Confidence around tariffs is improving with key China talks on deck
Wall Street cheered on Thursday as the first green shoots from President Donald Trump's trade negotiations emerged, one day before the one-month anniversary of the April 9 tariff pause and just ahead of key talks with China . Officials from the U.S. and United Kingdom announced that the countries have agreed to the outline of a trade deal . The news helped fuel a broad rally for stocks, with the small-cap Russell 2000 — a barometer for confidence about the economy — outperforming its large-cap counterparts in the session. .RUT 1D mountain Small cap stocks outperformed on Thursday. The U.K. agreement was not at the top of the priority list for investors worried about the global economy, but any progress is positive right now. "The US-U.K. trade deal is ultimately a positive development and a sign that after months of turmoil, we may be incrementally moving towards de-escalation of the global trade war," Martin Frandsen, equities portfolio manager at Principal Asset Management, said in a statement. The bullish hope is that incremental progress can build into something more substantial and certain. In particular, traders who bought stocks Thursday are implicitly betting that something positive will come from talks with China. Trump said Thursday he expects the scheduled discussions with Chinese officials this weekend to be "substantive." U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on " Power Lunch " said that lowering tariffs on China as a result of those talks is "on the table." "We think this is an opportunity to find some stability with these folks. China's market and economy is so different from our own. It's so hard to fit a square into a circle in a way that's fair. So that's a much longer conversation. This talk is about can we get to a stable place, and maybe that's a foundation for something more," Greer said.
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