- Stocks are up again today despite the trade deal between the U.S. and the E.U. which will place a 15% tax on imports into America. Why are traders so happy about this? Because an examination of what few details are available about the deal suggests that most of it simply formalizes spending and investment that was going to happen anyway. And there’s a case heading to the U.S. Supreme Court which may declare all Trump’s deals are illegal in the long run.
European stocks are up 0.93% today, and the STOXX Europe 600 index is again approaching an all-time high. (By contrast, S&P 500 futures are only up 0.28% this morning.) Given that the U.S. just slapped Europe with a 15% tax on all its exports to America, why are investors in Europe so bullish?
One theory is that they are trading as if one of two conditions will turn out to be true:
- The new E.U. deal is, like its Japanese counterpart, mostly composed of stuff that will never happen or was happening anyway, and therefore changes little.
- The U.S. Supreme Court will rule that Trump has no authority to negotiate tariffs on his own under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and that all his deals will be declared null, resetting tariff levels nearer to zero.
That would explain why, this morning, Goldman Sachs moved its estimate of E.U. GDP upward by 0.1%, following the deal, according to a note from Sahar Islam and Ayushi Mishra.
Analysts hint this morning that E.U. officials appear to have pulled the wool over Trump’s eyes in the negotiations. The deal includes $750 billion in “strategic purchases,” $600 billion of private investment, and “vast quantities” of military equipment purchases. But there is near unanimity on Wall Street that the private investment was going to happen anyway in the normal course of business.
“The $600bn represents existing investment plans, not new investment,” Mark Wall and his team at Deutsche Bank wrote this morning.
“Pie in the sky”
And the Financial Times reported this morning that Europe’s “promise” to buy $750 billion of energy from the U.S. cannot actually be fulfilled because the European fuel market is controlled by private companies, not their governments. “Even if Europe did want to increase its imports, I don’t know the mechanism by which the EU goes to these companies and tells them to buy more U.S. energy,” Matt Smith, an exec at the energy consultancy Kpler, told the FT. He called it “pie in the sky.”
The E.U. government doesn’t have the power to compel private companies to buy American oil, the price of energy is coming down, and the long-term trend in Europe is to phase out fossil fuels in favor of renewables. “European gas demand is soft and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies, not states, that contract for energy imports,” Bill Farren-Price, head of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, told the FT. “Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.”
The military purchases are unsurprising given that Russia is waging war on Europe’s eastern flank. NATO will be happy to buy from the U.S.—it needs all the weapons it can get.
And then there are the omissions from the deal: No new rules on drug pricing, the digital services tax, or agricultural rules—all of those were U.S. priorities before the talks but seem to have evaporated. The strangest pro-Europe quirk? The E.U. now has an advantage in automobiles—a 15% tariff where the U.S., Canada, and Mexico all have to pay 25%.
No wonder President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said yes so quickly.
VOS Selections vs Trump
And then, waiting in the wings, is the biggest potential upside surprise to global stocks of them all: VOS Selections vs Trump. This case was brought by a group of small American businesses angry that their bills are going up because of the tariffs. They argue that Trump’s assertion of a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 is not valid for him to make trade deals without Congressional approval. (Congress is the usual body that approves trade deals.) An appeals hearing is set for July 31, and it is likely that, in turn, the case will go to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
“If the IEEPA is deemed inadmissible, the status of the trade deals is also unclear,” JPMorgan’s Jahangir Aziz and Bruce Kasman reminded clients this morning.
The high court is packed with Trump’s own picks, of course, so he can expect a sympathetic hearing. It would nonetheless be a huge leap for the justices to agree that routine trade deficits constitute a national emergency.
If they eventually declare the tariffs illegal, expect stocks to leap.
Here’s a snapshot of the action prior to the opening bell in New York:
- S&P 500 futures were up 0.28% this morning, premarket, after the index closed up 0.018% on monday, hitting another new all-time high at 6,389.77.
- STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.93% in early trading.
- The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.73% in early trading.
- Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 1.10%.
- China’s CSI 300 Index was up 0.39%.
- The South Korea KOSPI was up 0.66%.
- India’s Nifty 50 was up 0.50%.
- Bitcoin is holding above $118K.
