Hello my friends, today is October 11th and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week it was looking to be a pretty boring week. The government continued to be shut down so we didn't have any official data releases. And looking at the shutdown, it looks like positions are hardening a bit and so it may continue for longer than expected. Looking at Koushi, the Koushi expects this to continue for almost 30 days and that estimate continues to rise. Now next week, it's a paycheck week for the military and so that might put some more political pressure but again it's really hard to say.
So the stock market looks like it was just going to chug along but you know, funny thing happened on the way to S&P 7000. So today let's talk about three things. First off we have to talk about the renewal in the trade war where China appears to be hardening their stance leading the stock market to decline pretty notably on Friday. Secondly, let's talk about the surge in silver and gold and lastly let's talk about the resurgence in the US dollar largely due to political developments in Europe and Japan.
All right starting with the trade war. So on Thursday there was news leaked that published in major publications saying that the Chinese had a new policy of export control on certain technologies and rare earths and no one cared about that. And then on Friday we had this very memorable tweet from President Trump basically expressing his frustration that China had done this and promising retaliation in the form of 100% tariffs on China on top of everything else and export controls on software to take place November 1st. So again, keeping some room for negotiation.
Now I point this out because oftentimes things happen, the market just doesn't know and so you know the market is oftentimes slow in many things and sometimes it reprises the same news in over and over again. So we all thought that the trade war was over but now it looks like it's kicking back in a full year largely at the initiation of China who is finally exercising their leverage.
Now let's summarize a little bit about the state of the trade war over the past few months. Now in April we had the very memorable liberation day in the Rose Garden that kind of really changed the world. Now between then and now we had a lot of discovery when it comes to trade negotiation. Back then many people were pontificating, projecting this would be really bad, it'd be a disaster but it turns out the president was correct in that they did hold all the cards and they were able to secure very favorable trade deals with many countries.
Now at the end of the day the US had tremendous amounts of leverage because it is the largest importer in the world. Being a big client again that gives you bargaining power but more importantly though we also see that the United States is a security guarantor for many countries and the European Union for example they have a war on their eastern front they really need US support for intelligence and arms and stuff like that looking to the far east you have Japan, Korea, Taiwan again all those countries depend on the US for their security.
In fact they have US military presence within them and within Europe as well. So at the end of the day the emperor protects but it looks like these countries also have to have to chip in a little bit as well. So what the US ended up with was the US would tear off these countries they are not allowed to tear off the US back and also they promise to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the US. In the case of Japan that number is 550 and it's going to be at the discretion of the president. So very very I think very strongly in favor of the United States.
Now looking at this tariff sheet from Bloomberg we can see that tariff rates have indeed gone up across the board. Before liberation day the average tariff for US imports was about 2% now it's closer to 10% but there's a huge variation in the increases. Increases for some countries not so much but look at China. The increases of tariffs on China have increased tremendously so on average they're about 40%.
So China really stands out and China is also one of the countries that retaliated on the US and tariffs. What we also learned over the past few months is that China is strong. So all these other countries they had to give in but China didn't bunch and at the end of the day it looked to me that the administration was looking for reason to step down and found it and step down their huge tariffs on China.
Now the US-China relationship is complicated and multi-faceted. At the end of the day though there's a strong degree of mutual dependence. Now China works up of the world sells a lot to the US directly and also indirectly through see Vietnam and other countries and the US of course consumes a lot of Chinese goods and that has kept prices down. If trade between the two countries were impacted it would severely negatively impact China. Of course lots of unemployment factories would be idle and if and from the US perspective prices of goods would go up a lot. You source cheap Chinese goods and if you don't have them there's a real prospect that inflation can go up significantly and of course corporate margins will be squeezed as well.
So that kind of that seems to have led the president to step down. Now although the two countries are mutually dependent I think what we found out is that the pain tolerance in the US is a lot less than China. So stock market goes down and inflation goes up people aren't happy and we know we have elections right around the corner so the government really can't allow or if it wants to stay in power really can't allow too much suffering whereas over there in China you know President Xi is going to be there basically no matter what and so that basically puts the US on a weak negotiating position.
Now the Trump card that China has played over the past few months was rear earths. So they would say that you know we're going to slow walk our rear earth export process and that led to complaints from many car companies in the US as it penned on these and so the car cup please complain to the White House and so they keep striking these deals and so forth. But Thursday's action button from China really represents a significant escalation and I think a realization that they have a lot of power.
So in the past what the US would often do is take advantage of the dollar system and use that as a way to enforce basically extraterritorial powers. For example not to one go let's say like a decade ago there was a French bank that was doing business with Iran and the US did not like Iran got really mad that this French bank was doing this and so they basically find them over a billion dollars and limited their ability to access the dollar system. That's a big problem because global trade, global commerce is all conducted in dollars and so ultimately flows through the United States which ultimately gives the United States government jurisdiction over a whole bunch of countries and so when you get frozen out of the dollar system, your economy tanks financial markets tank so you kind of have to listen to the US that's this huge choke point the dollar financial system.
