Global Daily: The Signal and the Noise

US stocks rallied sharply yesterday following an unexpectedly strong services PMI report and comments from Donald Trump suggesting that reciprocal tariffs due to take effect next week may be somewhat watered down. Trump said that he “may give a lot of countries breaks” as he would be “embarrassed” to charge the USA’s trading partners tariff rates commensurate to the barriers that US exporters face to access those markets. However, it DOES seem to be the case that a ‘Dirty 15’ countries running persistent large trade surpluses with the United States will be targeted.