Focusing on tariffs 'misses the point,' this strategist says

Yahoo

21-03-2025

BNP Paribas Asset Management chief market strategist Daniel Morris tells Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton, joined by Epistrophy Capital Research chief market strategist and The Drill Down podcast host Cory Johnson, that focusing only on tariffs "misses the point," highlighting that the market (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) expects a soft landing for the economy in 2025.
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Well markets point to muted action after another volatile week on Wall Street, and our next guest says the economy's soft landing is what's really behind the weakness so far this year. Joining us now is Daniel Morris, BNP Asset Management Chief Market Strategist, and with us for the hour, of course the one and only, Corey Johnson, Pistrophy Capital Chief Market Strategist and host of the Drill Down podcast. Welcome to you both. Uh, Dan, uh start with you here on the markets and I thought, Dan, your comments are interesting, you look at the market action this year, Dan, and you say, in your opinion, this has really been about much more about the macro, it's about the slowing growth more than the tariffs, Dan. Walk us through that, 'cause we can't tell you we had a lot of strategists on really the word so far we hear over and over again point, you know, focus, the attention has been on tariffs. Why do you say that?
Well I think that misses a point, and that's important, because if you're not analyzing what's really going on in the market currently I think you then miss what might come next. So think back to what we thought was going to be the outlook for 2025 before the election, and the word we kept repeating over and over of course was "soft landing." Uh, so that meant growth was supposed to slow. Uh, inflation then would come back down towards target, and then the Fed cuts rates, and we were all gonna be quite happy. Now we perhaps got a bit distracted by what happened subsequently with the election, of course the markets are pricing in what it anticipated as pro-growth policies from Trump, but we've got to remember there's a sequencing effect here. Uh, if that happens, it's not going to be right away. You know, you need time for these things to filter through for the economy. Economy's going to continue doing essentially what it was going to do, and I think it's that soft landing that we anticipated. So, from that point of view, we shouldn't be surprised. That's what we thought was going to happen, and I think fundamentally that's the key thing that's behind the market. Of course, tariffs come on top of that, but the key point I think is the soft landing.
But it is a softer landing than anticipated by many. I mean, you're looking at GDP forecast that a lot of places are revising lower, and many are attributing that to the sort of survey data that we've gotten, the weakening, sort of confidence, in part.
Yeah, I guess I again kinda question the analysis that's going on there. So if we go back to the growth that we had at the end of last year, 2.8% if you look at core core GDP, and well above trend we expected that to go down, right? That's all part of that picture. Towards two-ish, let's say. So we're kind of going in that direction anyway. I think some of the numbers that you see in the calculations of the GDP now are a function of the surge in imports you had ahead of the tariffs, so that does have a mathematical impact on the GDP calculation. But if a lot of those imports just end up in inventories, you'll more or less see an offset in the GDP calculation when the figures come out. So I still think we're looking at a two-handle for GDP for the first quarter. We'll see. Not an economist. No predictions on what's going to come out.