexico so tariffs on pause for a month and surely after the same thing for Canada. So it looked like that was a negotiating ploy. But is that the end? Now personally I continue to think that this is really just the beginning. Now at a press conference on Monday Trump was asked about his Canadian tariffs. This is what he said.
What I'd like to see Canada become our 51st state. We give them protection, military protection. We don't need them to build our cars. I'd rather see Detroit or South Carolina or any one of our Tennessee, any one of our states build the cars. They could do it very easily. We don't need them for the cars. We don't need them for lumber. We don't need them for anything. We don't need them for energy. We have more energy than they do. We don't need them for energy. So I say why are we doing this? Why are we willing to lose between $100 billion and $200 billion a year? We don't need them.
As a state it's different. As a state it's much different. And there are no tariffs. So I'd love to see that. But some people say that would be a long shot. If people wanted to play the game right, it would be 100% certain that they'd become a state. But a lot of people don't like to play the game because they don't have a threshold of pain. And there would be some pain. But not a lot. The pain would be really there. So I pay special attention to the last 20 seconds of tha...
...that because what that tells me, my sense as a Trump watcher is that this isn't over yet, that he is quite serious about his potential territorial acquisition here. Now on Friday there's a story in the Wall Street Journal where Trudeau now is telling his advisors, you know, I think this guy was just being mean. But now I think he's serious because maybe he wants Canada's natural resources. Now for those of you who don't know, Canada is actually a very vast country. Huge amounts of land. One of the largest countries in the entire world with a lot of natural resources that are difficult to develop because the government, at least...
...the Trudeau government, has frowned upon natural resource extraction. So that is a possibility. I don't know. But Trump has been talking about things like Greenland and talking about making deals with Zelensky to acquire rare earths in Ukraine. So it seems like Trump is thinking a lot about natural resource acquisition. So we'll see. My sense is it's not over. Now with regard to Mexico, again, 30-day reprive. Now the problem with Mexico is not so much about resources or a territorial acquisition. Trump has never said he wanted to take over Mexico. But I think it has more to do with his vision for bringing manufacturing back to the US. Because a lot of the companies in China, for example, have moved their factories to Mexico. And so the manufacturing in Mexico and then because of the trade agreement, just ship it to the United States, tariff free. So that's going to be a big problem that has to be resolved.
And I'm not sure how he's going to go about doing that. Now what was quietly missed though is that the 10% tariffs on China did in fact go into effect. Now China, did we tally it a little bit? But the China watchers say that this was very much a half-hearted effort. And it seems like the Chinese are trying to avoid any further escalation. Now the new front in the tariff war happened on Friday when President Trump was having a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Ishibao. Let's hear what he has to say. I mean, we're going to have tariffs, mostly reciprocal tariffs where we go with, and I'm going to be probably meeting on that Monday or Tuesday. Have an announcement, probably a news...
Conference, but probably reciprocal tariffs where a country pays so much or charges us so much. And we do the same, so very reciprocal, because I think that's the only fair way to do it. That way nobody's hurt. They charge us, we charge them. It's the same thing. And I seem to be going in that line as opposed to a flat fee tariff. So it seems like Trump's new tariff plan now is reciprocal tariffs.
So the thinking is that for a lot of countries, the United States does not tariff them, but they tariff us. So for example, it's much more difficult for the US to sell cards into the European Union because of things like tariffs. And it's easier for the Europeans to sell cards into the US. So the new idea seems to be, you know, if you put a 10% tariff on us for these goods, we'll do the same to be reciprocal.
Now I don't really know if that's going to happen next week because the timeline, of course, is a bit tricky for this. Now everything President Trump does is draws controversy and oftentimes legal challenges. So over the past week, we've had legal challenges to doge, for example. So they don't really want to do something and then have some, you know, judge from Hawaii or whatever, stop it.
So they want to do things in a way that they can defend it legally. So the tariffs for Canada, Mexico were under IEPA, under the guise of a national health emergency. Now in order to have proper economic tariffs, you actually need a little bit more paperwork. You need some investigation. And the thinking is that this wouldn't really be ready until April. So I'm not sure how they will get tariffs done next week, but I guess we'll find out. It seems though that the tariff war is moving on towards the European Union.
