#tariffs

#tariffs

Now, the Bolt is backbut as expected, it won't be sticking around for very long. And now we know just how long. According to Bloomberg, GM officials have decided to end production of the heavily updated 2027 Chevrolet Bolt after just about a year and a half, in order to free up production space at its Fairfax, Kansas factory for a gas-powered Buick crossover.

Earnings-call word usage shows increased emphasis on growth in Q3 versus Q2, decreased mentions of tariffs and uncertainty, and slope of highlighted words represents change in usage between quarters.

Investors should be watching this closely. The TACO trade lacks the precision of a proper model, yet the repetition looks too consistent to ignore,

Before I get to the dialogue and the book, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about a domestic subject. And that is this extraordinary moment where Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins informed a TV interviewer that her department had run thousands of simulations, and good news, it was possible to feed an American person for less than $3 if that person ate a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing.

After a brief sell-off in the run-up to Donald Trump's speech to global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, markets are up, after the president backed off earlier claims and ruled out using force to acquire Greenland. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 451 points, or about 1%, and the S&P 500 was up 67 points, also about 1%, in midday trading at the time of this writing. The Nasdaq was up about 0.7%.

I was paid visits by everybody. Rolex came to see me. They all came to me, but I realized and I reduced it because I don't want to hurt people. I don't want to hurt them. And we brought it down to a, you know, lower level. Doesn't mean it's not going up, but we brought it down to a lower level.

Europe is weighing retaliation if President Donald Trump imposes more tariffs - and it threatens the US's big global advantage. French President Emmanuel Macron pushed to activate what's commonly referred to asa trade "bazooka" in response to Trump's recent threat to impose an additional 10% tariff on European countries unless they agree to a deal ceding control of Greenland.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has decried Europeans for their complicity in failing to stand up to Donald Trump's demands that he be allowed to buy or annex Greenland. Newsom, a frontrunner among Democratic candidates for president in 2028, told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday that Europeans were being played by Trump and that their efforts to negotiate with him were not diplomacy, it's stupidity.

Tuesday morning, Bitcoin was trading at around $91,000, which was down around 4.5% over the past five days. It had been trading around $95,000, but took a tumble late Sunday evening, suddenly falling to less than $93,000, and trended downward early Tuesday. Ethereum, or ETH, followed a similar trajectory: ETH values are down almost 8% over the past five days, and are currently trading just north of $3,000. XRP did the same and, as of Tuesday morning, is down roughly 7%.

[The Trump administration] may have entered the office thinking that they could use their economic leverage to push China in certain policy directions," said Amanda Hsiao, a China studies director at the Eurasia Group consultancy.

Futures are trading dramatically lower as we start the holiday-shortened trading week, following yesterday's MLK remembrance day. The futures downdraft this morning is being attributed to President Trump's threat to raise tariffs significantly over Greenland. Last Friday, the market closed unchanged primarily after a sizable options expiration that boosted trading volume throughout the day. With 184 companies reporting fourth-quarter results this week, many top stocks could be data-driven and volatile over the next four days.

"For Germany, these new tariffs would be absolute poison," ING economist Carsten Brzeski told AFP, adding that the heightened uncertainties "clearly jeopardise the fragile recovery underway".

Donald Trump became president for the second time on this day in 2025. With that came a lot of new economicplans for trade, immigration, and the federal workforce. Elizabeth Renter, a senior economist at NerdWallet, said uncertainty from actual or potential policy changes affected consumers, job seekers, and small to midsize businesses. "There was a lot of guesswork happening in 2025, and then you add to that mix issues with economic statistics, and sort of reading the tea leaves to figure out where the economy is headed amidst all this change became increasingly difficult," Renter said.

Asked about Macron's decision not to join the board, Trump dismissed the French president's position. "Did he say that? Well, nobody wants him because he will be out of office very soon," Trump said. "I'll put a 200% tariff on his wines and champagnes, and he'll join, but he doesn't have to join," Trump said. A source close to Macron told the AFP news agency on Monday said France "does not intend to answer favourably" to the invitation.

The brunt of US tariffs - 96% - have been paid by US buyers, research from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, found, while about 4% of the tariff burden was paid by foreign exporters. "American importers and consumers bear nearly all the cost," the researchers said of the tariffs. The study, published Monday, said that the $200 billion increase in customs revenue that the US government raised in 2025 was a "tax paid almost entirely by Americans."

Why the relative calm? Well, markets have learned to live with Trumpian tariff adventures. They know the attention-grabbing initial threats do not always translate into action, at least not at the advertised level. With hindsight, Trump's liberation day last April, which did shake markets, created one of the best buying opportunities in years and 2025 as a whole was a bumper year for stock markets almost everywhere.

I'm all for Trump taking out enemies of the West. Maduro, the Iranian regime. But if he falls out with his own allies and leaves America isolated, that, that would be a very bad place to be.

A fresh round of tariffs on European exports would cost Germany and Europe dearly, the president of the German auto industry association has said, as he called for a smart response coordinated by Brussels. The costs of these additional tariffs would be enormous for German and European industry, especially in these already challenging times, said Hildegard Muller, the president of the VDA trade organisation. What is crucial now is a smart, strategic response from Brussels that is coordinated with the countries affected, she added.