Whatever the tariffs look like, please let them be the last ones/FX response & foreign flows/PMIs/Cruising, interest income/Copper fresh record high

In light of the press reports on what the April 2^nd tariffs might look like (targeted maybe but only in terms of the number of countries the tariffs will be applied to rather than targeted in terms of overall dollar size), whatever it looks like and regardless if one agrees with the application or not, let's hope that it's then done so businesses, households and investors can at least have some visibility from all of this and can plan around them.

Not much of a US dollar response as the DXY is down .15% and is still near giving back all of its post election gains. Specifically, the Canadian dollar and the Mexico peso are up a touch while the Chinese offshore yuan is flat in response today. Since the election, the Canadian dollar and Chinese yuan are really the only two currencies that are notably down vs the US dollar. The rest are mostly flat, including the Mexican peso.

I've argued that the real moves in the US dollar index have been more influenced by the foreign flows in and out of the Mag 7 stocks as they became a global reserve asset. In case you didn't see, on Friday in the BoA Flow Show, Michael Hartnett said while US stocks saw the biggest inflow of 2025 ($34.1b); "but note past 2 weeks have seen biggest foreign selling of US stocks since Mar '23" and that with Europe stocks: "biggest inflow since May '17, and 4^th largest ever ($4.3b)." Investors have discovered other choices. We continue to have specific international equity exposure in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam and most recently Brazil. Emerging market local currency bonds we own as well. And there are plenty of cheap, value stocks in the US that have been kicked to the curb that we own and like, including commodity stocks in oil/gas, uranium, precious metals, ag and industrial metals.

Bottom line, that playbook that worked so well over the past few years by mostly owning 7 US stocks and some other ones here and there (like utility and electrification stocks that were a play on AI), throw it in the garbage as a new one is being written. There should be nothing profound about that by the way as changing cycles and leadership in markets has been going on since the history of markets.