Worldwide Financial Planning

After a wild round-trip, markets are heading back to where they were at the start of the month, before Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs sparked the sell-off. But not much has significantly changed – US imports are now subject to 10% tariffs, while the more punitive rates are suspended, not cancelled.

In itself, it’s a two-part sub-series – the problems of weaponization, and then what they are doing about it, but it’s very important in the overall understanding of the future of the dollar and the motivation and where we might one day find peace. Long sigh.

Hopefully you may remember my comments on dedollarisation in June 2023 – ‘it will happen’. This journey of explanation of dedollarisation turns to the calamity and farcical charade that is - tariffs.

After resuming their slide at the start of the week, global equity markets jumped on news that the highest tariffs would be delayed by 90 days. Did Donald Trump blink in the face of market turmoil, or does he think the threat of higher tariffs has done its job by forcing countries to the negotiating table?

You can have all the water in the world, but if the pipes are clogged or run through someone else’s tap, good luck getting a clean wine glass mate. That’s what we’re seeing now with global finance. The water - money - isn’t the only story anymore. It’s the pipes: how it flows, who controls the taps, and what happens when someone upstream decides to turn off the supply.

The US president unveiled a sweeping package of additional tariffs on US imports, with the largest hikes being added to goods from its biggest trade partners. But Trump and his trade advisers are in a very small minority that think these measures will be anything other than damaging to US and global economic growth.