Now the European Union has a scienceable goods trade surplus with the US around $300 billion. So Trump is complaining a lot about American cars, not being sold in Europe and so forth. And some people would say that it's because the Europeans don't like American cars and maybe American cars are too big for European streets. And that's all legitimate as well. But in any case, as Trump turns towards Europe, it seems like he really is going to put more tariffs on from what I hear.
And on Friday, we also had a response from the European Union talking about willingness to lower tariffs on US cars. Now in the past, we've also heard people like Christine Lagarde say that one way we could satisfy the Americans is maybe to just buy more energy from them. So the European Union has been buying more net gas from the US, especially as they kind of try to turn away from Russia.
They would really have to buy an enormous amounts of natural gas to close that trade deficit. So it seems like that's still a work in progress. One thing about the European Union is that it's a little bit more difficult for them to act together because it is kind of a union of many different nations and you have to have a lot of agreement consensus. So it's a slow process. There is some indication that they would be willing to retaliate on big tech companies in the event of US tariffs. But again, this is all up in the air.
But again, this is only week three of the Trump administration. We have a few more years of this and I continue to believe that the trade war is going to get much worse before it gets better. So that's all for tariffs on this week. And next week, we'll figure out, we'll find out if the reciprocal tariffs really did happen. Okay. The next thing that I want to talk about is all the other random things that Trump administration did the past week.
Now, interestingly, Trump put out an executive order to try to create a US sovereign wealth fund. Now, this is kind of a surprising thing and kind of a strange thing for the US to do. Now if you look across the world, the countries that have sovereign wealth funds all have something in common. For example, China, tremendous amounts of sovereign wealth. Why? Well, they have a trade surplus of about a trillion dollars a year. So that means every year they have about a trillion dollars worth of foreign currency coming into their country. They got to do something about it, right? Or you can look at Norway. So tremendous amounts of natural gas, a lot of money coming into the country. They have a lot of money. What are they going to do about it?
So what you see is that these countries take all this sovereign wealth, take all these money and they invest in, let's say, treasuries or stocks or, let's say, loans to countries in Africa and so forth. So the common thing is that countries that have sovereign wealth funds have a lot of income. They don't have tremendous fiscal deficits like the United States. And the United States in particular kind of doesn't really need a sovereign wealth fund since they have the dollar as a reserve currency. Like if you're China, for example, your currency is not the reserve currency. So you have to hold some hard currency like the dollars, not the case in the US. So it is a strange thing. And to me personally kind of worrying, when I was watching that press release, it seemed that press conference seemed like Besant was talking about the sovereign wealth fund is going to be used in Besant America. And then Secretary of Commerce, Ludic was mentioning as an example, say that if the United States buys from a vaccine manufacturer, maybe the US could get some warrants on that company's stock so that we can capture a bit of the upside of doing business with that company. Now that all sounds fine, but having a sovereign wealth fund is kind of having another slush fund. So today, maybe we are using it to invest in America. Maybe tomorrow we will be using it to buy a whole bunch of windmills and solar panels in Alaska or something like that. So having a sovereign wealth fund is kind of strange for the US, but we at the very least need to get the governance rights.
Now another thing that was pretty interesting in the past week were comments from Secretary of Treasury Besant on interest rates. Let's listen to what he had to say. Whether the Fed is going to cut, not cut, what we are focused on is lowering rates. So we are less focused on the specific rate cuts and how do we get the whole curve down? I mentioned that the tenure, I believe, is the important price to focus on. Its mortgage is its long-term capital formation. So, and look, I think with the President's policies of energy dominance, deregulation and non-inflationary growth, I think that the tenure is going to naturally be a little naturally come down. And then, look, on top of it, what do we do get some big savings on the spending side from the Doge programs? Now, his dialogue clearly tells you that he is not interested in trying to bully the Fed to cut, but he's trying to get the entire interest rate curve down. And the way he's doing this, again, not to bully the Fed, I think he's, again, he is a miracle investor. So he knows that if you kind of force the Fed to cut interest rates, then I think the market could potentially freak out, think that we would have higher inflation and then you can have the tenure yield go higher. The tenure yield is obviously much more impactful to the economy and to the markets than the overnight rate, right? And mortgages, for example, are keyed off the tenure yield.
Now I was surprised by some of the commentary on this, but his commentary, I thought, was pretty straightforward and not particularly controversial. He wants to get the way that he wants to get the interest rate lower is by carrying out his plan, which is, of course, getting energy prices down, reducing regulation, again, reducing costs for businesses and just increasing growth. And that's all, I don't know, very conventional. So anyway, that just tells you that the administration is not going to bully the Fed. They're going to do other ways to relax to lower interest rates. And we already see their efforts to lower energy prices. And I think very soon we'll see their efforts to probably do something with the banking regulations that could help with the interest rates, which I could talk about, I think, in a future post.
Let's see, what else? Oh, again, we have to talk about Doge, of course. Now Doge has been kind of a wrecking ball this past two weeks, stirring up a lot of controversy. So as we all know, Elon Musk gained read only access to the Treasury payment system and has been trying to root out some fraud or at least waste. Now the US government runs a two trillion fiscal deficit. The growth spending, of course, is even higher. Now what that means when you have these trillion sub trillions of dollars flowing into the system, there's a lot of people who are receiving that money, a lot of people who benefit from this. And if you try to take away the piggy bank people who were benefiting from that, they're going to lose some money and they're going to be unhappy. So I would expect there to be lots of controversy and a lot of people very angry about what's happening. Now, one of his big moves the past week was, of course, shut down USAID. And one of the things we've learned is that USAID provides financing for a lot of NGOs and also a lot of the media as well. So if you have a newspaper that is saying angry things about Doge, I think that's not surprising because Doge basically took away some of their money. But from a broader view, though, it does seem Doge is being pretty effective in cutting government spending. Now, he does have that government employee buyout so far. It seemed as of this morning, 60,000 people took that offer. A judge has paused that so we will see what happens. But so far, I think it's been surprisingly successful. It's very hard to touch all these entrenched interests, but it seems like Elon is definitely making progress towards this.
Now, I was listening to an episode of the odd lots a few months ago where a professor from Boston University who specializes in government waste was telling some pretty surprising stories. Now, obviously there is a tremendous amount of waste in the government. Now, the professor noted that, and this was surprising to me, 1% of the entire federal budget is spent on the dialysis program. And the reason why it's so expensive is because of this loophole. Now, if you are a dialysis patient and you can't get to the dialysis station, the government is very nice. They provide you with a paid ambulance. And so that's the way of just helping these people who are maybe too sick to move to get to a dialysis center. And the flat fee for that program is $250 for the ambulance. And that doesn't sound like a lot for an ambulance, but if you are a taxi driver, that sounds like a lot. So after the inception of this program, there were thousands of people all across the country who basically started ambulance programs where they would, you know, it could buy a used ambulance for $30,000, have a few people, and they would just field these cause and just collect $250 one way, one way and $250 back. And so in a sense, that's how this program basically with good intentions became just kind of the slush fund for all these fraudulent ambulance operators and ended up as big as 1% of the entire federal operating budget. So there is instances like this, again, everywhere.
So there is a tremendous amount of fat to cut. Obviously we're not going to go from a tutoring deficit to a balanced budget on Doge alone, but I think we can actually make a surprising difference. So far it's been very promising. I'm going to see how that goes. And of course that has implications on employment, on growth and on the term premier. So a lot of things happening there. Hopefully I think we can all agree that an more efficient government is in the public's interest and people who complain. I'm guessing that they're losing some money. Okay. The last thing we want to talk about, of course, is the job market report.
Now as usual, when you look at the job market report, we have to look into the details. So on the headline basis, job, job games were a little bit lower than expected, but in the details, it was unambiguously a very strong report. Now even though the headline jobs created was a little bit lower than expected, they were revisions upward that, well, that overall raised the amount of jobs on a moving average basis. Now looking at wage growth, surprisingly strong as well, much higher than expected.
Now to be clear, we have to be careful about the average hourly earnings because it doesn't take into account the compositional difference of employees. It's just a blunt average. So if you hired, for example, more doctors and lawyers in one month, that will bring the average higher. And of course the unemployment rate surprisingly, surprisingly declined to 4%. Now if you're looking at this from the Fed's perspective, well, Fed is cared about, cares about unemployment and price stability.
The unemployment rate went lower. We don't have to worry about that. And from an inflation span point, wages much stronger than expected. So you've got to be worried about that as well. So the market took one look at this and the entire curve went higher and that is totally, totally the correct interpretation of this. But before panicking, I would know that this is one job report. The overall trend is overwhelmingly towards a cooling labor market. We see this in jolts, for example. We see this in the settled decline in average wages. And of course, going forward, I'm pretty sure we're going to have tremendous amounts of economic disruption from the ongoing trade war.