Hello my friends, today is May 17th and this is Markets Weekly. This past week was a crazy week in markets, it seems like we are crashing up. Now the proximate cause of this was new news on the US-China War. So first, today let's talk about what's happening in the markets and the pivot in the US-China trade war. Secondly, let's talk about the administration's new priority, the big beautiful bill that seems to have earned a ratings downgrade from Moody's and lastly let's talk a little bit about the inflation data we received the past week that is painting a better than expected picture.
Okay, starting with the markets. Now if you just take a look at this chart of the S&P 500, it really looks like we are crashing up. Now looking at data from Bloomberg, this type of rally in such a short period of time really is historic, it's absolutely bonkers. Now this all started, it seems when the president suspended for 90 days the reciprocal tariffs on everyone but China, but this latest leg seems to have been driven by news on the US-China trade war front.
Now as we know, Secretary of Bessent met with his Chinese counterparty in Switzerland during the weekend to talk about the ongoing trade war. Now on Friday, the president had tweeted out that a good tariff number on China is probably 80%, right, down from 145%. Now as someone who's been following this very closely, my expectation that we would get tariffs on China moved down to 50 to 60%, since that seems to be a number that's been leaked and also talked about during the campaign. But to my surprise, the number that they came out with was actually just 30%. Just 30% tariffs on China and looking into the details, it was also very surprising.
That 30% is basically the 10% basic tariff on everyone. So treating China just like any other country and the fentanyl-related tariffs on top. So I think that was from a tariff standpoint very dovish. So going forward, if there's improvement on the fentanyl front with China, that extra could go away, and so China could just be stuck with 10% baseline tariffs that the US is imposing on everyone. Now to be clear, there were tariffs on China even before the Russian day and according to calculations from JP Morgan, the effective tariff rate on Chinese imports is about 40% now. But again, that is a big improvement from the tremendous tremendous 145% tariffs put on China.
So this is a pretty big pivot and the markets just love it. We absolutely surged on Monday and basically surged throughout the week. Now before we get into talking about what other drivers there were, I think it's worth thinking about what this might mean for trade policy going forward. Now I don't think for a moment that the administration has abandoned their desire to rebalance global trade. That's actually what they believed in for decades. And also I think one of the main reasons they got elected.
However, I think that the use of tariffs as a tool is probably going to be on the back burner now. Now the price that loves tariffs and indeed at a 10% baseline tariff at a minimum and again, there are other tariffs on top depending on sectors. It's already much higher than the tariffs they work before liberation day. But I think the whole liberation day episode just kind of left a bad taste in the mouth of the public in the sense that I think maybe they touched the stove and realized that actually the service quite hot.
So when you look at the poll numbers, well, first off, of course, the markets did not like it and the business lobbyists did not like it. But more importantly, the polling was suggesting that President Trump was losing support from his conduct of the trade war. And so it seems so my best guess is they're going to move away from this and that we really are just going to get a 10% baseline tariff on everyone and some details on other sector-specific tariffs. Again, semiconductor tariffs still to come, maybe some autos and stuff like that.
And of course, we still have negotiations with Japan and the European Union. But I think those are going to be a lot less eventful because the end game is becoming increasingly clear that what's going to happen is we're just going to have this baseline tariff. It's not as low as it was before, not as high as it was in liberation day. But it's, I guess, a move towards just an extra tool in this wide range of tools that they have to try to reshape global trade flows.
And this tool seems to have been maxed out at least for the moment. And so the administration is going to turn towards other things now. However, of course, as you know, when you think about markets, people buy and sell for many different reasons. So part of the reason for this tremendous rally we've seen is of course positive development on the trade front, never mind that shares are still notably higher than they were since before the start of the Trump administration.
Now it seems like looking according to reporting from Bloomberg, a big driver of the recent rally has been just a whole bunch of people who are just buying the dip. I think we have a whole generation of traders that are really just conditioned to buy the dip because of course, nothing bad ever happens. Now, I think this is a very dangerous way of looking at the world because that's just not true. Sometimes bad things happen. But when you believe that things, nothing ever happens, then you are likely to be overlevered or overexposed. And that could of course make the stock market crash up as we're seeing now. But that also makes it very fragile.
Another thing to think about in this rally is that it seems like there are a lot of options related aspects within it. Now data suggests that there has been a tremendous amount of call options being bought, relative to put options and it kind of makes sense if you see this crash up. But some very interesting data from a spot gamma, so Brent Kachuba from spot gamma also suggests that we could be at a turning point at least briefly after Friday, since Friday was May Options' expiry. Now it looks like that options' expiry was very, very much call heavy.
And so as that expires and rolls off, it's very likely it seems that the people who are holding those call options are probably not going to roll all of that up to the next strike or to the next expiration date. They're probably going to take some ships off the table. And that in turn means that dealers don't have to be long suckers, much to hedge that. So this option of expiry could potentially be a turning point with respect to the options aspect of what drove the rally. So that's something to keep in mind as well.
