FxWirePro: Ignore noise around trade war; focus on hard economic numbers

The recent market reaction strongly suggests that the financial market is overreacting to all the media chatters, and we at FxWirePro would like to recommend our readers to cut through the noise and look at hard data for evidence of what actually happening.

What noise we are talking about:  

This Reuters report, https://in.reuters.com/article/usa-stocks/wall-street-gains-as-trade-fears-ease-oil-prices-jump-idINKBN1JN1TF  says, “At the market open, stocks rose as President Donald Trump said he will use a strengthened national security review panel — the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) — to deal with potential threats from Chinese acquisitions of U.S. technology, instead of imposing China-specific restrictions.”

Good news! Right? Wrong! Fake news or noise! The actual truth is nothing has changed.

Here is one of the Bloomberg stories https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-24/u-s-plans-curbs-on-chinese-investment-citing-security-risks that suggests U.S. to specifically target China.

Bloomberg later had to clarify and redact the suggestions of the U.S. targeting only China, as the Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin countered the claim.

Maybe Bloomberg is right in its reporting or wrong. Maybe they have an insider; maybe they don’t. But the point is that the market is overreacting to every claim and counterclaim.

Believe in hard evidence:

The policies are pretty clear; the U.S. wants to reduce deficits, especially trade deficits. So, we strongly recommend watching the trade numbers rather than the noise around. For example, many people suggest that trade was are not healthy for the economy; so we guess the GDP/IP/CPI/NFP numbers would surely tell us.

More importantly, Trump supporters do not believe that trade wars would be bad for the economy as a whole; so it is very likely that the sentiment readings would be overly skewed and would not reflect the actual picture. That makes the hard numbers more important despite their lag.

You can check the numbers from census bureau site here, https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0004.html