We are still torn by the war that the tariffs have created. China has held steadfast on not breaking and today it seems that the US has somewhat toned down its rhetoric and actually talked about reaching a globally beneficial consensus, at least that is what I took from what President Trump said. Now just looking at what has happened since the US declared the "Independence Day" it seems that it has mostly been bluffing and talking big from most of the big players. Smaller countries with small economies have stayed out of the battle, after all most of the countries that do rely heavily on their US exports happen to have negative trade balances with the US, so the tariffs slapped on them were a general 10%.
Of course this does have a negative impact on their products, but as in the case of my country, Honduras, what we do export to the US is agricultural product and most of this is actually produced by US backed companies, so I think that this 10% hike can be, at least partially, taken care of by these said companies. Besides which, a 10% price hike on a supermarket product that retails for say $3.00 is not too big a hit for consumers.
No the war is between the US and its large suppliers, China, the EU, Mexico, Canada, who can see their economies severely hit by these tariffs. Personally I think the US will be the hardest hit, because it will be tariffing everything from everywhere so of course consumer prices will go up, a lot. But as was seen yesterday, even the idea that tariffs will not be as tough as initially presented has a soothing effect on the markets, wall street at last had a good day.
Which brings me to Crypto, the overall market cap at one point after the tariff thing began dropped all the way down to 2.5 Trillion USD, today it has rebounded to 2.92 Trillion USD. Bitcoin which went all the way up to $109,000 last year and then went on a downward spiral to fall below $80,000.00 is now at $93,000.00. Of course I question why tariffs should have any effect at all on crypto. Crypto in fact should be a safe haven for money right now and should have either stood its ground or even gone up in price. Yet the reverse happened. Just proves I know nothing about how this works, but I do notice it is a market that does not follow any reasonable path, seems to be a follower until it suddenly moves straight up or down. Well at least it is exciting.