Scary night but could have been worse/Tariffs pain me/Some very relevant earnings comments, especially from Manpower

Just in case you were sleeping early last night east coast time and are just getting up now hearing that Israel bombed Iran. The initial response was about a 65 pt drop in the S&P futures, $4 jump in oil, $35 rally in gold, and fall in the 10 yr yield to 4.50%. The yen even was a flight to safety for an hour as it traded up to 153.6 last night. With word of a modest Israeli attack (uncertain what the target was and the damage seen) and an expressed no retaliation response back from Iran, you can see that we're well off the intra night levels. Geopolitical war/battles/tensions/etc... are scary but only matters for markets and the economy when disruptions of supplies result from it. 

For those who weren't reading my work years ago, I've been anti tariff from day one believing that it's just a tax on the American business and consumer and the broad damage offsets any benefits to particular industries. Well, with the likelihood of a ramp up of them on steel and aluminum imports from China, the WSJ is reporting that "China slapped a levy on imports from the US of a widely used chemical, a small salvo in an escalating trade dispute between Washington and Beijing. China's commerce ministry said imports of US made propionic acid would be subject to a levy of 43.5% after an investigation that began in July concluded the chemical was being dumped in China at rock bottom prices and hurting Chinese producers as a result." Nothing good will come of this back and forth and the worse it gets the less growth and higher inflation we'll see. As a reminder, the 2018 tariff battle with China helped to put US manufacturing into a recession. 

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-moves-to-raise-costs-of-imports-of-key-chemical-from-u-s-7d33196d

At least from the Reserve Bank of India, we can quantify the extent at which foreign central banks are buying gold. With a hat tip to my friend Fred Hickey, weekly data from the RBI revealed that they bought 5 tons of gold in March and that year to date purchases by them have totaled 19 tons. In ALL of 2023, they bought 16 tons. We remain bullish and long.