By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
we heard the treasury secretary talking about deals on trade that could come as soon as this week and conversations with up to 17 trading partners here. To what extent do you feel that we are going to get those deals this week and what does that tell you about where trade policy is heading?
00:22 Stephen Stanley
I think the most important thing is that we keep the ball rolling forward. So, if you think about what sort of trade deals we’re likely to see in the near term, I think they’re going to be scaled down. I mean, you know, you think about something like the USMCA. I mean, that took years to negotiate. It has an incredible amount of detail to it. It sounds like what they’re working on now would be more scaled down um deals, you know, with a maybe a handful of specific steps that each country would take. But in a large sense, that’s enough, right? Because that keeps the ball moving forward. It probably forestalls the reimposition of reciprocal tariffs, and I think the markets would be pretty satisfied. I think markets are eagerly awaiting that first deal just to get proof of concept.
01:49 Speaker A
Yeah. And Chris, let’s go to you on this. To what extent do you think we would have any substantial rally or bounce off the back of that first deal that’s announced?
02:01 Chris Verrone
Well, I think it’s important to remember we’ve we’ve basically have rallied on no news. So, you know, what would actually make me uncomfortable is if we got some good news and the market didn’t respond as maybe the consensus would expect. And I think the challenge, and maybe Stephen, if I could ask you, what do you make of this considerable daylight that’s opened up between the soft data, the surveys which we know have been very weak, and the hard data, which frankly looks okay here? How do you think that resolves itself?
03:11 Stephen Stanley
Uh I I mean, I think the the the key thing is the passage of time. Um I mean, for the most part, the hard data that we’ve had up until a few days ago was for March, which, of course, predated liberation day. I I think April is probably too soon to see uh much of an economic impact. We’ve seen a lot of anecdotal reports and survey findings that firms were to the best that they could were holding the line at least temporarily on pricing, so the inflation numbers for April may not be that uh terrible. Um obviously, we saw on Friday the jobs numbers suggests that firms weren’t uh pulling the trigger on layoffs just yet either. So I I think it’s a matter of time. Um I think people are are braced for the worst, and you see that in a lot of the soft data, a lot of the survey, uh whether it’s surveys of consumers or of businesses. Um but it seems to me that the the worst, the window for when the the the economy could be at its worst uh is probably closer to the to the middle of the year into the summer uh than it is in the very near term.