Article courtesy of USA TODAY via “The Rundown”
Economists say there are no winners in a trade war, and American farmers, appliance companies and automakers are proof that tariffs can inflict financial harm.
But if you’re using the stock market as a measure of who’s winning the trade dispute, the U.S. has a clear lead over China and its other trading partners.
While stock prices are just one way of gauging who’s feeling more of the ill effects of tariffs, there’s no disputing that shares of U.S. companies are performing better than China-based stocks and other foreign markets, says Alec Young, the New York-based managing director of global markets research for FTSE Russell.
“There’s a lot of ways to judge this, and I expect a lot of twists and turns, but if we just look through the lens of the market, we’ve seen a much stronger U.S. stock performance,” Young says.
The Standard & Poor’s 500, a stock index filled with America’s biggest companies that get more than 43 percent of their revenues from overseas sales, is up 6.1 percent this year. China’s Shanghai composite is down nearly 13 percent over the same period. The major stock index in Japan is down a little less than 1 percent and European shares are up just 0.3 percent.
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