Stocks enjoy 'Trump bump', but oil slumps

After Donald Trump launched a number of measures that will affect the global economy, US president for the second time, global stock markets rose on Tuesday. Oil prices, however, plunged on the perception that there would be more drilling in the United States. As Briefing.com analyst Patrick O'Hare noted, the rise on Wall Street following the Martin Luther King public holiday was part of a "Trump bump." When Trump became president again, he signed executive orders that showed he could continue to use his aggressive measures in international relations and trade. Additionally, he spoke about the potential for a 25 percent tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods, which caused their currencies to fall. Canadian and Mexican stock markets were up slightly for the day. "What was missing in yesterday's executive orders was any declaration of a decisive tariff action against China," instead O'Hare said, President Trump said existing trade agreements should be reviewed for any recommended revisions. Analysts at Goldman Sachs also found that initial announcements by Trump were “more benign than expected.” "This was especially true with regards to the economic stance towards China, which was less aggressive than some of the positions taken by Trump during the presidential campaign or in the post-election period," noted economists at Goldman Sachs. That helped Chinese markets rise, with Hong Kong rising nearly one percent. A Chinese government official said no country will emerge as a winner in a trade war. Protectionism leads nowhere and there are no winners in a trade war, Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump also gave the social media app TikTok 75 days to find a buyer for its US business after its Chinese owners ByteDance failed to sell its US subsidiary to nonChinese buyers or it would be banned. European stocks also ended the day in the black, with both Frankfurt's DAX and London's FTSE 100 setting record highs. The first Trump bump for Wall Street was after his November reelection, when investors welcomed the prospect of tax cuts and deregulation. But as November gave way to December, the bump wore off as Trump's plans to impose tariffs on key US trading partners spooked investors into thinking that inflation would rise and stop the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates.