Say this much for Dan Ives, the guy can sure turn a phrase.
When the Wedbush analyst weighed in recently on President Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on all imported cars, he boiled his feelings down to two words: “pure chaos.”
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Ives and his team were back on April 3 to share their thoughts on Trump’s latest rounds of tariffs, which have sent stocks tumbling, in a research note with the very subtle title: “What To Do After Trump Dropped This Economic Armageddon Tariff Slate?”
“In the Rose Garden at the White House President Trump laid out a jaw-dropping reciprocal-tariff chart that will be showed in classrooms and be written about for years to come by economists … because they are so illogical and absurd,” Ives said.
After speaking with business leaders and supply-chain experts from around the world, Ives said the investment firm was taking the view that the tariffs are the start of negotiations with countries and even individual companies to level the playing field.
Many tech companies depend heavily on China for manufacturing, market access and revenue.
Ives warned that “especially China-exposed names” like Apple (AAPL) , Nvidia (NVDA) , Tesla (TSLA) , Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) , and a host of other tech and supply-chain companies will be the most under pressure “as worries about this China 34% tariff (could be 54% when adding the baseline) and 32% Taiwan tariff are almost hard to look at.”
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“No matter what the White House says … basic economic theory over the last 100 tells you one person pays these tariffs … the US consumer…. [It’s] not a debate,” Ives said.
The analyst added that numbers are now going to have come down across the tech world “as just the sheer uncertainty from this tariff announcement heard around the world will cause some IT budgets to freeze and C-level management to figure out their own supply chain and how to navigate this near-term Category 5 hurricane.”
“We will see an upcoming earnings season for 1Q in which it would not surprise us if many companies/management teams did not give guidance and would take us back to some of those March/June 2020 Covid days of uncertainty,” Ives said.
Apple is scheduled to report earnings May 1. The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant’s shares up are 20% from a year ago but at last check April 3 were down nearly 9%.
