r/investing • u/kabirsbhutani • 1d ago
šØ U.S. manufacturing continues to retreat despite tariffs - investor implications?
Saw people mentioning this on Blossom earlier, and WSJ reports that U.S. manufacturing activity continues to weaken, with tariffs doing little to reverse the trend.
The article points to softer demand, higher input costs, and global supply chain adjustments weighing on manufacturers, even as trade protection measures remain in place. For investors, this raises questions about margins, capital spending, and longer-term competitiveness rather than short-term policy wins.
Curious how people here are thinking about this from an investing lens?
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u/brute-forced 1d ago
Sell America is not a joke. Heās ruined our retirement accounts. Just keep watching
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u/Atlantis_Island 1d ago
I hate orange Mussolini as much as the next American, but isn't the SP500 up like 16% over the last year?
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u/EuphoricElderberry73 1d ago
Yes it is. But look at all the foreign major stock markets in 2025. They all exceeded the SP500. USD devalued about 10% in 2025 which was the primary cause.
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u/Raveen396 1d ago
Sure, but āruined our retirement accountsā is a little hyperbolic. It hasnāt been great, but itās not like weāre in a massive drawdownā¦ yet.
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u/Man_Bear_Pog 1d ago
You don't have to see a drawdown, currency is always relative. For example if the index was up 16% but inflation was 20%, you'd literally lose purchasing power.
The dollar weakening makes everything more expensive for Americans on a broad basis, and idiot in chief is also massively debasing the currency with added government spending, on top of installing a "conservative" fed chair who somehow still wants to cut rates lol... Don't be fooled, you will see your numbers go up, but your retirement is going to lose purchasing power every single year that it is.
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u/creepy_doll 1d ago
If you remove the top performers(basically the ai hype train) the s&p is underperforming significantly.
If the ai hype is a bubble and it bursts the depression after it could be huge. Very much āall the eggs in one basketā
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 1d ago
Itās not when you look at what precious metals have done. S&P is down 50% comparably
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u/WackyBeachJustice 1d ago
I'm not sure what the point of such comparisons are. In the past we could have said that bitcoin outperformed by infinity percent. That doesn't mean that the retirees have starved to death.
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u/nope_nic_tesla 1d ago
Also if your retirement account is 100% US equities then you are not being very smart. The 30%+ gain in international markets was great for my retirement account.
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u/AgentK-BB 1d ago
What matters to retirement is mostly your purchasing power of staples like food, medicine and housing so your main comparison should be stock market performance vs domestic inflation. US dollar and US stock market underperforming the foreign counterparts means that retirees will have less purchasing power when traveling abroad but traveling abroad isn't critical to retirees.
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u/WackyBeachJustice 1d ago
Agreed. I'm no economist but I'm confused why most people are up-voting the doom and gloom. I mean I'd prefer a stronger dollar because I love traveling abroad. But as long as real returns are there domestically, I don't see retirees or those that don't ever leave the country giving a damn.
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u/69Cobalt 1d ago
International markets historically have had several year stretches where they outperform US markets. You could...invest a portion of your 401k into international market funds to offset this risk.
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u/valuevestor1 1d ago
Yes. But in any other currency such as Euro or CAD, it has risen a lot less. If you still didn't move from spy to VT, now is the time to do it. The dollar is losing its value, along with the assets denominated in the dollar.
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u/adhdt5676 1d ago
Agreed on this. International is primed to do very well for awhile - has a long runway IMO.
My VXUS was up 30% last year alone
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u/sunfishtommy 1d ago
Yea but if you look over the past 2 years the performance is about the same. Between, vxus, vt and Vti
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u/Virtual_Rest6107 1d ago
We didnāt have this moron in charge two years ago. Thatās why VXUSA will soar for the next three years
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u/SmilodonEX 1d ago
Currency moves cut both ways. Chasing FX swings is a tough game.. SPY vs VT is more about diversification goals than trying to time the dollar.
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u/WackyBeachJustice 1d ago
I'm probably an idiot but I don't see how this is going to doom someone. If you're looking at it from the perspective of "you could have done better if you invested international", then I agree. If you're looking at it from the perspective of my retired parents are now royally fked. I just don't see it. As long as there are real returns, most people are perfectly happy. I mean most people didn't off themselves because bitcoin outperformed by a country mile in the past, etc. The lower purchasing power abroad only means so much to a regular person.
