Hello my friends, today is April 5th and this is markets weekly. So this past week is going to go down in history as a historic week. Not because of what happened in the equity markets and yes we did tank bigly but because of what President Trump announced at the Rose Garden, Liberation Day basically signals the end of globalization. Over the past few decades the trade system in the world has been roughly characterized as free trade. It wasn't completely fair but at least that's what people aspired towards. And now on the Liberation Day, President Trump is putting up big tariffs and he's basically saying that globalization is over so the future will not look like the past and everyone is trying to figure out just what that means for the financial markets and for the economy.
So today let's first level set a little bit about the economic data. Let's talk about what happened on Liberation Day and let's think about what that could mean for markets and the economy going forward. So heading into okay so this past week we did get some notable data points. We got the farm rules, print and we got some survey data but really the hardy can not data over the past few weeks can be summarized by the Atlanta GDP now casting page which is saying that we have some modest negative growth.
Now the headline negative 2% is pretty high and a lot of that is because of the enormous amount of golden ports that are pouring into the country. But even if you adjust for the golden ports you can see that growth is still a modest negative 1%. Now a lot of people have been importing like crazy trying to front run tariffs so maybe that now casting number is not as accurate as it usually would be. But it's consistent with what we see in ISM surveys and everything else. That growth is slowing. We're not in a recession but growth is slowing.
Looking at the jobs report the headline jobs number was better than expected but when you look into the details you can see the unemployment rate taking up a little bit and wage growth decelerating on a year over your basis. The labor market is okay but it is cooling. So overall we headed into Liberation Day with an economy that was okay but definitely definitely slowing. And we were kind of growing at above trend over the past few years so slowing is not to be unexpected.
Now nobody knew what to expect on Liberation Day. The Trump team definitely kept their cards close to their chest. Many media reports suggesting maybe they could be really big. Other reports for suggesting maybe you'd have a tiered structure that some countries would have low tariffs, some would have higher and so forth. But nobody really knew until the president began to speak at the Rose Garden. Now equity futures at the time were rallying furiously. The equity market seemed to be happy with what they were hearing.
Trump put on a 10% minimum tariff on all imports into the US so yeah that's lower than what most people expected. But then he unveiled the board. And the market took one look at that board and were like what's going on. And the market tinked and basically tinked the entire week. Now hopefully none of you were surprised or heard by this. We've been talking about this for some time. And just on Monday to my subscribers I was telling everyone that the market continues to misunderstand Trump misunderstand maga and the market is totally, totally mispricing this.
So looking at the board you can see that the reciprocal tariffs, you know, reciprocal tariffs were very, very high on the European Union, 20% Taiwan, Japan, 30% and to China, you know, taking into account the tariffs already put on China. You know, you're looking at a tariff rate of around 60%. Now the president sold this as you know, we're being kind, right? These other countries dripping us off bigly. We're just going to reciprocate by about 50%.
So they taxed us a lot. We're only going to reciprocate with about 50% of that. And of course many people were pointing out to that as just, you know, silly calculations, right? But come on, that's not really what this is about. The president basically decided upon these and everyone else had to come up with calculations to justify it. And then the president would just, you know, like a salesman saying, hey, I'm going to give you a good deal and give you 50% off on this.
To be clear, CEOs in many organizations, so forth, make decisions like this, the boss man based on whatever makes a decision and everyone around him tries to justify it and sell it. So now this also tells us a lot about who is ascendant in the president's court. Now this was a very, very on a hawkish trade message, particularly on China. Now in the president's inner circle, you can see that there's Peter Navarro who, very influential, China hawk was in the first Trump trade administration, actually went to jail for President Trump and came back and went right back into his administration.
Now, it wasn't for anything. It was just for contempt of Congress. Basically, the Congress wanted Navarro to denounce the president, but he wouldn't do it. And went to jail for contempt of Congress. So Navarro has written books about, you know, unfair trade with China and what he wants is not so much balanced trade, but he actually wants decoupling. Now Jamie Greer, who is the top trade representative for the US in the past, has also suggested strategic decoupling with China. So that would be consistent with 60% tariffs on China, right? It's not so much the balanced trade is that the US wants to decouple from China. So I think that's kind of a huge deal.
