Russ Mould

To be fair, they're not very good at measuring geopolitical activity or risk because it's really, really hard to quantify and second guess what's going to come next.

But we've certainly had a very soft start to the week after the American Martin Luther King Day on Monday.

We've had the U.S.

market start the week in the red.

And Asian and European markets have lost some of the momentum that they had this year and they're in the red again today.

One of the most intriguing things in the final quarter of last year and the early stages of this year was the word tariff wasn't really being discussed by stock market or bond market strategists anymore.

They felt that we knew where they stood with that, where markets stood with that, that the possible effects were factored in.

And now this conversation is starting again, which again I think is another reason why we have markets losing a bit of that early year positive momentum.

It could.

Everybody has to listen to the most powerful leader in the world and the person who ultimately is in charge of the country that's the world's biggest economic engine.

It's home to its world's biggest bond market, biggest stock market, and its reserve currency.

So what the president has to say always matters.

But under these circumstances, yes, given that nobody's quite sure what he's going to say next.