On this week’s episode of Capitol Gains, Yahoo Finance Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul, focuses on what’s coming down the pipeline from the Trump administration that could impact markets. There are three main things investors should monitor: reciprocal tariffs, the future of the Federal Reserve, and the Russia-Ukraine war.
To learn more, listen to the full episode of Capitol Gains here.
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Capitol Gains is Yahoo Finance’s unique look at how US government policy will impact your bottom line long after the Presidential election polls have closed.
This post was written by Lauren Pokedoff
a pretty common metaphor, um, we've heard in recent weeks is veggies and desserts with in terms of what's coming from the Trump administration. The idea being that we were having the the less friendly stuff first, the veggies, and then the desserts are coming. But I think we've got a lot of signals this week that even as dessert is getting kind of seems to be getting farther and farther away, my note card is that more veggies are ahead. Um, this is in addition to all the tariff talk that we've had the last couple weeks that have really roiled markets. So a couple of them just to kick us off. The first is reciprocal tariffs. This is the next phase of Trump's plan and his big one as he as he's called it. Rick and I have been covering this week, and the question is whether markets are really ready, are really understanding what could be coming here. Um, I talked to a really smart market watcher this week who talked about how when they when the Trump administration is gonna is gonna set a rate for each country, some of those rates could be 50%. I don't know if markets are really ready for that and sort of accepting what that is on on April 2nd when it comes. And a few other quick ones that I think are perhaps a little bit below the radar but are sort of other veggies, call them broccoli, call them kale, whatever whatever you want from there. One is one is Trump and Fed Independence. You know, you mentioned Trump criticizing Jerome Powell and and lower on rates this week. An equally significant development is Trump firing sort of what are called independent people that work for independent agencies. The granddaddy of them all of course is the Federal Reserve as an independent agency. They've traditionally been, um, able to not not be not have the president weave come in and the and Trump is clearly aiming to change that. How far he goes remains to be seen, but that that could be kind of have a lot of market impacts. Um, other things like the rule of law, this has been kind of less in the business press, but I would remind when Trump goes head-to-head with judges, this was literally the case from folks like Reed Hoffman and Mark Cuban during the campaign as to why Trump would be bad for markets. That if you undo the rule of law, that's really bad for businesses. So it's another one where we're kind of waiting to see how far he goes on there. Ukraine is the last one, I'll just real quickly, which is that we this war is not ending anytime soon. There was a lot of back and forth there this week, and it's clear that this is gonna be a long slog as somebody put it this week. This is this is gonna take a while to end, and there's a lot of geopolitical implications there and economic implications.
