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The potentially growing trade war between the United States and China is straining businesses and creating uncertainty, a potentially disastrous mix for stock prices, market analysts say.
In a note to clients on Wednesday, equity analysts from Jefferies said that recent surveys are increasingly showing unease among top executives at large companies.
“The temperature is changing coming into the U.S. mid-term elections,” Jefferies’ Sean Darby said in the note with the firm’s equities team that highlighted increasing worry about the scope of U.S. foreign policy.
“Our earlier optimism that a trade war would be averted in May were quickly dashed despite warm discussions between US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and China Vice Premier Liu He,” he continued.
Further, there was worry about how the “trade dispute quickly flared into a trade war,” the note said. “The bottom line is that trade wars are akin to zero-sum games or mutually assured destruction.”
A “suicide pact”?
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who is preparing to leave the company after 12 years at the helm, gave a similar assessment of the prospect of an all-out trade war during remarks on Tuesday during a talk in New York, calling it a “suicide pact.”
“I suspect that we’re not going to cause the economies to collapse with a Smoot-Hawley on steroids,” Blankfein said, referring to the 1930s protectionist law that brought import taxes to historic levels and many historians believe significantly worsened the Great Depression.
Blankfein also said he believes the ratcheting up of proposed sanctions on China is part of a negotiating tactic by Trump, and it may be similar to recent talks with North Korea, which included “a lot of bluster.”
While his initial comments were critical, Blankfein added, “I can’t say as a lot of people do that this makes no sense at all,” noting that China exports significantly more the United States than the U.S. does to China.
In that regard, the president’s strategy of threatening further sanctions on Chinese goods if Beijing responded to U.S. tariffs with their own, as the Chinese government has threatened to do is not entirely without merit, he said.
“That’s what you would do if you were crazy and really wanted to end free trade and that’s what you would do if you wanted to remind your negotiating partner of the fire power you could bring to a trade fight,” he said.
Economic consequences
Brett Ryan, senior economist at Deutsche Bank Securities and the firm’s equities team, said in a note to clients that “further escalation of the trade dispute” could reduce real gross domestic product growth by $40 to $50 billion a year, or 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points, according to the most recent U.S. GDP estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.