Tariff uncertainty is starting to ripple through US supply chains, with container traffic to the West Coast already dropping.
Wilmington Trust chief investment officer Tony Roth joins Market Domination to weigh in on how prolonged tensions with China could tip the US into recession, noting that if there is no de-escalation by Memorial Day, a recession is imminent.
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I think Scott Bassent said yesterday that, um, you know, they expect possible de-escalation. I think both sides are looking for an off-ramp. I mean, the question is if they're going to start to negotiate, doesn't that mean they have to take tariffs really off the table and grant sort of a 90-day, you know, period just to even begin negotiating? And that might take a couple years before that's complete. But, you know, when you look at the the data in the US, I mean, yesterday we had great PMI data. The durable goods data today, obviously, was still pretty robust. And so until we see meaningful evidence of deterioration in the labor market, uh, you know, it might be premature. We might, obviously, see tariffs be reversed right away. We just never know. That's the whole basis of the art of the deal. And so, uh, you know, I'm just wondering, I guess, how much confidence you have that that we are going to go into recession when we know this whole situation is so chaotic and could very well reverse on a dime, uh, you know, with any sort of, uh, negotiation discussion.
There's here's what you need to think about, I I think, in my in my view. Yeah, I've talked about the president's being what I call a cause and effect guy, which is he likes to be the cause of anything that happens. And and if he sees the effects, he either lauds himself, or he he can course correct if the effects are not attractive. Well, right now, he's undertaken a lot of cause. He's taken undertaken a lot of activity in the tariff space, but he doesn't see the effects in his face, which is to say the pain that's being caused for small businesses and even some large businesses across the country. We're seeing, um, a drop in the amount of container traffic that's supposed to be, um, expected to come into in the month of April and and even more so in May coming into the West Coast, um, measured in the tens of thousands of containers. So, if you think back to the pandemic, you'll remember that once the supply chains got shut down, it took a long time to get them back up and running again. And that had a lot to do with the inflation that we experienced. So we're we're starting to see the the same phenomenon occur, which is as these supply chains get rerouted, get shut down, as sellers of goods in China start to reroute their their goods to Europe and other places, it's going to take a long time to get it back into place. And so it may be, um, pretty quickly here beyond the the point of no return as it relates to a recession for the US. And I think that if we get to Memorial Day and we don't have a significant de-escalation, specifically on China, then we will have a recession. And the question will be how deep and how long will the will the recession go.