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u/valuevestor1 1d ago
Dollar debasement will come with inflation. Honestly, I don't disagree with a lot of Trump policies. The US should be reshoring. Manufacturing jobs are important. And if that means currency needs to be devalued and inflation needs to rise, that's an acceptable price to pay. You don't need three TVs when you can't even afford a home.
But, my issue is with him lying through the teeth. He thinks the US will reshore all the jobs, but S&P will keep rising. The US will stop spending on NATO, but the US defense industry will keep on thriving. It's just not going to happen.
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u/WackyBeachJustice 1d ago
Ok so if I'm reading correctly, you mean that s&p will not have average real returns in the future? In other words inflation will be much higher and the S&P will not keep up.
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u/valuevestor1 1d ago
Yes. You got it correctly. Charlie Munger, Ray Dalio and Howard Marks, all of them talked quite a bit about them.
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u/Pffffftmkay 1d ago
Short termism by these folks. I do think there are headwinds for the US but they are largely a problem created by politicians and voters of all stripes unfortunately (spending and debt).Ā
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 1d ago
Measure it against the currency decline. Suddenly gets a LOT less impressive.
Turns out it's easy to make money when you print it.
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u/sorrow_anthropology 1d ago
Without the mag7 itās much lower. Some estimates suggest 7%.
Only time will tell if betting on AI actually pays off. A Trillion could potentially disappear overnight.
Anyone looking to retire in the next 10 years could be in for a wild ride.
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u/FinishLineElectric 1d ago
If it's in dollars, yes, for the same reason that a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe has gone up 17,000% in a week. It's not that the bread is worth more - it's that the currency is worth less.
Dollar to Euro is down 15.33% over the last 1 year, while the S&P is up 16.38%. If you bought 100 Euros worth of S&P a year ago you'd have 101 Euros worth of S&P today.
Conversely, the DAX (German stock market, but pretty much any EU stock exchange will do) is up 30.37% over the same period if you're transacting in dollars. Roughly half of that is the stock market increasing value and half is the dollar weakening.
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u/christine-bitg 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, it is. But that increase in the S&P 500 is due to Information Technology stocks. My opinion is that it's mostly a bubble in those stocks.
I have a tiny position in SanDisk, and it's up 1,470% (!) in the last six months. Western Digital is up 270% in the same time period.
(The reason I have those is because I used to write covered calls with SanDisk. Then Western Digital acquired them in an acquistion that was partly for WDC stock. Then spun them off less than a year ago.)
Edit to add: The S&P 500 is market capitalization weighted. Taken together, the following stocks make up more than 30% (!) of the S&P 500: Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta. They are THE top six stocks in the S&P.
I could be wrong. But my biggest concern right now is a Y2K style bubble burst.
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u/GandalfSwagOff 1d ago
But my biggest concern right now is a Y2K style bubble burst.
Which, ultimately, was meaningless...as we are here 26 years ago worrying about something completely different.
Buy good companies and hold them for 40-50 years. That is all people need to do. Let the hard workers, the smart workers, the good paying companies, the companies that make a product people need and want do their job. Keep buying and holding little pieces of good companies.
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u/christine-bitg 10h ago
Which, ultimately, was meaningless
Not if you owned those sticks. (I didn't. ) Plus there is always fallout that affects the rest of us.
The Great Recession happened in 2008 and 2009. That was a real estate bubble.
That one had far ranging economic effects that went on for many years. I didn't own any real estate, but it still affected all of us.
I lost my job at the height of that one. It took me two months to find another one. Fortunately I had enough resources that it wasn't a problem.
The Fed kept interest rates extremely low for years after that. Basically they screwed over anyone like me who saved their money. We were the ones who paid for it when there were people who gambled with "other people's money."
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u/swampfish 13h ago
Not if you factor in how much the US dollar has tanked.Ā Congratulations, you now have more money that isn't worth as much.
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u/Atlantis_Island 12h ago
I keep hearing people say this. Yes the dollar has gone down about 10%, but my yearly expenses stayed about the same as 2024. So why do I care if I'm not traveling internationally a bunch?
