Jeremy Siegel says stocks are ‘not out of the woods’ yet due to difficult China negotiations ahead
President Donald Trump’s pause on reciprocal tariffs is not an all clear signal for investors to embrace risk assets again, according to Jeremy Siegel, professor emeritus of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “We’re not out of the woods on the tariff,” Siegel said on CNBC’s ” Squawk Box .” “We’ll see what gets negotiated. It definitely will have to be negotiation with China. I don’t know whether Trump holds as many cards as he thinks he holds.” Stocks rallied violently in a kneejerk reaction to Trump’s announcement to put a 90-day pause on some of the lofty ‘reciprocal’ tariffs. The 9.5% one-day gain in the S & P 500 ranks as the third biggest since World War II. Still, the S & P 500 is in the red for April and off 11% from its recent record. .SPX 5D mountain S & P 500 Siegel, also a chief economist at WisdomTree, cautioned that many investors are traumatized by Trump’s initial tariff rollout, making the rebound in stocks less sustainable. He said the S & P 500 won’t go back to its record high from February anytime soon. “It is good to the extent that he has 75 countries he will be negotiating with, but the shock of what happened, I don’t think you can get that out of consumers mind or investors mind for for quite a while, and so I don’t think we can challenge those February highs for quite some time,” Siegel said. The president raised the tariffs imposed on imports from China to 125% “effective immediately” due to the “lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.” China, which is the U.S.’s third-largest trading partner, had already retaliated by hiking its tariff rate for imports from the U.S. to 84%. “July 9 is still a date out there. It appears the 10% tariff is permanent, which is still five times as what we had before the Trump presidency,” Siegel said.
