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Hostilities cooled in the trade war:

The Trump administration on Tuesday delayed imposing a 10 per cent import tariff on laptops, cellphones, video game consoles and a wide range of other products made in China, in an abrupt pullback from a hard line stance on Chinese trade.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office action was published just minutes after China’s Ministry of Commerce said Vice Premier Liu He conducted a phone call with U.S. trade officials.

The delay in the tariffs that had been scheduled to start next month provides some relief to retailers. Although most stores would have stocked their holiday merchandise before the earlier September deadline, some might have faced the tariffs for fill-in orders late in the holiday shopping season.

“We’re doing this for the Christmas season, just in case some of the tariffs would have an impact on U.S. customers” President Donald Trump told reporters as he prepared to depart from New Jersey for an event in Pittsburgh.

For what it’s worth, I will note that Trump has an election to fight next year – and the concept of ‘voting with your pocketbook’ is so well-known it’s trite. So I believe that Trump will win a headline concession from China (never mind all the fine print), declare victory and lift the tariffs well before the election. I’d be hesitant to estimate a probability for that scenario, though!

The Treasury market, though, ignored my prating as usual and flattened:

The U.S. Treasury yield curve hit its flattest level in more than 12 years on Tuesday, suggesting increased market anxiety over the state of the economy amid trade war concerns and global political tensions.

The spread between U.S. 2-year and 10-year note yields, a closely watched metric for recession signals, declined to 0.6 basis point, the narrowest since June 2007, according to Refinitiv data. The last time this yield curve inverted was also in June 2007 in the midst of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis
…
Despite weak signals from the yield curve, U.S. yields rose across the board on Tuesday after the Trump administration delayed imposing a 10% import tariff on laptops, cellphones, video game consoles and a wide range of other products made in China. Analysts said the U.S. move served to ease trade tensions between the two world’s largest economies, at least for now.

U.S. two-year and 10-year note yields hit session highs after the trade news, while those on 30-year bonds rallied from more than three-year lows. Traders earlier were bracing for 30-year yields sinking to a record low below 2.08%.
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The Labor Department said the U.S. consumer price index climbed 0.3% last month, lifted by gains in the cost of energy products and a range of other goods. Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI gained 0.3% after rising by the same margin in June.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 13th, 2019 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.