Hello, my friends. Today is March 8th, and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week was a very exciting weekend markets. We saw the S&P 500 down notably. We saw the 10-year yield notably lower, and there was a notable weakening of the dollar, particularly against the Euro. Now, none of this should be surprising to you all. I laid this out months ago, and my markets outline 2025. Take a look. And of course, more recently to my readers just two weeks ago.
So today, let's talk about two things. First off, let's talk about what happened in the markets the past week. And secondly, let's talk about this revolution in fiscal policy happening in Euroland. All right, starting with the markets. Now, to understand price action, first, we have to listen to the different stories that are in the market right now. As I discussed in my free online course, market participants, everyone buys themselves for different reasons. So understanding the different stories in the market is essential for understanding what drives price action.
Now, the most prominent story of the past week was, of course, tariffs. Now, President Trump has been talking about putting 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for some time. They were supposed to go online in February, but at the last moment, there was a U-turn and they were delayed for one month. I'm guessing a lot of people were expecting the same thing to happen this month, but the tariffs actually did go into full effect, but only briefly. Now, right after putting on those tariffs, the president gave exemptions on autos and shortly after exemptions for anything that was USMCA compliant, which are most things involved in trade there.
So at the end of the day, although the 25% tariffs did go on, Canada and Mexico, they weren't severely watered down. The president seems to want to shift the focus to April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs rather than the fentanyl-related tariffs right now. So the trajectory of this is going to depend a lot on political developments. Now, this trade war is going to have a negative impact on a lot of businesses in the US, but it's going to have a devastating impact on Canada and Mexico, who are much more reliant upon trade with the US.
So looking first at Mexico, President Sean Bonham over there is working really hard to try to work out a solution with the White House. She even floated a very interesting idea, noting that the US is fighting a trade war with China, Mexico could join and also put tariffs on China as well. So it seems like Mexico is working hard to hammer out a solution in. I'm getting the sense that things are going to be okay over there. Looking north to Canada seems like the Canadians are a little bit more unhappy with what's happening. I note that Doug Ford, who is basically governor of Ontario, the most populous state in Canada, was even suggesting that they could turn off the electricity and try to freeze the Americans.
So I think the discussion up north is a little bit more escalatory. And so there's some more downside risk over there. But again, this is a fluid situation and we'll see what happens in the coming weeks. So tariffs again, one thing I also note is that these positive, I guess, tariff announcements where there was exemptions only listed at brief bounces in the markets that were quickly sold. So I thought that was kind of a red flag. But again, this is something that's going to continue and it's going to get even bigger as April 2nd approaches.
Now, the second common store in the market is about growth. Now, US growth seems to be faltering and that would argue for a lower stock market and lower interest rates. Now, this past week, we had the bigger non-forms payroll prince. And overall, it does suggest a weakening labor market. Now, the headline print was okay, a little bit weaker than expected. But looking at the revisions, last month's jobs report was revised lower, looking at wage growth a little bit lower than expectations. Last month was also revised lower. And of course, the labor force participation rate is lower as well.
So all in all, the labor market is definitely weakening. Now, if you look at the Atlanta Fed GDP now, which is kind of summarizes all the data coming in and gives an estimate of what GDP will be, we talked about it last week, whereas the big negative print was largely due to the surge in imports and should be not taken too seriously. Now, we have a little bit more information on that. Interestingly, yes, there was a surge in imports, but it was mostly gold imports.
Now, the creator of the Atlanta GDP estimate actually wrote an article adjusting for all those gold imports. And according to his adjustment, the Atlanta GDP now should be about 0.4% annual growth rate. Again, that's notably lower than the 3%. We've been accustomed to the past couple of years. So again, the US economy is slowing. And so what you see in the market makes sense in that context. But when we think about the economic data, we also got to think about the policy reaction. As you all know, I believe that the most important driver in markets is policy. And that means what happens from the central bank and also from the legislator.
Now, we heard from both JP and Secretary Besant the past week. So it seems interestingly, they're not too worried about what the growth at the moment. JP spoke on Friday. And in his speech, he talked about thinking that growth is still solid, not too worried. But he acknowledged that there were big changes coming forward, changes in immigration and regulation and fiscal policy and so forth and trade, of course. And his view seems to be that these big changes, you know, I have no idea what's going to happen. So I'm just going to sit here and wait.
