Looking across the stock market, it’s hard to find a company that isn’t vulnerable in some degree to the U.S.-China trade war.
Stocks of companies that do lots of business with China, such as chipmakers and other technology companies, are obvious candidates for investors to sell when trade worries rise. They have fallen more than the rest of the market whenever President Donald Trump sends out a tweet or speaks about tariffs.
But investors are also looking beyond these first-order effects as they pick out which stocks look susceptible to the trade war. Those picks now include many companies that have no significant ties to China but are still at risk.
That’s why all but 2 percent of the stocks in the S&P 500 fell on Aug. 5, when worries ratcheted higher after China let its currency devalue to its lowest level in a decade.
Financial stocks have been the second-worst performing sector in the S&P 500 in recent weeks as the prospect of less-profitable lending threatens banks’ profits.
Texas-based Comerica, for instance, has been sucked into an industry-wide downdraft. It is based in Dallas and has bank branches mostly in Arizona, California, Florida, Texas and Michigan. It has some businesses operating outside the country, but in Canada and Mexico, not China. Its stock has sunk 16.2 percent during the recent pick-up in trade tensions.
The escalation in the trade war has led a growing number of economists and analysts to warn about a possible recession. And those concerns have spread to the bond market, where interest rates have sunk sharply.
The market for interest rates has gone so haywire this month because of worries about a possible recession that long-term Treasury yields in some cases are lower than short-term yields. That’s trouble for an industry that relies on borrowing money at short-term rates, lending it out at long-term rates and pocketing the difference.
The broader damage from the trade war has been widespread since Trump shocked investors on Aug. 1 by saying he planned soon to extend tariffs across virtually all Chinese imports.
The latest tariffs cover about $300 million of Chinese goods, many of them consumer products that were exempt from early rounds of taxes. Even though Trump has delayed some of the tariffs, they will ultimately raise costs for U.S. companies bringing goods in from China. Those companies will then have to either pass higher prices on to their customers or give up some of their profits. That’s a big deal for investors because a stock’s price tends to track the path of its earnings over the long term.
One concern is that all the uncertainty on trade will lead businesses and shoppers to hold off on spending in hopes of waiting out the tumult. Businesses say they have seen inklings of such behavior, which, if it accelerates, could lead to a self-fulfilling cycle where weaker sales for companies push them to cut back on hiring. That could lead in turn to even weaker spending and do more damage to the economy. That’s trouble for most companies, to some degree.
It’s also why some of the hardest-hit stocks in recent weeks have little business, if any, in China but remain vulnerable to the consequences of the trade war.





