This weeks market moves were about how the discounting mechanism of the markets work. The Trump trade war news was spread out far and between such that Asian markets reacted to it all month long till the Final announcement. The actual timing and outcome was leaked to the media two days ago, such that a 10% tariff did not come as a surprise

The old adage buy/sell on expectations and cover on News applied here perfectly. So we witnessed the strongest up move in Asia in weeks over the last few days. What might lie ahead is in these few charts of China, and Singapore published this morning.

In the end all the tariffs end up doing is push up the input costs for the US and thus the end consumer prices that eventually feed into inflation and interest rates. The market will adjust to everything else. The sentimental impact is behind us and the market can now reflect on the real economic impact.

Our own regulators are busy figuring out what this all means if anything at all. At some point there will be a knee jerk reaction mostly in the form of raising interest rates when we realise that we are far behind the curve.