The title here is of course a reference to the fact that trade war news took a back seat to domestic politics in the U.S. this week.
It's a quip, and not a particularly creative one, but it resonated on Friday, and it speaks to the manic nature of the news cycle that has, at various times over the past two years, overwhelmed market participants' collective ability to process the deluge of potentially relevant incoming information.
And please, save me the "it's all noise" line, because anyone who really trades knows it's only "all noise" until an algo misreads a headline and runs everybody's stops.
"Remember XYZ?" has become something of a common refrain on financial Twitter (or, "FinTwit", for short), and while anyone could have made the quip that serves as the title to this post, I'll attribute it to one of FinTwit's more widely followed pseudonymous accounts:
Well, let me assure you that to the extent folks forgot about trade wars this week, the market's memory will be jogged soon enough. While I'm obviously predisposed to suggesting that most political news has market ramifications, the political soap opera that captured everyone's attention in the U.S. this week only matters for markets to the extent it influences the U.S. midterms. That effect might be large, but it's a second order effect, which means it's inherently untradable in the short run.
On Thursday, as everyone scrambled around at their desks to try and find a live feed they could stream of the Senate Judiciary Committee proceedings, the World Trade Organization was like that kid in the back of the classroom who never gets called on by the teacher ("Me, me, call on me, please!").
Had anyone cared to call on the WTO Thursday, they would have discovered that the organization
