CNBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and Reuters contributed to this report.
Traders barely flinched when President Donald Trump cranked up tariff rhetoric over the weekend. The ﹙mostly symbolic﹚jolt left the broad picture pretty calm: the MSCI World Index was flat, US 10-year yields dipped a hair, gold ticked up and the dollar eased. In plain English: headline noise, not a market meltdown.
“The market didn’t really react much to the news. It was already widely anticipated,” said Ed Yardeni, who runs Yardeni Research.
His message — echoed by other strategists — was simple: the trick right now is patience.
Hugh Dive of Atlas Funds Management put it even blunter:
“Sit on hands and do nothing, this is just noise.”
That’s the playbook a lot of pros are recommending: don’t overreact to a tweet or a tariff headline that can be walked back, negotiated, or otherwise muddied in a few days.
There are reasons for the calm. The Supreme Court’s recent tariff ruling and the legal gymnastics that followed have left policy in a procedural gray area rather than a clean structural shift. And investors have gotten used to the president’s mix of big posturing and later recalibration — the so-called “TACO” pattern (Trump Always Chickens Out), as some in markets joke.
Still, not everyone is all-in on chill mode. Steve Sosnick at Interactive Brokers warned it makes sense to dial back risk if you don’t have a clear read: trim US exposure, tilt toward global names less tied to a US tariff drama, and be ready for headline-driven volatility. Crypto traders are already getting that memo: Bitcoin and other high-beta assets sold off harder on the tariff news, while gold benefitted as a classic safe haven.
Markets are treating the 15% tariff move as a headline to be watched, not an immediate game-changer. So for now the dominant strategy from Wall Street to Main Street seems to be the same three words: sit still and do nothing.









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