Stocks Soar on Good Trade News

Stocks soared today on news that Trump and Juncker reached a good trade deal. The S&P is just a few points below the highs reached in February.

Global Macro Picture Weakens As China Shocks Market With Trade Deficit

Look out beloooooow! Now I understand why crude oil is down. It's the stock market driving perceived demand for crude instead of vice versa this time around.

from Mish Shedlock:

Equity futures are in the red across the board late Wednesday evening in light of an unexpected trade deficit in China.

Some reports suggest not reading too much into the deficit because February trade numbers are distorted following the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday. However, even the two-month total is negative, so the holiday excuse is a pretty weak one.

Please consider China Reports Unexpected Trade Deficit as Export Growth Cools

China reported an unexpected $7.3 billion trade deficit, the nation’s biggest in seven years, in February after a Lunar New Year holiday disrupted exports.

Outbound shipments rose an annual 2.4 percent, the slowest pace since November 2009, and imports climbed 19.4 percent, according to a report on the customs bureau website today.

Yuan forwards weakened after the announcement, which may deflect international pressure for China to strengthen its currency to redress global economic imbalances. Commerce Minister Chen Deming said March 7 that it’s “totally unreasonable” to say the yuan is undervalued after U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner repeated calls for a faster pace of appreciation.

Economists combine Chinese data for the first two months of the year to eliminate distortions caused by the annual holiday. On that basis, the nation had a deficit of about $890 million, compared with a surplus of about $22 billion a year earlier.

Global Macro Picture Worsens

Two months do not a trend make, but a couple more would do it.

As a side note, people frequently write wondering why China does mot buy more commodities with its US dollar reserve. There are a several reasons, one of which should be obvious from the above article.

1. China's manufacturers are already squeezed, unable to pass on rising import costs.
2. Accumulating commodities is pro-cyclical. China is overheating already.
3. Any commodities not bought directly from US suppliers (for example copper from Australia) increases trade distortions elsewhere.
4. Thanks to loose economic policy globally, commodity speculation is running rampant already. No importers want to add fuel to that fire.

China is overheating, and the global macro picture, especially from a Chinese perspective is far worse than that.

The world may not have noticed yet, but Europe is in trouble. The PIIGS are imploding under austerity measures and the most of the rest of Europe except perhaps Germany does not look very good.

Europe is China's largest trading partner.

Factor in the situation in Libya, rising oil prices, an ECB that seems hell-bent on hiking rates (I bet they back off after at most one hike), state budgets under attack in the US (thankfully), and the whole idea that Chinese growth is going to save the world is Fantasyland material.

Failure At G20

from Boston.com:
SEOUL — President Obama’s hopes of emerging from his Asia trip with the twin victories of a free trade agreement with South Korea and a unified approach to spurring global economic growth ran into resistance on all fronts yesterday, putting Obama at odds with his key allies and largest trading partners.

The most concrete trophy expected to emerge from the trip eluded his grasp: a long-delayed free trade agreement with South Korea, first negotiated by the Bush administration and then reopened by Obama, to have greater protections for US workers.

And as officials frenetically tried to paper over differences among the Group of 20 members with a vaguely worded communiqué to be issued today, there was no way to avoid discussion of the fundamental differences of economic strategy. After five largely harmonious meetings in the past two years to deal with the most severe downturn since the Depression, major disputes broke out between Washington and China, Britain, Germany, and Brazil.

Each rejected core elements of Obama’s strategy of stimulating growth before focusing on deficit reduction. Several major nations continued to accuse the Federal Reserve of deliberately devaluing the dollar last week in an effort to put the costs of America’s competitive troubles on trading partners, rather than taking politically tough measures to rein in spending at home.

The result was that Obama repeatedly found himself on the defensive. He and the South Korean president, Lee Myung Bak, had vowed to complete the trade pact by the time they met here; while Obama insisted that it would be resolved “in a matter of weeks,’’ without the pressure of a summit meeting it was unclear how the hurdles on nontariff barriers to US cars and beef would be resolved.