China now is realizing that they also have a key choke point and that is they have a global monopoly on certain rare earths. Now we're earths themselves as we all know are not super rare however the processing and refining is basically all done in China. It's a technology that they specialize in and it's also not very good for the environment which they from regulatory standpoint is cheaper to do over there. So China is now basically saying that if you have a product that has rare earths that originated from China you got to have a license from China so you have to register and you have to have their approval and they're also having some restrictions on rare earth processing technology.
Now this reminds me a little bit about the US's quest to limit China's access to advanced semiconductor. They don't want Nvidia selling advanced semiconductor to China and they also don't want these advanced chip making machines from ASML to to be said to China. So the US has been using this part for some time. No China is using it.
Now the problem is that these rare earths go into everywhere. So you want car batteries you want semiconductors you want missiles you need these rare earths that are in China without which you know AI invest in boom not going to happen US making missiles to send to other countries not going to happen either. So this is a very very strong choke point and I know there is efforts for the US to try to have this technology themselves to develop it in. We have MP materials for example in California but if you also limit the exporting of these refinery technologies it also makes it difficult for the US to build that capacity domestically as well.
So this is a very real choke point in the global supply chain that is at least as strong as the global dollar choke point and what do the Chinese want they want the removal of all these tariffs that the US has put on them. They want tariffs now to be in line with everyone else. I don't know maybe it's a 10% global minimum tariff that the US has been charging its friends. So going from 40% to maybe 10% that would be a big change in the US's posture towards China.
Now at the end of the day I think we all know what's going to happen. There's going to be some kind of I guess tacoing as they call it but the path from here to over there is can be long and can be winding. We do know that the President eventually did have a pretty big pivot in April but that was after a size blow drawdown in the equity markets and also the bond markets kind of freaking out as well. So although I think everyone knows how this ends up and I think there's tremendous amounts of inserting as to the path but even as the stock market so down significantly and to be clear the stock market hasn't had a correction in some time. Many people were anticipating this stock market look like it was losing momentum and there's of course many whispers out of a potential bubble and so forth.
So this could be I just an excuse for the stock market to kind of have a breather. It doesn't mean that it could be anything serious but I think this escalation in the trade war is kind of a regime shift in how things may work and so we'll see how it plays out how the negotiations play out over the next few weeks. Now the price action of course was pretty interesting. We had sell-offs in the major indexes sell-off in crypto so guys crypto is not a safe haven exhibit 1000 of that but also we had soybean sell-off a lot so soybean futures selling off because that suggests that US farmers are going to be not going to sell to China there's no prospect of a good trade deal.
We have rare earth materials companies surging in the US thinking that this doubles down the efforts to for the US to build their own rare supply chain. Although to be clear if you actually look at these companies they don't really make any money and of course they are quite some time from building out these refinery capabilities so I'm not sure this is the right move. But what really stood out to me though is that again we had classic treasury safe haven so treasure is still a safe haven notwithstanding what happened in April but we had gold standout again true safe haven at the moments and surprisingly silver as well normally I think of silver as behaving like an equity but they actually held up pretty well this past turn which brings us to our next topic absolute surge in gold and silver at the past week.
So silver most memorably surged finally past 50 dollars now if you look at this chart of silver prices over the past few decades you notice that 50 dollars has kind of been a resistance for many decades in the 1980s we had the Hunts brothers just tried to squeeze silver higher we talked about that in a prior episode of course in 2011 silver surged to 50 dollars on the back of you know QE debasement whatever and I remember that clearly because I rolled that up and also had to write it down sadly but happy to report that silver finally repaid me for what it took back then.
So what's driving silver and gold up right now now a very popular story that we hear in the press is the quote unquote debasement trade that is to say that there's tremendous fiscal deficits all around the world fiat is going to zero so we got to buy these hard assets now as we've been talking about for some time people buy themselves for many different reasons and this is and oftentimes people look at the price and make up a story and I think this is one of them is the being debased absolutely that's what the two trillion fiscal deficit is but then again we've been doing this for some time and on the other hand and this is what I think a lot of these debasement guys forget the productive capacity of the economy also grows over time so whereas you're kind of printing more dollars at the same time the ability and amount of goods and services you produce also grows over time.
So what debasement in a fiat system really means is that you have less purchasing power for your money that's a say inflation so if you look at inflation it was 2% now it's 3% and yes that is the debasement does it justify gold and silver going to the moon I'll let you decide that another corollary another related story to this of course is that we also have a tremendous tremendous squeeze in the silver market.
So the precious metals markets are I mean most people trade them through futures and futures are kind of like a fractional reserve system whereas you know you're buying and selling futures just to speculate on the price but at the end of the day you don't really want delivery of 5,000 ounces of silver so you close your futures position and you roll it over to the next month. If however everyone were to actually hold their contract and stand for delivery well there's really not enough silver in the vaults to meet those obligations and so you could have it proper squeeze and that actually seems to be happening in London at the moment.