Now the other people, you know, I think it was a bit confusing for many of the US allies, Japan in particular. I think we're very upset thinking that they had a close relationship with the US, with the president, only to be slapped on with very big tariffs. The market reaction to this was, you know, panic, right? The equity market down a lot. Looking at interest rates, we have 10 year yield down to as low as around, you know, 3.9, 3.85, but ended the week around 4%. The market began to price it in more rate cuts, as many as 4.5 cuts this year, Friday morning, but again, the market reverted a little bit.
Now one thing that's so nice to me was the US dollar, as many people have pointed out, didn't really get much of a safe haven bid a little bit on Friday. But looking at the reaction, you would expect, you know, huge correction equity markets to lead to big rally in US treasury, US treasuries and a flight to the dollar. That didn't really happen too much, but I wouldn't read too much of it into it at least at the moment. We have big changes in the financial system. So it makes sense that these historic relationships between the US markets and risk off to change, but these are relationships that have been built over decades, and I don't think they change in just a few sessions.
So definitely something to keep in mind. Now many people have been worried about the potential for this to be an inflationary spike, but the market is very clear that the market is not worried. Now looking at market-based measures of inflation, on the one-year timeframe inflation, the market is expecting more inflation, right? But looking beyond that, though, let's say looking at five-year, five-year inflation expectations. So what the market thinks five-year inflation will be five years from today, they've been cratering.
So the market is looking at tariffs as kind of a one-time shock to the price level. You have tariffs, the level of the prices will go up. But afterwards, because there's going to be a very negative growth impact, we're going to fall into recession, and when you have a recession, prices usually go down. So at the moment, the market is not signaling any concern of inflation. The market is very, very concerned about growth, so potentially a disinflation or even deflation. So again, everyone is now thinking, what's next? Is this just a negotiating gambit?
Is President Trump just going to do some art of the deal stuff and then tariffs go back down, markets go back up, everything goes back to normal, or is this going to escalate into something worse? So I think to understand this, it's ultimately going to be a political decision. It's going to come down to an understanding about what the Trump team wants to accomplish, what their political base is, and it's going to depend on what other countries do as well.
On Friday, China slapped on huge retaliatory tariffs on the US. I think that really surprised the market and contributed to a significant decline on Friday, looking at around 6% declines in the major indexes. So if we have a tit-per-tat escalation, the trade war, that really, really opens up the possibility of severe declines. Thinking of the equity market, so we should be clear that nothing goes down in a straight line. I personally don't think that the lows are in for the year, but if you also look at implied volatility, the VIX has spiked enormously, it's about 40.
Usually when a volatility is this high, people will monetize their hedges, the VOLSOLIRS will come in, and you have a decline in implied volatility that can give you a pretty strong counter-trip in rallies. So that could happen as well. But looking at this, I think there's tremendous amount of uncertainty because of these moving parts. Now, the European Union very wisely said that they would not retaliate just yet. They want to negotiate first in the coming days, and if they can't get what they want, they are proposing a set of retaliatory measures.
Now, retaliation and President Trump has been very clear that, you know, don't retaliate on our measures, or we will double down in retaliation again, and that's how you can get uncontrollable escalation. So it's possible that in the coming days, President Trump will retaliate against Trump against China's retaliation tariffs. But really, when you're at 60%, already, how high can you go? 70, 80, 90? I don't know. Some of you, just narrowly looking at the trade deficit and trade gap. Now, China is a big exporter. The US is a big importer. From a Chinese perspective, when you're terrifying someone, you sell a lot of stuff, too. You can't win, simply because you don't really buy that much stuff from the US. You sell much more to the US than you buy, right? So I don't really know what that will happen there.
So we want to be focused on what other countries do for the next leg in the trade war. But looking just on Trump himself, let's think about what Trump is wanting to accomplish. So for decades, President Trump has wanted to balance trade. You can find videos I've been talking about this decades ago. They are ripping us like we've never been ripped before. If you look at Japan, if you look at China, where we lose $100 billion here with China, the President Trump has for a long time thought that other people are ripping the US off, and the way to get through this, the way to fix this is through tariffs.
Now to be clear, the Trump team is proposing many things, deregulation, tax cuts, no more legal skilled immigration and so forth. But the big lever that they pull, and to be clear, they're able to pull. Other stuff you kind of require, the cooperation of Congress has been tariffs. And so that's the thing they want to pull on. If you look at the trade deficit on the good side for the US, you can see that the US goods trade deficit is enormous. It's been whining and on an annual basis is over a trillion dollars. That's obviously not sustainable, right? That's saying that the US buys over a trillion dollars more goods than it sells to the world.
