Market Report for Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Tuesday granted Wall Street a welcome rest, closing in a sea of zeroes resembling salary negotiations at an unpaid internship fair. Morning gains faded into the ether, but when the worst anyone can muster is a 0.4% loss, we’ll call it a collective shrug in pinstriped pajamas.
Level Change 4/15/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.4 Dow
-0.1 Nasdaq
+0.2 Nasdaq 100
-0.2 S&P 500
-0.1 S&P 400
-0.2 S&P 600
The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) simmered down to 30 after last week’s tariff shock sent it boiling into the 50s. Solid bank earnings reminded investors that there’s more business going on than headline-writing. Cynics insist we’re seeing more selling of rips than buying of dips, but the S&P’s five-day, 8% climb suggests someone forgot to panic properly.
Trade remains the big question mark enchilada, as markets search for tariff off-ramps from the administration’s opening salvo of shock and awe. At this point, a country could toss in collectible finance minister action figures with every shipment and economists would call it a gold-standard deal.
So you know it must be cricketville in US-EU talks when the most optimistic headline is “little progress.” Brussels looks down in the sprout, resigning itself to lingering tariffs as Washington’s industrial archaeologists dream of repatriating industry one factory floor at a time.
If Europe’s dour, China’s spitting mad—banning rare-earth exports to the US and Boeing (BA -2.4%) imports to Beijing. Bloomberg says Chinese airlines were told to refuse Boeing jets and stop buying anything aircraft-related from the US, presumably including those tiny bags of pretzels. Luckily for Boeing, only 130 planes in its 5600-strong backlog were headed for China—less than 2%, about what the stock fell today.
American exceptionalism might not be stuffed and mounted in a Beltway gift shop just yet. Yesterday’s appetite for Treasuries carried over, nudging the 10-year yield down to 4.35%, and even the wheezing but upright dollar strengthened for a change. In a PR blitz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent assured the public that his department has a “big toolkit” to manage any surge in yields, but swears there’s scant evidence of abandonment in the global shopping mall, no sad little Treasury note waiting on a bench outside H&M.
From our Not Good file: The New York Fed’s April Empire State Manufacturing Index rose to -8.10 in April from March’s -20.00, beating expectations. But it’s still just shrinking less rapidly, a rebound only a statistician could love, and input and selling prices rose for the fourth straight month to their highest in more than two years. And for the first time since 2022, firms turned pessimistic about the future, notching the second-lowest outlook in the survey’s 20-year history.
But the Good file gives a nod to Band-Aid baron Johnson & Johnson (JNJ -0.5%), which grew sales and earnings in Q1 and—grab your chair arms—raised full-year guidance, bumped its dividend, and more or less said, “Tariffs? Never heard of ’em.” Thanks to risk of supply-chain shortages, brand-name pharma gets a pass. Let the 80%-foreign-finished generics do the sweating.
Such were the market murmurings today, when traders napped, Brussels pouted, the Treasury Secretary brandished his big toolkit, and the shampoo-to-chemo empire chuckled at tariffs.
— Jason Kelly
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