Obama’s meeting with China’s president, Hu Jintao, appeared to do little to break down Chinese resistance to accepting even nonbinding numerical targets for limiting China’s trade surplus. While Lael Brainard, the undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said that the United States and China “have gotten to a good place’’ on rebalancing their trade, Chinese officials later archly reminded the Americans that as the issuers of the dollar, the main global reserve currency, they should consider the interests of the “global economy’’ and their own “national circumstances.’’

The disputes were not limited to America’s foreign partners. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got into a trans-Pacific argument with one of his former mentors, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, after Greenspan wrote that the United States was “pursuing a policy of currency weakening.’’ Geithner shot back on CNBC that while he had “enormous respect’’ for Greenspan, “that’s not an accurate description of either the Fed’s policies or our policies.’’

Much of the rest of the world seemed to share Greenspan’s assessment. Moreover, Obama seemed to be losing the broader debate over austerity. The president has insisted that at a moment of weak private demand, the best way to spur economic growth is to have the government prime the pump with cheap credit and government stimulus programs. He quickly found himself in an argument with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

“You do hear the argument made sometimes: If you have a deficit, put off the action to deal with it because taking money out of the economy will reduce your growth rate,’’ Cameron said at the meeting. “I simply don’t accept that.’’

Merkel, in a more traditional German view reflective of her country’s history of hyperinflation before World War II, was equally adamant.

“I am not one, and Germany is not one, who says growth and fiscal consolidation are contradictory,’’ she said during a lunchtime address in Seoul. “They can go together, and it is essential to return to a sustainable growth path.’’ She also suggested that it was the job of deficit countries — like the United States and Britain, although she diplomatically avoided citing them — to increase their competitiveness rather than put limits on countries that had figured out how to get the world to buy their goods.

Trade Wars Are In the Air

from WSJ:

• Dow Jones Reprints: This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit www.djreprints.com
  See a sample reprint in PDF format. Order a reprint of this article now
• 

• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• SEPTEMBER 15, 2009, 5:53 A.M. ET

A Protectionist President

Like Hoover, Obama is abdicating U.S. trade leadership.

• Article
• Comments (125)

more in Opinion »

• Email
• Printer
  Friendly
• Share:
  facebook ↓ More

  • StumbleUpon
  • Digg
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Fark
  • Reddit
  • LinkedIn
  • del.icio.us
  • MySpace
• Save This ↓ More
• Text

President Obama traveled to Wall Street yesterday to press his case for more financial regulation, but the bigger economic issue of the day concerned other White House policies. To wit, what does it mean for the world economy if America now has its first protectionist President since Herbert Hoover?
The smell of trade war is suddenly in the air. Mr. Obama slapped a 35% tariff on Chinese tires Friday night, and China responded on the weekend by threatening to retaliate against U.S. chickens and auto parts. That followed French President Nicolas Sarkozy's demand on Thursday that Europe impose a carbon tariff on imports from countries that don't follow its cap-and-trade diktats. "We need to impose a carbon tax at [Europe's] border. I will lead that battle," he said.

Mr. Sarkozy was following U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has endorsed a carbon tax on imports, and the U.S. House of Representatives, which passed a carbon tariff as part of its cap-and-tax bill. This in turn followed the "Buy American" provisions of the stimulus, which has incensed much of Canada; Congress's bill to ban Mexican trucks from U.S. roads in direct violation of Nafta, prompting Mexico to retaliate against U.S. farm and kitchen goods; and the must-make-cars-in-America provisions of the auto bailouts. Meanwhile, U.S. trade pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea languish in Congress.

Shipping Activity, Trade Down Broadly, No Sign of Recovery

From AP on Breitbart:
Cargo handler DP World said Wednesday that business at its ports dropped 8 percent in the first two months of this year as global trade evaporates because of the global economic slump.

The slowdown shows no signs of easing. The CEO of the Dubai-based company, one of the world's biggest and most geographically diverse port operators, said market conditions are changing on an almost daily basis, making it impossible to predict how badly business might suffer this year.

"Volumes are just disappearing," Chief Executive Mohammed Sharaf said in a round-table with reporters. "It's not that we are losing our business to our competition. ... It's just not there. It's gone."