So right now a lot of people are actually scared that there might be tariffs on silver so they've been moving silver out of London into New York. Silver is also an industrial metal. What if it gets deemed to be a critical mineral and critical metal and gets uh tariffs on so people are kind of trying to get ahead of that and moving silver to to uh to comics now so that is one thing. And also if you look at this chart from Bloomberg about the silver held in London even though they're silver held in the vaults a lot of it is actually held in by ETFs so it's not really available for delivery.
Plus on top of that it seems like it's a deficit in silver production whereas the mine production is actually less than what's actually consumed for industrial purposes so this seems to be a structural deficit. So long story short um even as there's tremendous speculation in silver prices the amount of silver in the London vaults is not is declining and you also have more demand where people are actually looking for physical silver a story seems to suggest from places like India.
And so what's been happening is that it seems like there are some people in London who are caught short physical silver and are scrambling for physical inventory now one way to do this of course is to just borrow physical silver and deliver it hoping that you can source the physical silver later on and this is manifested in lease rates or lease rates for physical silver and London are absolutely exploding. So there's a shortage of physical silver over there probably temporary these things usually are temporary and that could be exerting price on spot and futures as well.
If it is a squeeze though we should keep in mind that these usually unwind sometimes violently as we saw in the case of copper not too long ago but to the extent that there is some real momentum and real fear about debasing spend or something like that so you know maybe it could trend higher so we'll see looks things look much better for gold it doesn't seem like there's kind of squeeze dynamic. It seems like more and more people are interested in gold as we saw in April and this past week it is a at the moment at least is perceived by the market to be a proper safe haven.
All right the last thing that we're going to talk about today is the dollar now the dollar many people have been hearing news stories about how the dollar is having the worst year since for many decades and that has been true but over the past few weeks it's also worth noting that it looks like the dollar has been stabilizing and actually rallying a little bit. Now again Fed is still cutting rates still have a large physical deficit still have a lot of chaos in the world why is the dollar strengthening and that has a lot to do with political developments abroad first in the European Union.
So at the beginning of the week France lost its prime minister yeah and this is something that's been ongoing France has had a few prime ministers in actually in the year or so the problem of course as we've discussed many times is that there's a big fiscal problem in France. They are spending too much money but they also have trouble carrying through any sorts of reform the letter-setter there is fractured you have you know pretty big right leading parties pretty big left leading parties the center is not very strong and you know nobody really wants to cut benefits but at the end of the day you really have to cut some government spending otherwise you know looking at French yields it's going to go higher and higher.
There's some real shades of a fiscal crisis now because there's no way to agree on what to do the France is having trouble forming government and passing legislation and so the prime minister resigned. Now Macron at the moment has a couple options I think some people would like him to resign so we can have an election for new French president others would like him to call an election for the legislator but I think that the fact is no one really knows how that will turn out and there's a good chance would end up exactly where we are today a legislator that is pre-divided where no party has a clear majority and it's very difficult to form a functional coalition.
So that led of French outspreads to widen out throughout the week and of course the euro to sell off and when euro sells off. that makes the dollar index go higher since the euro is a huge portion of the dollar index however at the at friday what we learned is uh Macron decided to have a new prime minister basically appointed the guy who just resigned and so we're right back we were restarted this is not going to be over this is probably something that's going to continue to hang on the euro going forward as to say be bullish tailwind for the dollar.
Now in addition to what happened in your land we also have pretty surprising developments in Japan Japan looks like they are on the cusp of having a new prime minister uh Mrs Takachi looks like she's going to be someone who wants to do some big fiscal spending and not only that she's made comments that suggest that you know she doesn't want the bank of Japan to to hire rates too much at least it'd be a bit more moderate in their path to normalize policy.
So many people have pointed out present Trump wanting to have more control over the central bank looks like this is something that is happening all over the world again this is something that happens all throughout history totally normal and so if you have a new prime minister that wants to do big fiscal spending and also would like the bank of Japan to not hire rates too much well the obvious conclusion is you have a weaker currency higher yields and in the case of Japan a higher stock market.
And monday was a really surprising day you have the naked surge basically 5% now that's a major stock market index trading like a penny stock yet we can notably as well and we have the JDB yields again moving higher and higher and higher however of course this past towards the end of the week we also had some use that you know maybe there are some coalition partners within Japan may not necessarily support the potential new prime minister and so forth so there's some uncertainty there as well.
But again all this political chaos political uncertainty abroad is benefiting the dollar so you're kind of in a strange situation where of course the US is a government shutdown a lot of changes happening as well so the argument that there's kind of all countries are kind of having their trouble and currencies being a relative game at the moment it looks like the US is benefiting but maybe most of all gold is benefiting.
All right so that's all I prepared for today very exciting week and also looks like next week it's going to be really exciting as well are the dip buyers going to come in just gonna just buy the dip as they've been taught over the past few months or is this the beginning of something more serious find out in the coming days all right talk to you guys next week.