🚀 Canada announces tariffs

Market Overview
Read time 1.4 minutes

Year To Date Performances:

1. In response to a breakdown in trade negotiations and a fresh round of 50 percent duties imposed by the United States, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of American goods on Tuesday, creating a dollar-for-dollar countermeasure set to take effect on September 8. Targeting more than 700 U.S. imports with duties ranging from 15 to 50 percent—including key sectors such as steel, aluminum, dairy, wood, paper, and consumer appliances—Ottawa designed the measures to directly match recent U.S. taxes while releasing a parallel $7.5 billion business and labour support package to insulate domestic industries. The escalation follows a turbulent week of collapsed bilateral discussions, in which each nation accused the other of unreasonable last-minute demands, reigniting trade tensions and prompting sharp rhetoric from President Donald Trump, while Canadian officials maintain that, despite moving forward with retaliatory measures, they remain open to a mutually beneficial resolution.

2. Targeting AI developers and researchers, Apple announced redesigned Mac Mini and Mac Studio desktops on Tuesday, incorporating specialized neural engines and high-speed unified memory architectures to run and fine-tune large language models locally. The new Mac Mini—which serves as Apple's debut for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s 2-nanometer M6 processor while offering M5 Pro options—starts at $899, marking a price increase that follows rising component and memory costs. Meanwhile, the high-end Mac Studio has been upgraded with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, allowing power users to network multiple units together to run trillion-parameter frontier models, with configurations starting at $2,499 for the Max and $5,499 for the Ultra ahead of their September 22 shipping date.

3. Fears over expanding federal spending and a total national debt exceeding $40 trillion have reignited Wall Street’s "debasement trade," driving strong demand for alternative stores of value like gold and Bitcoin while weakening the U.S. dollar. The market shift intensified after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced plans to double government bond buybacks to at least $4 billion, a move meant to manage rising long-dated Treasury yields that analysts say signaled underlying fiscal weakness and triggered a drop in the dollar index to three-month lows. With gold hitting three-month highs toward $4,700 an ounce—heading for its best monthly gain since 1999—and Bitcoin climbing near $80,000, prominent institutional voices including Ray Dalio are advocating for increased allocations to hard assets, even as market strategists warn that dollar depreciation could exacerbate persistent inflation and force the Federal Reserve into further interest rate hikes.

   Headlines

   1. China has been warned not to purchase Iran’s oil. Before the US war, they accounted for 90% of Iran's oil exports.

   2. Oil prices have fallen as the US appears to be moving from military action to economic sanctions in its war against Iran.