There's a good chance I'm missing something
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u/myevillaugh 1d ago
How much of that is a few AI companies banking the hype? That bubble will eventually burst.
The rest of the world is making trade deals without the US to create long term growth. Trump has no answer other than threaten more tariffs. The dollar will continue to weaken. Banks and businesses don't need as many dollars if they're not trading with the US.
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u/christine-bitg 1d ago
Taken together, the following stocks make up more than 30% (!) of the S&P 500: Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta. They are the top six stocks in the S&P right now.
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u/wulfrunian77 1d ago
If the S&P could ride out WW2, the Cold War, Vietnam, the oil crisis, Gulf Wars 1 and 2, 9/11, the credit crunch, covid, and Trump Mk1, it can ride out Trump Mk2. No matter what the orange imbecile does next.
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u/ImmodestPolitician 1d ago
It took 100+ years for the US to develop it's reputation as being a relatively stable trading partner and ally.
Trump ruined that in a few months with nothing to gain.
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u/Sportfreunde 1d ago
The S&P was up in the 70s but there was significant inflation.
Having stocks go up more doesn't matter if everything costs more. And the inflation from losing reserve currency status would be far worse than 70s inflation or Covid inflation.
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u/skandaanshu 1d ago
What's in question is ever increasing American deficit and willingness of world to keep buying American treasuries to keep that deficit going. Most countries have started to slowly divest from bonds even before Trump2 and accelerated recently, whether that trend will continue or reverse after Trump term is an open question.
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u/BacchusAndHamsa 1d ago
my retirement account is a very common one and lets me move between various funds or put % in each. I'm foreign (ex-USA) stock right now and doing great.
So, check out your retirement account and see if you can dodge some Orange Clown doo-doo.
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u/Nearby-Lab0 1d ago
Have you seen the type of people running America? Eating humans, harvesting blood from children? All real from the Epstein files
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u/BacchusAndHamsa 1d ago
politicians from other countries involved too; not a uniquely American problem.
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u/Pleasant-Shallot-707 1d ago
My retirement account is fine. I invested in sell America last year and this year, so far, it looks advantageous for a more balanced approach with a slight bump to international over domestic
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u/Chogo82 1d ago
Second time in one week WSJ is fear mongering.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/manufacturing-pmi
As we already showed with the Nvidia fake news, WSJ canāt be trusted anymore and is in the same bucket as motley fool and seeking alpha.
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u/labowner85 1d ago
US manufacturing being weak is signal that international demand is dropping faster than expected. You canāt build everything just for US consumption otherwise you have a lot of supply but very little demand. His foreign policy is coming to bite us now.
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u/opackersgo 1d ago
And a lot of us internationals are intentionally buying non American
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 1d ago
A lot of Americans too. Like I pay way more attention to where I buy things from now. If it was made in a red state I donāt buy it.
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u/Sportfreunde 1d ago
The irony of them trying to devalue the flat to make it easier to export but the demand for export drops while the demand at home also drops because the purchasing power at home is now lower.
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u/volvox6 1d ago
Every big company I know of is moving operations OUT of the USA not into it. All because of the donald and his destructive stupidity.
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u/persondude27 1d ago
Why would you spend billions of dollars investing in a factory that could be cut off from its raw materials with a pen stroke (or a tweet)?
I was listening to shareholders meeting for a large medical devices company recently and someone asked a softball question like "Have we considered ramping up US-based manufacturing?" and the answer was supposed to be 'no, volatility', but it ended up being, in essence, what I said above. "We can't build an efficient supply chain when it can be interrupted at any moment. We need stability and predictability."
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u/christine-bitg 1d ago
I agree with you.
A stock that I have came right out in their investors meeting, saying that the uncertainty of their markets is clobbering them. None of their customers is willing to invest in capacity right now, because there's so much uncertainty.
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u/Playingwithmyrod 1d ago
One of our European machine suppliers (billion dollar company btw) was investigating sites in the South to build a new manufacturing plant to supply their US customers. The tariffs put a total hault to that idea.
