Toyota is up +8% on the news of a 15% tariff.
Why?
It's simple.
Ford, GM, Tesla, and all the other American manufacturers are going to be paying 50% more for their steel, 50% more for their copper, 25% more for their Canadian production, 25% more for their Mexican production, and 55% on their Chinese production.
Toyota only has to pay 15% more and they're done with all the shenanigans.
Ford has to pay much more than that. A lot more in fact.
We've given a Japanese car company an advantage over American car companies.
All in hope of bringing auto jobs back to America.
0D Chess.
A historic picture:
Ships set to cross the Strait of Hormuz make a 180 degree U-Turn at ~9:15 AM ET this morning.
This was just minutes after Iran's parliament approved closing the Strait.
Wild times.
BREAKING: China’s Huawei has developed a new AI chip seeking to match Nvidia, $NVDA, per WSJ.
This comes just weeks after the U.S. restricted Nvidia’s H20 chip sales to China.
What the Fed's economic projections show (but its rate projections do not, yet) is that the outlook has changed a lot in just three months, and the bar for cuts has gone up.
Not only did officials revise up their core PCE inflation forecast by three tenths (for the second straight time -- they went from 2.2% in Sept to 2.5% in Dec to 2.8% in March for year-end 2025), but a few officials also nudged up their forecasts for 2026 and even 2027. Also, 18 of 19 officials have inflation risks to the upside. The labor market will likely need to weaken to get cuts from here.
Powell suggested the inflation forecast changes were almost entirely due to trade policy changes. ("We now have inflation coming in from an exogenous source.")
I spoke to two former Fed officials who were there for the 2019 trade tensions and the 2021 pandemic inflation who think they will have a hard time looking through price resets due to tariffs.
“You’re basically saying, ‘Look, we have a potential inflation problem here. We’re going to be focused on that, and when we get more evidence about what’s happening on the growth side, we’re willing to react at that point—and not before.' No one would like to have to do it that way. But it may be that in this environment, that’s what they’re going to have to do.”
https://t.co/2wGzkRDDYp
Hatzius’s predecessor, former NY Fed President Bill Dudley, flips from higher-for-longer hawk to cut-now dove: “I changed my mind… Waiting until September unnecessarily increases the risk of a recession.” https://t.co/c03Ab4qR9w
At the rate the BOJ is destroying the yen, it will be cheaper to hire 100 Japanese PhDs to write your essays and memos than to pay $20/month for chatgpt