Tag: trade
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Report – The Trade Trilemma Revisited (May 18, 2026)
by Thomas Wash | PDF
In February 2026, the United States Supreme Court struck down the import tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in April 2025 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), eliminating the import charges that had been applied to specific countries but leaving in place those imposed on certain products. While the White House is now working to replace those tariffs to ensure that countries follow through on the trade deal commitments they made over the last year, the time that these tariffs have been in place has helped shed light on their overall impact.
In 2025, we wrote a report called “The Tariff Trilemma,” in which we focused on three types of tariffs — reciprocal, revenue, and restrictive — and their respective trade-offs and purposes. Now that these tariffs have been in place for over a year, we have actual data to assess how the administration’s trade policies have affected the economy and what they may mean going forward, even after the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA tariffs unconstitutional.
This report briefly reviews the three different types of tariffs and what sets them apart. We then focus on how these tariffs have changed trade flows, investment spending, and domestic inflation. We also discuss the impact of trade on financial markets, including domestic and international equity markets, global currencies, and interest rates.
Don’t miss our accompanying podcasts, available on our website and most podcast platforms: Apple | Spotify
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Podcast – #65 “Export Controls: Another Battle in the US-China Trade War” (Posted 5/2/25)
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Podcast – #63 “The Bessent Gambit” (Posted 3/28/25)
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Report – The Bessent Gambit (March 24, 2025)
by Bill O’Grady | PDF
Before the election, there was a sense developing that suggested a major shift in how the US manages the global financial system. This vibe was described as the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” suggesting the changes were similar in magnitude to historic events such as the Bretton Woods Agreement, Nixon’s closure of the gold window, and the Plaza Accord. In recent weeks, articles and podcasts have emerged which discuss some of the ideas that are percolating. In this report, we lay out the issues facing the US economy, Treasury Secretary Bessent’s plans to address them (at least what we know so far), the likelihood that these plans would be implemented, and the associated potential market ramifications.
Note: The podcast for this report will be delayed until later this week.
Don’t miss our accompanying podcasts, available on our website and most podcast platforms: Apple | Spotify
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Podcast – #11 “Mineral Commodities in the World’s New Geopolitical Blocs” (Posted 6/6/22)
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Report – Mineral Commodities in the World’s New Geopolitical Blocs (June 6, 2022)
by Patrick Fearon-Hernandez, CFA | PDF
For many years, we’ve discussed how the United States has been backing away from its historical role as global hegemon, setting the stage for deglobalization and a fracturing of the world into separate geopolitical and economic blocs. In our Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Report from May 9, 2022, we provided a detailed, comprehensive forecast of which countries are likely to end up in either the U.S.-led or China-led bloc, which countries will lean toward one or the other, and which ones will try to be neutral. As a follow-up to that analysis, this report looks at the distribution of key mineral resources among those camps and what the different endowments might mean for geopolitics, the global economy, and financial markets in the future.
With China and Russia becoming ever more threatening from a military and geopolitical standpoint, and with the coronavirus pandemic demonstrating the vulnerability of supply chains even in peacetime, investors have become more sensitive to the security of commodity supplies and the way nations might try to monopolize or weaponize them. As such, we conclude with a discussion of the ramifications for investors.
Don’t miss the accompanying Geopolitical Podcast, available on our website and most podcast platforms: Apple | Spotify | Google
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Podcast – #9 “Parsing the World’s New Geopolitical Blocs” (Posted 5/9/22)
Bi-Weekly Geopolitical Report – Parsing the World’s New Geopolitical Blocs (May 9, 2022)
by Patrick Fearon-Hernandez, CFA | PDF
For more than a decade, we at Confluence have been tracking and writing about the waning commitment of the U.S. to its role as global hegemon. We’ve shown how U.S. retrenchment and protectionism have helped erode globalization. Factors like deregulation, falling transportation costs, improved technology, and easing geopolitical tensions following the end of the Cold War may have promoted political and economic integration for decades. Now, however, governments across the globe are erecting barriers to trade, investment, and migration, leaving authoritarian strongmen emboldened to assert themselves. The latest example of that has been Russian President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Amid these developments, we’ve argued the world will fracture into at least two main political and economic blocs: a U.S.-led bloc consisting mostly of liberal democracies and a China-led bloc of mostly authoritarian states. This report discusses which nations are likely to join each bloc, which will merely lean toward one bloc or the other, and which may try to stay neutral. Based on our predicted makeup of each bloc, we describe their differing political, economic, and financial characteristics. As always, the analysis also includes ramifications for investors.