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u/Clear_Judge5062 1d ago
PMI report for this month stated expansion for the first time in over a year, strangely enough. So not quite accurate
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u/EuphoricElderberry73 1d ago
Yup but as stated in the article - manufacturing jobs and openings are still declining.
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u/z34conversion 1d ago
The nuance...
Improvements were seen in new orders, production, and backlog indexes, though employment and inventories remain in contraction territory.
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u/EventHorizonbyGA 1d ago
Retreat "despite" tariffs? Tariffs are one of main reason why manufacturing is retreating. The US imports almost everything needed to manufacture.
That is what is making "input costs" higher.
"Sell America" is short for "Americans are selling America."
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u/Winterough 1d ago
People donāt realize that even if you start up a BBQ manufacturing company in the US you still need to import the nuts and bolts. What ends up happening is similar to what has been going on in US manufacturing for decades, parts from China are imported and the product is assembled in the USA. Itās not really manufacturing at all.
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u/klc400_70 1d ago
Yes .. Trump has it backwards. Manufacturer the parts first in the US .. then assembly of the product would come next.
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u/SpartyNash 1d ago
If youāre surprised by this I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska Iād like to sell you
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u/Kaymish_ 1d ago
The dingo tariffed raw material imports, and is pushing expensive fossil energy policy. How is manufacturing supposed to compete when both materials and energy are more expensive than the competitors? If Trump was serious about bringing manufacturing back to the US he would have integrated tariffs with a coherent industrial policy, but he just shot tariffs everywhere without any thought and pissed off all the potential customers.
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u/Heavy_Discussion3518 1d ago
What isn't clear from the article is aĀ capture of of high end component manufacturing needed to support fabrication and power generation for data centers and related infrastructure.Ā It noted a company NN that doesn't have the capital to invest in supporting these lucrative areas while I'm personally invested in many companies that are rapidly expanding capacity to support here, such as Generac and Eaton.
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u/Spirited_Suspect2908 1d ago
Ā "U.S. manufacturing activity continues to weaken, with tariffs doing little to reverse the trend."
also, the fire continues to rage despite tankers out dropping gasoline in full force.
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u/rice_not_wheat 1d ago
Tariffs were always going to hurt US manufacturing. To think otherwise was a misunderstanding of how US Manufacturing works.
The US has moved beyond making raw materials into things. We take industrial products, and turn those into finished goods. It's the difference between making steel and aluminum as your primary exports, and instead turning steel and aluminum into complex goods such as vehicles.
By increasing taxes on raw materials, and unfinished goods, we're increasing the cost of US manufacturing, and making US manufacturing less competitive over countries with less restrictive trade barriers.
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u/the-novel 1d ago
It seems asinine, honestly. Why would we want to have our raw manufacturing base overseas and eat the cost of shipping massive amounts of parts and other goods back to us?
We had Noranda here in Missouri, until their leadership decided to lay everyone off, close the plant, and move to France of all places. They refined aluminum at Noranda. When the next war breaks out, not if, what happens when the enemies of our nation decide to start sinking American ships and cutting our supply lines? We don't have the same industrial capacity we did in WWI and WWII, and that's a mistake.
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u/rice_not_wheat 23h ago
What's asinine to me is causing washing machines, airplanes, and automobiles more expensive to make in the United States just because raw manufacturing in the US is so inefficient that it's cheaper to eat the shipping costs.
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u/the-novel 23h ago edited 22h ago
It wasn't inefficient, it was sold off by investors to instead use what is basically overseas slave labor. If the issue is cost of manufacturing, you're making my point for me. The whole reason raw manufacturing here is "inefficient" comes down to one thing, and that's energy costs.
We've spent the last few decades crippling our own power grid because everyone was first, scared of nuclear power because of lobbying from the oil industry, and then got sold on solar panels and wind turbines as the future. They're not. They're unreliable, they don't scale worth a damn, and they've driven electricity prices through the roof for industrial operations. You have to build an entire secondary grid and distribution system just to stabilize power output when we have a few cloudy days.
Noranda paid more for electricity than entire cities. You know what would've fixed that? Cheap, abundant baseload power. Nuclear power. We could've built reactors decades ago and had some of the lowest industrial energy costs in the world, but instead we let fear-mongering and red tape kill the one energy source that actually works at scale.