Now for me personally, I think that this looks honestly very much like a bear market rally. I guess I would express my view through this clip. All right. So the second thing that I want to talk about is the big, beautiful bill. Now the administration is likely going to shift away from tariffs. Again, that was not what they expected it to be, I think. And so now they're trying to do other things. And there are many tools and many things on the administration's agenda.
The president was in the Middle East just doing this huge business-related, I guess diplomacy trying to court for an investment into the U.S. And their big headline numbers, not sure how much of that will materialize. But I think when you look at the imagery of this, I perceive it to be a success, lots of good images. And honestly, I think it's extremely impressive that a man that's basically 80 years old can fly across the world, jet lagged, give all these speeches, do all these conferences, attend all these events. That stamina is incredible.
So the focus now appears to be the next step in the president's agenda. That is the big, beautiful bill. Now within it are a lot of provisions that are aimed to also help restore American manufacturing. Yeah, and there are many tools. One of them is to make imports more expensive through tariffs, discourage people from importing. And there's also the carrot as well to give lots of tax incentives to make sure that people actually do want to build in America.
Looking into the details of the bill, you have a lot of tax expensing, so depreciation benefits for people who have machinery equipment. And even people who buy real estate that they're going to use to manufacture in America. So that's going to be something that is going to make manufacturing more attractive in the US. I don't know if it's going to be enough, but definitely this is a multi-year process, and they're definitely taking steps to make that happen.
Now the budget impact of the big, beautiful bill, though, is seemingly going to be very large and non-partisan analysis of this budget bill shows that we're really going to blow the deficit and it's going to be front loaded. So one interesting thing about how the US dust legislation is that oftentimes they will design it in a way so that the deficit impact looks smaller than it actually will in practice speed.
Now let me be precise. So the Trump tax cuts that he did during his first term cut taxes across the board for corporations and for households as well. However, those tax cuts are designed to sunset in a few years, so expire in a few years. So when you're the congressional budget office and you're doing budget scoring, what you do is that you score the budget impact of a bill based on how it's actually written. So the first Trump tax cut bill was written for tax cuts to expire.
And so because the tax bugs expire, the deficit impact of it looks good. Well, actually, better than it would be than if it were permanent. And so based on that, the congressional budget office came up with these budget forecasts. Right now it's looking like it's going to be a 6% budget deficit for the foreseeable future. However, the political calculation is that when it comes time for the tax cuts to expire, the sitting Congress at the time is not going to let the tax cuts expire. Right? Because if you are Congressmen, you can't run on hiking taxes for the American people. And so once people get used to having low taxes, they don't want tax rates to go higher.
So the political calculation is always that, yeah, we wrote these temporary tax cuts in to make it look better for the congressional budget office. But in practice, of course, these tax cuts are going to get extended, maybe made permanently because no one wants taxes. And so this big beautiful bill is basically a way to make those tax cuts originally set in the in Trump's first tax bill to be permanent. And maybe add some other depreciation stuff as well to help manufacturing be showing. So this is, of course, going to beneficially balloon out the fiscal deficit.
And that actually has been so alarming that Moody's is rolling out a downgrade on Friday of the US's credit rating. Now, just a little bit of history, the US's credit rating has been downgraded as early as 2011 by the standard and pores. Now, at that time, it was kind of a traumatizing impact in the market. This was the first time this had happened. And there was a pretty strong negative reaction in the equity market. Now, mechanically, one of the explanations for this is that at the time, there were many investment managers who had written in their mandates that they can only hold triple a rated stuff.
So at that's like US treasuries, right? But if the S&P-5-Furthered S&P downgraded US debt, it's not triple anymore. Does that mean that some investors will have to foresell their treasuries? Does that mean there's going to be a lot of market impact? No one really knew. And of course, the political context of the time was that we had a European sovereign debt crisis going on. And so people were very sensitive what was happening in the sovereign debt markets. Now, since then, there have been a lot of changes. Now, no one wants some random rating agency to cause a financial crisis.
So a lot of the investors basically rewrote their mandates, such that they can hold stuff if it's sovereign, not necessarily if it's triple a. So that's really not a mechanical issue anymore. And indeed, in 2023, when Fitch, which is also another major ratings agency downgraded the US, the market reaction was still there, but much, much more muted than it was in when the US was first downgraded. Now, on Friday, when Moody's downgraded the US, now in the US there are three major ratings agencies, S&P, Fitch and Moody's. So that Moody's was the last major credit agency to downgrade the US from its higher credit rating.
Sighting, of course, budgets and institutions and so forth. It's unclear if that would have a meaningful market impact. Looking at trading after hours, it seems like the stock market did decline, but of course, as we discussed earlier, after options X-ray, there are some, I guess, options related forces that are no longer there. The market could just be looking for an excuse to decline a bit. So another question that people often ask is, you know, why does it make sense for any fiat-based country to have a credit rating that is below top notch, after all, if you can print your money, how could you ever default?
