Markets have been dealing with first one conflict; and, then, a second one over the past 18 months, and those two battles coalesced into a two-front war this week. The older of the two—the U.S. trade war—leapt back into the forefront with the Administration threatening a usurious 50% tariff on US$20 billion of Canadian exports, followed shortly by formalizing a 10%-to-12.5% tariff on a wide swathe of goods from all major trading partners, under the guise of Section 301 and forced labour. The latter step comes with a large footnote, as it mostly just steps right into place of the expiring Section 122 tool, which had ... (full story)