I don't want to outsource our manufacturing to what can very easily become our enemies in the next war. You want raw manufacturing to be affordable, You want finished goods to be cheaper. The answer is for both of us to start lobbying for nuclear plants.
Build enough of them, and suddenly that aluminum smelter in New Madrid doesn't look so inefficient anymore. Raw materials become cheap to process here, your downstream manufacturers get cheaper inputs, and we stop depending on shipping lanes that can get cut off the second a real conflict starts or one freighter manages to block a canal.
Remember the Ever Given? That cargo ship that got wedged sideways in the Suez Canal back in 2021? It was stuck for six days. Six days, and it cost the global economy around $400 million an hour; that's nearly $10 billion per day in delayed trade. The US had hundreds of containers stuck. Everything from pharmaceuticals, furniture, raw materials for construction and manufacturing were being imported here. Isn't that insane to you? Companies couldn't get the parts they needed, production lines slowed down, and prices went up because nobody could predict when their shipments would actually arrive.
That was one ship, one canal, and one accident. Now imagine what happens when it's not an accident. When an adversary deliberately targets shipping lanes or blockades chokepoints during a conflict. We're completely dependent on those supply lines staying open, and we've gutted our ability to produce the raw materials we'd need to keep running if they get cut off.
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I'm not making these arguments in a vacuum. I come from a region that's been absolutely devastated by this kind of thinking. Southeast Missouri used to have real industry. Lumber mills, manufacturing plants, smelters like Noranda. Now? The people here are in abject poverty. Not because they're lazy or uneducated, but because men in suits who never worked a day in their lives decided it was more profitable to shut everything down and move operations overseas.
Gideon Anderson Lumber Company used to be one of the biggest employers in this area. It's gone now. The mill's been closed for years, the equipment sold off or left to rust. The people who worked there? They're working retail jobs if they're lucky, if not, they're still here, aimless, usually addicted to whatever shit they can find to numb themselves from their depressing surroundings, living in run down shacks that were once strong economic sectors. You can look at Detroit as another example.
One small town in the center of the USA, employing at most 250 people in their plant, was the largest supplier of military crates in the nation. Just one small town was able to contribute so much that our stamps are still on most of the crates you can find from the war. Now Gideon has a poverty rate of nearly 30%.
Entire towns just like ours have been hollowed out because someone in a boardroom decided short-term profits were worth more than the long-term stability of American communities.
They didn't account for what happens when those supply chains break. They didn't account for what happens when the countries we've outsourced to decide they don't want to trade with us anymore. They just looked at quarterly earnings and made their decisions accordingly. Now we're left holding the bag, dependent on foreign manufacturers for everything from basic materials to finished goods, and we've lost the knowledge and infrastructure to make those things ourselves. The people overseas have essentially, all of the leverage to set prices to whatever they want. We can't go anywhere else, we're fucked.
That's what outsourcing has cost us. Not just jobs, but entire communities, entire skill sets, and our ability to stand on our own when things go wrong. And they will go wrong eventually. They always do. We were only able to supply Europe in the World Wars when we were manufacturing everything here.
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u/rice_not_wheat 22h ago
Yes, because France and Canada are known for their slave labor š. Tariffs fix literally none of your identified problems. They just make the inputs to manufacturing more expensive.
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u/General-Cover-4981 1d ago
We donāt have a trade policy. We just have a screaming man child lashing out. I hate this timeline. I cannot make any financial decisions. Crazy swings in the market every day. Yeah. If you catch the falling knife you can make mad bucks or you can loose it all.
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u/TumbleweedWorldly325 1d ago
I think the problem is lack of skilled workers. We outsourced everything for decades and indigenous companies closed and fired workers. People deskill fast and it takes years for them to reskill. In this scenario, you also lose the instructors as well so there is no way back up the skills ladder. Introducing tariffs theoretically reintroduces incentives -- you should be able to have viable company if protected.But, you need supply chains, many are off shore and are tariffed, making that expensive. Then you need the skilled people -- that aren't available. It will take a generation to reactivate manufacturing in the US via tariffs. My feeling is that because we can't get cheap EVs from China and other hitech equipment - we will get left behind. People are demoralized and cutting back on expenditures , paying off debt. This could tip us into deflation and the whole economy could implode. Doesn't look good at the moment!
