Why Wall Street isn’t panicking over the Iran war — yet
NY Post
The market gyrations over the Iran conflict are starting to feel a bit like “Liberation Day” – and that could be a good thing.
Last April, Wall Street’s initial fears about Trump’s tariffs proved overdone, as sold-off stocks soon bounced back in an epic market recovery. Now, several top financial executives tell me they are taking a deep breath on the Iran-war – and factoring in a better outcome, as evidenced by the yo-yoing yet not totally nosediving Dow.
Predicting the outcome of a war is risky business, of course. Even glass-half-full investors are planning, as the head of one major financial institution put it, for a situation that is “binary” – meaning that things also could go terribly wrong.
Possible scenarios are manifold. The risk remains for a significant loss of Americans on an overseas base or an aircraft carrier sent to the region. That could mean that all bets are off on President Trump’s “no boots on the ground” pledge. The result could be a conflict lasting longer than a few weeks, leading to a nasty spike in oil prices, inflation, and tanking markets.
That was the fear during Liberation Day, before the Trump administration used the shock-and-awe of his tariff pronouncements on global markets to cut more benign trade deals that pared the initial steep losses in asset prices and then some.
On The Money has been a skeptic of Trump’s tariff regime, but I must admit his quick pivot away from market-crushing levies toward trade deals, even with our archenemy China, showed the world Trump is no ideologue and willing to improvise and compromise when he has to.
US stocks were little changed on Tuesday as oil prices dropped after President Trump signaled the war in Iran will be limited – though the drop slowed after the White House walked back a claim that an oil tanker had been escorted through an Iranian energy chokepoint.
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