Deep Dive

DEEP DIVE: What's The Matter With China's Consumers?

China’s Consumer Bust I: Blame Xi, Not Trump. As US President Donald Trump does his worst to hobble China’s economy, China’s President Xi Jinping may be beating him to the punch. There’s no doubt that Trump’s tariffs are destabilizing Asia’s biggest economy. Though the current 30% US tariff on Chinese imports is a fraction of Trump’s earlier 145% China tax, it’s still

DEEP DIVE: Essential Rare Earth Minerals

This is an excerpt from the June 5, 2025 Morning Briefing of Yardeni Research, Inc. “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” That’s a saying that President Trump should have taken to heart before slapping aggressive tariffs on Chinese imports, because China has one thing that the US lacks and needs: rare earth minerals. These minerals are necessary components of high-tech equipment like automobiles, robots, and

DEEP DIVE: Demographics Entrench Deflation In China

For a decade now, economists have been theorizing about how China’s aging and shrinking population might affect its economic growth potential (Fig. 1 below and Fig. 2 below). Yet there’s nothing conjectural about the ways demographics are now exacerbating the nation’s deflation troubles. As Japan’s experience since the 1990s has highlighted, few Asians in their mid-60s and higher consume with gusto as twenty- and thirty-somethings do.

DEEP DIVE: A Semiconductor Revival

DEEP DIVE: Anatomy Of A Correction

This is an excerpt from Yardeni Research Morning Briefing dated Monday, April 28, 2025. The latest correction in the S&P 500 was led by a short and shallow bear market in the Magnificent-7 stocks. Trump’s Tariff Turmoil clearly drove lots of the selling pressure. However, the stock market selloff this year was also attributable to the downward rerating of the elevated valuation multiples of S&P

DEEP DIVE: Trump Retreats On Terminating Powell

This is an excerpt from Yardeni Research Morning Briefing dated Monday, April 22, 2025. President Trump has been frustrated by Fed Chair Jerome Powell since Trump’s first term in the White House. Trump nominated Powell to serve as Fed chair in 2017, replacing Janet Yellen. However, he soon soured on his pick, repeatedly attacking Powell on Twitter for raising interest rates too quickly. In 2018, Trump was so frustrated

DEEP DIVE: Bonds Away!?

This is an excerpt from Yardeni Research Morning Briefing dated Monday, April 14, 2025. Bonds I: Kerfuffle. Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon said on the company’s Friday earnings call: “There will be a kerfuffle in the Treasury markets because of all the rules and regulations. When that happens, the Fed will step in—but not until ‘they start to panic a little bit.’ He

DEEP DIVE: The Valuation Problem

This is an excerpt from Yardeni Research Morning Briefing dated Monday, March 17, 2025. Last Thursday, I visited with some of our accounts in Connecticut. They seemed remarkably relaxed that day as the S&P 500 fell into correction territory. Many of them are seasoned institutional investors and have been through lots of corrections and bear markets. Everyone attributed the selloff to Trump Tariff Turmoil 2.0. The bulls

DEEP DIVE: Lowering Our S&P 500 Targets

This is an excerpt from Yardeni Research Morning Briefing dated Monday, March 13, 2025. Strategy I: Where Do We Go from Here? John Maynard Keynes is credited with saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” However, there is no definitive evidence that he actually said or wrote it. Wall Street’s forecasting community (including us) is scrambling both to assess February’s weaker-than-expected

DEEP DIVE: Trump Turmoil 2.0 Raises Odds Of A Recession

This is an excerpt from Yardeni Research Morning Briefing dated Monday, March 5, 2025. Strategy I: Trump Turmoil 2.0. We haven’t had to change our subjective probabilities for our three alternative economic scenarios for quite some time. We are doing so today and may have to do so more frequently in coming months or even coming weeks in reaction to the volatile nature of policymaking under President Donald