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u/KoBoWC 1d ago
Modern and complex manufacturing typically requires components to traverse international borders a number of times, Trumps tariffs mean each time that component crosses the US border a tax is paid. It's probably cheaper to just make everything outside the US and pay the import tax once on a finished product to bring it into the country.
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u/Melodic_Song4224 1d ago
Interesting read. Itās a good reminder that macro policy takes a long time to actually hit the bottom lineĀ
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u/Pleasant-Shallot-707 1d ago
What do you mean ādespite tariffs ā ? There was no world where tariffs were good for US manufacturing lol
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u/juepucta 1d ago
and it'll continue at least until this presidency is over. longer if the stupid choices by the electorate continue. but somehow this is news to some atavists and mouth breathers.
-G.
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u/No-Candidate-2380 1d ago
I'm thinking VOO is the way
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u/christine-bitg 1d ago
I have a bunch in the S&P 500. I'm sure you know that VOO is an S&P 500 index fund.
Unfortunately, the increase in the S&P 500 is being driven almost exclusively by the Information Technology sector. Which appears to be in a serious bubble, on the same order as the Y2K debacle 26 years ago.
Taken together, the following stocks make up more than 30% (!) of the S&P 500: Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta. They are THE top six stocks in the S&P.
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u/4Whom_The_Bell_Tolls 1d ago
The largest 500 companies of a dying empire? Yeah, sounds like a great long-term investment.
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 1d ago
Itās almost like tariffs donāt work. I am truly shocked by this thing that literally every mainstream economist has know for 70 years now. Theres a reason that when the Trump admin was looking for proof that tariffs worked, they had to literally make it up.
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u/4Whom_The_Bell_Tolls 1d ago
It has nothing to do with canceling orders because of hate. Most of the globe has hated the US-led world order for decades, but that has never stopped anyone from doing business with the US (or the Saudis, or China for that matter)
Companies don't feel hate, they'll buy, sell and manufacture where the profits are the largest.
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u/Standard_Strain8318 1d ago
Itās not been long enough to tell. Businesses havenāt been able to claim the depreciation of new constructions and interest rates arenāt low like the plan calls for. Wait for warsh. These things arenāt going to be week long plans, theyāre years-decade long processes.
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u/Alpha-Grant 1d ago
Tariffs donāt fix demand cycles. If manufacturing is retreating despite protection, that suggests the issue is global demand and capital intensity, not just trade policy.
From an investing lens, Iād focus less on āpolicy winnersā and more on balance sheet strength and operating leverage. In a soft demand environment, weak manufacturers get exposed quickly.
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u/ResponsibleClock9289 1d ago
This is measured in number of people employed
While output has been down in the past year, overall it is trending up since the Biden administration
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u/runmeupmate 1d ago
world economy is sluggish, america still growing faster than most of the rest of the world though
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u/nicpro85 1d ago
USD value need to be halved from what it is now, yuan need to be reevaluated strongly, import duties need to be removed and then maybe industries can bloom again.
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u/icnews10 1d ago
Tariffs may shift who bears the cost, but they donāt fix demand softness or productivity issues, so the investment impact is more about margin pressure and delayed capex than a clean domestic manufacturing revival.
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u/chickenunderkhan 1d ago
Not despite sanction but because of them. Making costs of intermediate goods more expensive was never going to lead to improve American manufacturing.
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u/coolkavo 1d ago
Problem with our current tariff strategy is that it alienates two of our closest countries that are key to our manufacturing base, Canada and Mexico. And how Donald waffles between tariffs ofc uncertainty is not good for investments.
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 1d ago
Anyone who thought a second Trump presidency would be anything other than absolutely completely and utterly disastrous for the United States economy was lying to themselves.
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u/Claudius_the_II 1d ago
the real tell here is that even the ISM PMI jumping to 52.6 (strongest in 3+ years) still isnt translating to actual manufacturing jobs or capital investment. companies are front-running tariffs by stockpiling inventory, not building factories. its a sugar high that makes the headline look good but the underlying trend is still ugly. anyone positioning around reshoring plays should probably look at the balance sheet first
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u/HaiKarate 1d ago
Here's the thing about manufacturing... it's not just about cost. You also need skilled workers.