The US is basically the consumer of last resort and basically a huge global consumer. And that's cost the US a lot of manufacturing jobs. If you look at the labor force participation rate of men, for example, who traditionally non-college educated men would be working manufacturing, you can see their labor force participation rate has declined significantly over the past three decades. Last manufacturing jobs went to China. So there's a huge crisis, both on the trade side, the US is doing this unsanitary trade deficit and also a crisis for a lot of people within the country who basically have lost their role in society. And President Trump wants to restore that also noting that there are huge national security concerns, whereas if you ever wanted to fight a war, how can you do that if your industrial base is across the ocean, right?
Let's say that the US, hopefully this will never happen, but let's say the US fights the war with China. How could the US do that at all if everything is made in China, right? It doesn't make sense from a national strategic perspective. It doesn't make sense from a financial perspective and it doesn't make sense from a political standpoint because you have all these people who are basically left out of society. So this is something he's been trying to fix for a long time and it's the coalition that he's built up. Now a lot of people are looking at the commotion and the stock market and saying, you know, the president is doing a terrible job, stock market is down and you can see this in the Wall Street Journal, you can see this in CEOs and a lot of people on Twitter.
But Treasury Secretary of State, it makes it a really good point when he went on Tucker this past week and he talks about the distribution of equity holdings. I'm not happy with what's going on in the market today, but the distribution of equities across households, the top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities, 88% of the stock market, the next 40% owns 12% of the stock market. The bottom 50 has debt. I think the Secretary is saying that yes, the stock market is down and I don't like that, but we have to be clear though, most people don't hold equities.
Now when you look at Federal Reserve data, it's very clear that about 10% of the population hold all the equity wealth and even more alarmingly about 50% of the population don't really have any exposures to equities at all. So we have to be very careful not to be stuck in our bubble where we think that no stock market going down, that's the end of the world. Trump of course has to change course because well the stock market is down, right? But again, that only affects a small minority of people. And Treasury Secretary of State makes it a really good point that the bottom half of the population doesn't have exposure to equities, they have debt. So what they care about is lower interest rates and lower inflation for a lot of the household necessities.
So when you have a huge decline in the equity market, what you do is you slowly count me down so you get less inflation, hopefully not a recession, but you also get a decline in interest rates, which we've seen over the past few months. And that is helpful for a lot of the ordinary Americans who maybe they have credit card debt, maybe they want to buy their home and so forth. So the political message from a declining stock market, it's not super clear. A lot of people are complaining about the stock market without thinking about just who the president's coalition is.
Now if you listen to some of the people in the MAC coalition, you can see the auto workers, the steer workers, they are saying good things about the president. They like tariffs, they feel like this is helping them. Are there more doctors and lawyers of other middle class, upper middle class people with big equity holdings? Or are there more working class people who could potentially benefit from blue collar jobs? And this is a political calculation. I don't know the answer to this. And this is dynamic. If we have a recession, everyone is going to be affected. But it's first of all very clear that a decline in the stock market is not the clear cut retreat that I think people would think.
Think it is. It would be if President Trump delivers on his promise, really not have a big impact on his base and it could actually be helpful. So in thinking about the future of what happens in the market, we have to think where the pain point is, what are the political constraints are. Now I suggest that probably doesn't really have any political constraints at the moment. At the moment, he's doing what he ran on, he's doing what his base wants and the people he hurts. Not a lot. And my sense is that upper middle class people usually didn't support President Trump anyway.
So he's probably not going to back down. And the direction the market is going to depend on what other countries do in terms of their retaliation and also what the Fed does. Now JP was pretty clear that he's not in a hurry to cut rates. And this week I'm going to talk about where I think the Fed put would be. So that should be helpful in putting at least a temporary floor on the market. But overall, it's going to be, yeah, it's wide open right now.
One thing I would leave to everyone as we think about whether or not Trump would back down is this. Just a few months ago in a beautiful Pennsylvania field in Assassin's bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again. Now President Trump believes it has believed for decades that this country is going on the wrong direction. The tariffs are way to put the country on the right direction. And he believes that he's doing the right thing, right?
He's not trying to direct the country. He believes he is doing the right thing. So I don't think he's going to back down. I don't think the market fully understands his determination just yet. So this is really going to be an interesting time. All right, can't wait for Monday. Let's see what happens in the coming days. Talk to you all next week.