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by energy123 441 days ago
I'm don't understand the disagreement because it's not like I'm saying that markets perfectly price all available information.

Even if securities are not priced perfectly accurately, it's still a fact that investors know that Trump might change his mind. It's still a fact that investors know that the Supreme Court might strike down the tariffs. These optimistic possibilities reduce the amount of panic and reduce the magnitude of the drop.

If the Supreme Court ruled against the lawsuit brought by New Civil Liberties Alliance tomorrow then the market would drop even more than it otherwise would, because it makes it even more likely that the tariffs will remain.
1 comments
timr 441 days ago
> I'm struggling to understand the disagreement because it's not like I'm saying that markets perfectly price all available information.

You're being sanguine about the power of markets to react to short-term change. Basically, "all available information" consists, at this time, of what I posted above. Be honest: what can you infer from it regarding the "correct" level of price change in the S&P500? But that's too ambitious: what's the correct level of price changes in, say, machine screws?

You can't know the answer. Nobody can. The best any particular expert analyst might be able to do, right now, is to speculate about the impacts of the top-line tariff rates on a given company's product prices. But they cannot:

* know if those prices are correct

* know how the pricing of other products (which they don't analyze) will materially affect those pricing models.

* know what compensating strategies the company might employ

* know the costs of those compensating strategies

* know the impacts of the price change on the market demand for the product(s)

* know the impact of the price and demand changes on margin

...and so on. There are so many unknowns here. Even the most informed analysts are just wildly guessing based on headlines and vibes. I have 0% faith the "market" is currently providing a useful estimate of the impact of these changes, and I have 100% certainty that the people confidently asserting things (like a market projection) are fools, or simply talking their book.

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