No clue what the 3 things were, but it's a fun, catchy title.
Armstrong is trying to make sense of the world but, like me, he comes down way short (though for different reasons: #936442):
It is probably a mistake to expend too much analytical energy on what happened in the US market on Thursday and Friday. This was a panic, and in a panic there is more noise than meaning. And the panic may continue today.
Looking at the worst-performing stocks in the S&P500, Armstrong deduces the market's will:
There are, to simplify quite a bit, two main kinds of companies here (some are a mix of both types). The first are companies whose supply chains are going to be absolutely whacked by the tariffs. The tech importers fit there (Micron, Western, Dell, GE HealthCare). The second is energy, commodity and financial companies that are very sensitive to rising odds of recession (APA, Diamondback, Freeport, Apollo). This nicely sums up the first two questions the stock market is wrestling with. On the one hand, there is the specific hit companies will take from tariffs; on the other, there is the effect that a shock to the economy might have on demand in general.
Here's a little bit of an odd one, via Michael Feroli at JPM:
On the question of impact on aggregate demand, JPMorgan’s chief US economist Michael Feroli is now projecting that full year real GDP growth will fall slightly, unemployment will rise to 5.3 per cent at year’s end (it is now 4.2 per cent), and core PCE inflation will rise to 4.4 per cent
A little bit of an odd coupling — since prices should fall, or at least not rise very much during recessions or periods of higher unemployment —but perhaps they're counting tariff-induced changes in average prices as PCE inflation
Negotiations re: tariffs (#936971) are mentioned:
...those negotiations will take a long time, because the crucial issue is not tariff rates but non-tariff “cheating” (currency manipulation, subsidies, VAT taxes, industrial standards, et al).
In the second story we get some US government employment numbers... to everyone's surprise, the Doge efforts have paid off... nada:
There was surprising strength in retail and transportation, and, despite Doge’s efforts, the US government only shed 4,000 employees, less than February’s 11,000 bureaucrats lost.
So far it was all a nothing-burger. (I can hear @DarthCoin laughing at us, with a Star Wars-induced astronaut meme: always was.)
non-paywalled: https://archive.md/W423j