Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving and why.
The Trump administration is keeping tariff pressure firmly in place, proposing a new round of levies tied to forced labor concerns, timed to land precisely as existing duties are set to expire. The sequencing here is deliberate — Washington is signaling there will be no relief window, no gap for importers to breathe, and markets are pricing that continuity accordingly.
Turning to the macro picture, the OECD is sounding a serious alarm over a prolonged Gulf energy crisis, warning of what it calls a dark scenario where global growth rates could fall to levels last seen during the Covid pandemic. That kind of language from a body as measured as the OECD carries weight, and bond markets in particular will be watching energy supply headlines closely in the sessions ahead.
And on the Fed, market historians are drawing uncomfortable parallels between Kevin Warsh's early days as Fed chair and Alan Greenspan's debut in nineteen eighty seven — a tenure that began just months before one of the worst single-day crashes in equity market history. Whether that parallel holds any predictive power is debatable, but the timing of the comparison alone is enough to keep risk managers reaching for their hedges.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
