The stock market is now higher than before President Trump’s broad and steep tariffs sent share prices into a tailspin. The 10-year government bond yield is now largely in line with where it started the year. On Tuesday, a widely watched measure of inflation nudged lower.
Judging from a snapshot of today’s financial markets, it would be easy to conclude that very little had happened over the last four and a half months.
As the administration has dialed down its trade offensive, delaying the worst of the tariffs announced on April 2 and promoting a long list of trade deals in the works, stocks have risen and the unnerving volatility in the government bond market — which Mr. Trump noted when he first began pausing his tariffs — has subsided.
On Tuesday, the latest reading of the Consumer Price Index showed a slower pace of inflation in April than economists had predicted, despite widespread concerns that tariffs could have sped up price increases.
The S&P 500, which came close to hitting a bear market early last month, is now up slightly since the start of the year, after a 0.7 percent gain on Tuesday.
Still, investors remained cautious, and complain that the outlook remains uncertain, with little clarity on what the final level of tariffs will be.
That leaves them in a tricky position, with many saying they have little conviction as to where the economy is headed but they cannot afford to wait on the sidelines and miss out on the possibility that tariffs will be lowered further and stocks will rise.
In the meantime, investors are still trying to parse how the tariffs that remain in place — including 30 percent tariffs on many Chinese imports — are affecting consumer spending and corporate profits
John Kerschner, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson, said signs of tariff-fueled inflation are not likely to show up in the economic data for months.
“The market will wait with bated breath for those readings to make a determination of where we actually stand on tariff induced rising prices. Thus, market uncertainty will likely remain elevated,” Mr. Kerschner said.
The Federal Reserve is also in a wait-and-see mode, unwilling to keep lowering interest rates before the inflationary effect of the new tariffs is known. That’s because lower interest rates stimulate the economy and could add a further tailwind to inflation.
Market bets on when the Fed will next lower interest rates have gradually been pushed further out. At the start of this year, investors were anticipating that the Fed would lower interest rates at its meeting last week. Now, investors expect the first rate cut of the year to arrive at the September meeting.
Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management said the lower than expected reading in the Consumer Price Index on Tuesday “doesn’t mean tariffs aren’t impacting the economy, it just means they aren’t showing up in the data yet.”
“Wait-and-see is still the name of the game, and until that changes, the Fed will remain on the sidelines,’’ she added.
The longer uncertainty prevails, the more it becomes its own economic force, separate from the tariffs. Uncertainty means businesses hold off on making investment decisions and consumers pull back from spending, slowing economic growth.
Beneath the surface, that concern is still evident in the markets.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies, which are more at risk from a downturn in the economy, has risen from its lows, but remains 14 percent lower than its peak in November. The S&P 500 is only 4 percent below its February high.
The lowest-rated corporate debt continues to show some signs of strain.
Then there is the dollar, which has sent the most pointed signal of concern about tariffs. The dollar index, which measures the currency against a basket of its peers, has fallen 6.9 percent so far this year.
That is the dollar’s biggest slide since the end of 2022, when the Fed pivoted from raising interest rates, which had strengthened the dollar, to holding them steady.
But even now, as tariffs have de-escalated, the dollar has regained ground.
“As far as markets are concerned, there’s now a belief that the worst of the trade war has passed, and that the trend is now towards de-escalation,” noted analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a recent research note. But they also warned, “The U.S. is not out of the woods yet.”