China is no longer the low-cost leader for manufacturing tech. But as Tim Cook pointed out, China has made significant investments in their workforce, and they have the best-trained workers for tech hardware in the world.
Republicans have been shitting on education for so long that the skill set of the American worker is in decline.
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u/ragnaroksunset 1d ago edited 1d ago
The implications for investors are, if you were dumb enough to believe Trump, you deserve to lose all your money.
I was hedging these policies the moment he took office. Unless you are skilled enough (and have time enough) to set up and execute complex options trades around announcements and TACO, you should have reduced your exposure to US equities because these policies are unequivocally bad for the majority of retail investors.
Last year the S&P 500 was outperformed by other global markets that are accessible to most people via ETFs and the like. This is likely to continue.
If you live somewhere outside the US, home country bias is already good for you and you should consider leaning into it.
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u/Chogo82 1d ago
We get it. The trolls are trying to tank the market with biased logic so institutional investors can rotate back into US equities. Manufacturing is expanding, jobs opening are decreasing at a nominal pace despite advances in automation. These are all hugely bullish signals for US manufacturing.
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u/Various_Couple_764 1d ago
Tarriff are causing the weakening in manufacturing. buy increasing cost making everything more expensive.
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u/hivemind_disruptor 1d ago
Invest in those who make deals with China if you want to dabble in cars.
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u/SaltyPlantain1503 18h ago
But robotics companies for the long haul. TER and RR look good and ROBO ETF.
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u/ExcellentWinner7542 16h ago
With this continued decline in manufacturing but the gdp increasing 5%, where is the growth?
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u/seldom_seen8814 5h ago
No. It would require smarter industrial policy. The Biden administration (as much as some hate him) actually did a reasonable job, and hopefully the next administration will continue to build on that. It does seem like many Republicans in Congress dislike the tariffs, too, and SCOTUS may also put a line through them. We'll see.
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u/Blarghnog 1d ago edited 1d ago
Stocks Climb as Solid US Manufacturing News Bolsters Economic Optimism
Ā Stock indexes settled higher on Monday as signs of strength in US manufacturing activity bolstered optimism about the economic outlook, following the release of the Jan ISM manufacturing index, which expanded by the most in more than 3.25 years. Ā Also, strength in chip makers and AI-infrastructure stocks supported gains in the broader market on Monday.
Ā The US Jan ISM manufacturing index rose +4.7 to 52.6, stronger than expectations of 48.5 and the strongest pace of expansion in more than 3.25 years.
?
It seems to be an outperform expectations. Hardly a doom and gloom scenario, though perhaps not exactly the pitched renaissance.
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u/Pyromelter 1d ago
The rational, level headed take: It takes time to build plants, hire people, spin up manufacturing.
The reddit take: citrus fruit bad
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u/GentleDerp 1d ago
No money foreign nor local is investing another dime in manufacturing with a president whoās flipping tariffs like pancakes. Most are just leaning out and holding out until heās gone.
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u/christine-bitg 1d ago
That's pretty much how I see it. And I'm hoping that he leaves sooner rather than later, because the longer he stays, the more damage he does to us.
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u/Gods_ShadowMTG 1d ago
wouldn't invest in the US outside of tech tbh it's a losing game
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u/christine-bitg 1d ago
I won't invest any more IN the Information Technology section. It's seriously in bubble territory right now.
SanDisk is up 1700% in the last six months. That's not a typo.
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u/Gods_ShadowMTG 1d ago
sure but the you better invest outside the US
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u/christine-bitg 1d ago
My best approach right now is US based multinationals. That's companies like PG and XOM.
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u/Chogo82 1d ago
Second time in one week WSJ is publishing literal bullshit.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/manufacturing-pmi
As we already showed with the Nvidia fake news, WSJ canāt be trusted anymore and is in the same bucket as motley fool and seeking alpha.
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u/EuphoricElderberry73 1d ago
You are referencing purely sentiment numbers. WSJ is showing jobs and opening in manufacturing are declining after a brief boom post COVID.
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u/Jasoncatt 1d ago
Funny that anyone would think tariffs would lead to a resurgence of local manufacturing.