The rationale, at least originally by S&P, was that even though the US can obviously print money and not have to default, they could voluntarily default, and that has to do with the debt ceiling. So from time to time, the US runs into its debt ceiling, and at that time, the US could simply because of a political impasse decide to not pay its bills, leading to why it technically default. And that's probably never going to happen. The Fed was there been a save today, but it seems like that concern is part of the reason that goes into that goes into these ratings down grades.
Now, I'm, again, as you can see, pretty skeptical that this moody sound rate will be meaningful, but it could have some impact on the political process in negotiating the big beautiful bill. Now, to be clear, the big beautiful bill is definitely going to pass. They're going to have to twist a lot of arms. Right now, the problem seems to come to two groups of people. You have people in Congress who are legitimately concerned about the deficit. People, I guess they call them the freedom caucus, and they don't want to approve a bill that is obviously going to increase the fiscal deficit, and indeed the Trump administration themselves campaign and reducing the deficit, and they don't seem to be doing that.
And secondly, you have people who are in high-tax states who want the salt tax deduction to be raised. So in the US, you have federal taxes, and you also have state taxes. And before the first Trump tax cut, you, if you are someone in high-tax state, you could deduct some of your local taxes against your federal taxes and that reduced your tax bill. The first Trump tax cut reduced that ability, and now the second time around, these guys in high-tax states want to raise a deduction. So I don't know, they're probably going to get a higher deduction. But in any case, they're going to get this tax bill passed, simply because Trump is just so influential in Republican politics at the moment.
Now, what this reminds me of is what happened in the 2018 midterms, when at that time Trump was much more controversial than he is today, and some of the Congress people running actually tried to distance themselves from Trump, and what Trump did is this. So on the other hand, you had some that decided to let's stay away. Let's stay away. They did very poorly. I'm not sure that I should be happy or sad, but if you just find about it, Carlos, Chubella, Mike Kaufman, Tubella, Mike, me a love. I saw me a love. She'd call me all the time to help her with a hostage situation, being held hostage in Venezuela, but me a love gave me no love. And she lost.
So basically after the 2018 midterms, he got on stage and he caught up everyone who tried to distance themselves from him. And he said that, yeah, you distanced yourself from me and you lost. So you are, you are, you know, that's that's why if only you stuck with me, you would have been better. So if anyone tries to cause trouble on the Republican side of his bill, Trump is going to just going to fly down there and go to campaign against him. So no one is going to depose this will pass. The question really is just how much of a deficit it will be.
So my sense is that we are probably getting into a place where these big fiscal bills are actually going to be negative for the equity market rather than positive. And I think that's what I'll write about in my weekly. But I think that's going to be the focus on policy coming up. And we'll probably have to have a decision on this by say July, August, since that's when the debt ceiling hits. And within this bill is lifting the debt ceiling. So there's a timeline on this and that's probably going to dominate headlines going forward.
Okay. So the last thing that I want to talk about, of course, is inflation data. So this past week, we got CPI and we got PPI. And this is particular topical because many people are concerned what the tariffs have on inflation. Now the latest University of Michigan data is out and it shows that yes, people are very, very concerned about inflation increasingly. So if you are a Democrat with one year ahead inflation expectations rising to as high as 9%. Now to be fair, Republican inflation expectations are rising as well.
Now this survey was conducted. Most of the people survey were conducted before we had this date on with China. So it's probably not updated. So if we do this next month, I imagine that inflation expectations will be lower. But again, people are very concerned. Now the CPI and PPI data, though, we're pretty benign looking at the CPI data again across the board lower than expectations. A big part of that, of course, was lower energy prices, lowering down headline. But core was also pretty subdued as well.
Now we also got PPI prices received by producers, businesses and CPI is prices paid by consumers. So it's a little bit different. Now what we're seeing in the PPI is that yes, there is some goods inflation. Obviously we have tariffs. But it seems that that's not being passed on to consumers. These good charts by Parker are showing that based on PPI data, the businesses aren't really passing on these higher-terror costs to consumers. But they seem to be willing to passing on to other businesses, suggesting some degree of margin compression.
Now recall, during the first Trump trade wars, the impacts of the tariffs were largely absorbed by businesses in their profit margins. Now also something to keep in mind is that when you're looking at inflation index, it's not all about goods, right? The basket of things that we consume in inflation index is going to be goods, you know, food, energy, stuff like that. But a lot of it's going to be services as well.
Now what seems to be happening so far is that we are having a disinflation or just low inflation in some services, especially things that are more consumer discretion, like travel. As consumers, you're fearful, as the economy slows. Again, we're going to have lower wage growth. Maybe there's less travel spending. And that's going to push against increases in goods, such that at the end of the day, you might not have much of an increase in the overall PCI, PCE index.
So right now, the Cleveland Fed is forecasting a very, very benign PCE for this month.
目前,克利夫兰联邦储备银行预测本月个人消费支出(PCE)将非常温和。
And for next month as well, with Bloomberg suggesting that PCE is going to be more moderate at the end of the year, simply because disinflation from services will offset increases in goods inflation.