Matthew Lynn

Have the markets stopped caring about Trump’s tariffs?

The New York Stock Exchange (Credit: Getty images)

President Trump’s imposition of huge tariffs on everything America imports on ‘Liberation Day’ at the start of this month has been widely condemned as one of the worst economic policy blunders of all time. There were fears the stock market would collapse. Investors are abandoning the United States for Europe. And the country is about to be plunged into stagflation. But something odd has happened. If you look at a stock market chart, basically nothing happened in April. Could it be that the markets have already decided that Trump’s tariffs don’t matter very much after all?

The stock market has got over their shock at the tariffs

As April comes to a close, it looks as if it will have been a ‘meh’ month for investors. The benchmarked S&P 500 looks set to end the month more or less where it started, falling by slightly under 1 per cent over the last four weeks.

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