Stock exchange waiting for mail from Washington

It's likely to be a surprise. Donald Trump plans to inform his trading partners about the future tariff rates by letter. Hopefully, the postal service can be relied upon, otherwise there may be a delay in delivery by Wednesday, when the moratorium on the US tariffs imposed in early April ends.

The stock markets are no longer taking the spectacle seriously, tacitly assuming that a suboptimal but still viable solution will emerge in the end. In the US, after a weak start to the year, stock prices have reached record highs again; in Germany, the DAX has been moving sideways at a high level for about two months.

From the US perspective, the composure is understandable: For three of its four most important trading partners, no immediate changes are imminent. Mexico and Canada have their own agreements, and the deadline for reaching an agreement with China is still in August. This makes the situation all the more delicate for the fourth of its major trading partners, the European Union.

The trade agreement Brussels hopes for cannot be concluded by Wednesday; an extension for further negotiations would be the best that could come of it. However, it cannot be ruled out that Trump will once again rouse the Europeans, who he sees as obstructive, with a big bang to get things moving—protracted negotiations are notoriously not his thing.

The post from Washington would therefore be no love letter, and the closer the date approaches, the more investors are concerned. The DAX, which began the week just above 24,000 points, ended it at around 23,800.

The mood, which is not measured in points, is apparently worse: The medical technology company Brainlab also canceled its IPO this week -

The US was already in holiday mode Thursday afternoon because of Independence Day on July 4th. Only Trump was apparently sitting in the Oval Office, catching up on some mail. He had planned to deliver the first ten customs letters on Friday.

Stefan Winter is the senior business editor at RND. He writes weekly about the stock market, financial markets, the rise and fall of share prices—and the companies behind them.