So it did not seem that he was jumping on the rate cut wagon immediately. And it seems like the market is also not pricing in any emergency rate cuts as some market participants would like. Now, looking moving on to Treasury, again, the top economic official in the US, Secretary of Treasury Besant, gave an interview on CNBC. And what is he thinking about the economy? My administration created this bad equilibrium where the top 10 percent people in this room, probably most of the people watching this show, top 10 percent of Americans are 40 or 50 percent of consumption. And that is an unstable equilibrium.
The bottom 50 percent of working Americans have gotten killed. We are trying to address that. We're trying to get rates down. And could we be seeing that this economy that we inherited starting to roll a bit, sure? And there's going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked. And we become addicted to this government spending. And there's going to be a detox period. There's going to be a detox period. I think that that.
So what are you saying is that, you know, this economy, it's been boosted up artificially by deficit spending. We're trying to cut down on deficit spending with Doge, get it to a more manageable level. So, you know, some hiccups are going to be expected, right? So he's not too worried about growth. There's no emergency simi-chives or anything like that. So it seems like he's okay with what's happening.
Now, many people are also curious as to what the Trump administration is thinking about the decline in stock market. And that's an also spoke on that. Let's listen to what he said. Or what type of levels on the S&P do you think you would need to see where he might that might influence some of his policymaking decisions? President Trump takes in a lot of information every day and stock market is part of it. That again, is somebody who was on the other side for a long time. And you say, where's the Trump put in? There's no Trump put.
Well, there's no put. The Trump call on the upside is if we have good policies, then the markets will go up. So basically, he's like, Trump put, never heard of it. So at the moment, the administration is not worried about the decline in the stock market. And to be clear, guys, we're just a few percent from all time highs. Let's revisit this one where 10 or 15 percent lower. So nothing, the policymakers are saying suggests concern, nothing, no concern. So the market is not going to get a boost there.
Now, other ways that people look at the markets and very popularly is through things like technicals. Now, a lot of people buy the market based on momentum, right? Things that tend to continue to go up. And this is actually one of the very few things that is empirically in the academic literature, empirically, something that holds up across assets and across time. And one of the ways that people look at momentum is through something very simple, like moving averages.
If the moving, if the price, the spot price is above moving averages, there's upward momentum, it tends to go higher, right? You're in a bull market. If you look at the moving averages right now, 50 day, 200 day, 100 day, you'll notice that the spot price has sliced through a lot of the moving averages. This past week, we were actually below the 200 day moving average for a session, but we did bounce back above it towards the end of the week.
So it does seem a very clear loss of momentum. And a lot of people who trade according to this will be worried about it. Again, one other thing that people look at is, of course, volatility, a lot of options hedging behavior. Smart people and options have noted that we are very much in negative gamma territory. So we see a lot of volatility in price action. That's not surprising and not very supportive. Although, of course, looking at volatility implied volatility is pretty rich relative to realize. So be on the lookout. Any moment now, we could have a vol smash lower and you could have a very violent counter trend rally upwards. So that is definitely in the cards and totally normal that we see throughout market history, right? Nothing goes straight up or straight down. There are always these violent counter reactions.
So overall, looking at the markets, and again, a lot of stories does suggest that we, the trend seems to have changed. And personally, I believe that the lows of the year are not yet in. I've also made changes to my market view portfolio that is available to subscribers on my website. So if you're interested in how I view the markets, you can take a look. All right. The second story we want to talk about is the huge, huge revolution that's happening in European fiscal policy. So this, well, some context here. So as we all know, the US and Europe have different viewpoints on what's happening, how they should approach the war in Ukraine. Now, the Biden administration was very supportive of the war in Ukraine and the European were on the same page. But suddenly we have an election and the new Trump administration is taking a very different view.
And that seems to be surprising a lot of people in Europe, but really they shouldn't. President Trump has been talking about getting out of the Ukraine war for some time. Now, President Trump realizes that the Ukraine war is only possible because the US offers support when it comes to military intelligence and a lot of equipment and supply of equipment and money. So President Trump wants to end the Ukraine war ASAP. The Europeans don't really want to do that. The Ukraine wants to continue fighting. But it's a difficult situation for them because over the past year, you know, the war has not been going well when from the Ukrainian standpoint, Russia has steadily advanced and has taken some territory.
Now, another really limiting factor is that Ukraine seems to be running out of soldiers, right? So even if you continue to give them war material, they also need people to fight, but they're running out of soldiers as well. Now, I want to take a step back and remind everyone that over the past two years, a lot of the legacy media, the talking kids have been saying that, you know, we're going to put sanctions on Russia, Russia's economy is going to collapse, Russia's just the gas station with nukes. We're just going to give arms to Ukraine and they're going to win. And over the past two years, that just didn't happen. Those guys were totally wrong. So I want to be careful when you listen to what happens on the ground, there's a lot of propaganda there.
I personally really like listening to people like Colonel Douglas McGregor, former U.S. Army colonel, he's been spot on in his assessment of the war of the past two years. If you want a more European perspective, Colano Jacques Bull, formerly of Swiss intelligence, has a lot of podcasts on YouTube, he's been spot on also has books on the subject. So these guys have been spot on on the development of the Russia-Ukraine war. If you want some good insight as to what's going on over there, I recommend you guys listen to them. But anyway, they foretold this trajectory of the war basically years ago.
So now that the war is not going well in Ukraine and, you know, what do we do? Well, the U.S. just wants to pull out, say that we would just have, you know, peace, no one starts dying. Everyone, everyone stops. So the U.S. is putting pressure on both Russia and Ukraine to stop the war, again, withdrawing support from Ukraine and threatening big sanctions on Russia unless they come to the table. That's what the U.S. wants. Now, that's a big problem for the Europeans because, well, they're completely dependent upon the U.S. for defense and but they want to continue to fight the war. So they're marking out a very different path now.
They're being so they're saying that, you know, we don't want to be completely dependent upon the U.S. for military policy. We want to have our own say. And after all, the U.S. has been badgering us about not spending enough on defense for some time. So this is what we're going to do. On the European level, European President Ursula von der Leyen has this new policy, whereas encouraging the members who hate to spend more on military. Now, in the European Union, they have this rule that you're not supposed to spend have a budget deficit of 3%, but of course that that's not really something that's super highly enforced. France has a budget deficit higher than that. It seems to be only enforced against smaller countries like Greece.
But in any case, they seem to be exempting military spending from that deficit limit up to. So that, in theory, could unleash up to hundreds of billions of military spending. Now, in addition to that, Germany, which has been pretty pacifist over the past few decades, actually announced major policy changes where they are willing to spend hundreds of billions on defense and infrastructure as well. Now, Germany has an even stricter policy when it comes to debt by the spending. They have a limit internally of about 0.3% when it comes to deficit. They're going to relax that when it comes to military spending, unleashing from their expense up to a trillion dollars in euros over a period of years.
So if Europe is deciding to have a fiscal stimulus, that's going to have big impacts on their economy and financial markets as well. Again, the immediate impact, of course, was German bun yields. You see the German bun yield basically going parabolic. Of course, if you're going to, if you're telling everyone that you're going to issue up to a trillion dollars in debt in the coming years, obviously, bond rates are going to go up. But of course, it does suggest stronger fiscal stimulus as well. So that's positive for the economy, especially the German defense box. If you look at the German stock market, the DAX absolutely surging like a meme coin.
And I personally found it very interesting in this interview from a German defense company, CEO, going on Bloomberg, his stock is doubled this year and actually hit limit up on that particular interview day. You can see the smile on his face when asked about it in an interview. Oliver, the stock came into the beginning of this year at 35 and now trading at 66. We've got a volatility interruption this morning. The stock has absolutely soared. Okay.
Now, as Europe is going to do more fiscal stimulus, you can see that there's a lot just sea change when it comes to global capital flows, the euro strengthened notably because everyone is seeing everyone who's thinking that Europe was just not going to make it, no growth, no nothing. Everyone left Europe and began investing in MAG 7 in the US. But now it seems like a lot of the money is flowing back. Huge, huge strengthening of the euro the past week as everyone tries to get ahead of a potential European renaissance.
Now, the good news is that, you know, if you look at global debt across the world, German debt to GDP is really, really low compared to other countries. So they definitely have the capacity to level up in investing growth. And we've all heard about how German industry has not been doing well, having trouble competing with China and so forth. Now, now they can maybe build a war industry. So this is a very positive growth story for your land. And it's going to have implications on assets in the US as well.
And I think that's what I will write about in my blog today. Now, one thing though that I would emphasize is that this also has potential very severe downside as well. Because if you really are remilitarizing and there is some discussion of maybe sending European troops to Ukraine to continue the fight, you know, that suggests that maybe we won't have peace. Maybe everyone will go and join in the war. And you know, that kind of sounds like World War 3 to me.
So again, some downside risk over there. All right. So that's all I prepared for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. Remember to like and subscribe. And man, this is such an exciting time to be in Global Macro. I can't wait to see what happens next week. Talk to you all then.