Suddenly, tacos are back on the menu. The latest fronts this week in U.S. President Donald Trump’s crusade against trade barely garnered a yawn from markets. Are investors right to bet that on the worst of his trade threats, “Trump Always Chickens Out”? We’ll dig into that after the news:

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• Yesterday Nvidia briefly became the first company to hit US$4-trillion in market value
• Today Aritzia Inc. is scheduled to release its 2026 first-quarter earnings along with Cintas Corp. and Delta Air Lines Inc.
• Tomorrow Statistics Canada releases June jobs numbers

Good morning, this is Jason Kirby, economics reporter with The Globe and Mail, back in the Business Brief chair.

Let’s quickly recap the past couple of days:

• Monday: With Trump’s 90-deals-in-90-days deadline for trade agreements falling short by (checks Truth Social) 88 big, beautiful deals, Trump set a new Aug. 1 deadline and threatened more than a dozen countries – including Japan and South Korea – with tariffs between 25 and 40 per cent.
• Tuesday: Trump took aim at imports of copper, with 50-per cent tariffs (twice the expected rate) and and threatened pharmaceutical companies with an astonishing tariff rate of 200 per cent.
• Wednesday : Trump announced tariffs of up to 30 per cent on seven more smaller countries, including the Philippines, unless deals are reached by Aug. 1

If this were, say, March or April, a volley of headlines like that would have sent panicked investors to check their tumbling brokerage balances.

Instead, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Sure, copper markets reacted by pushing the price for the metal, a critical raw material for many industries, to an all-time high (Read the latest from mining reporter Niall McGee) and drug maker stocks got temporarily walloped.

But the S&P 500 is just 0.4 per cent lower than it was before the July 4 long weekend and just shy of the benchmark index’s all-time high.

Is the TACO trade dead?

It’s clear markets don’t believe Trump’s tariff threats will become reality. This is the so-called TACO trade, a notion that’s been widely embraced on Wall Street and boils the President’s orange-hued skin. The Aug. 1 deadline extension, which Trump claimed Monday was a “clarification” and not a “change,” only bolstered investors’ resolve.

In one regard, the TACO trade is alive and well. It’s expressly because investors have come to rely on the waffler-in-chief to back away from his most outlandish tariff policies that his pronouncements this week barely registered with investors.

But implicitly the TACO trade only works if there’s something to spook Trump into conciliation. Earlier this year cratering stock prices and soaring bond yields did the trick.

A market that sleepwalks through tariff threats to near-record highs is hardly a deterrent.

What Trump wants, Trump gets

But even this understates the threat the global economy faces.

Trump calls himself Tariff Man for a reason. He deeply believes that putting up walls around the American economy will make it great again, regardless of all the economic and historical evidence to the contrary.

The first two trade deals the Trump administration has signed, with Britain and Vietnam, hint at what’s coming.

The latter in particular will see most goods imported from the southeast Asian country incur a 20-per-cent duty. That’s 20 per cent on a vast swath of the children’s clothes, toys, sporting goods and home furnishings sold in the U.S.

If the new Aug. 1 deadline for America’s reciprocal duties holds, the new rates, on top of the 20-per-cent tariff on Vietnamese goods, would push the effective U.S. tariff rate to 17 per cent, according to a note from Bank of Montreal senior economist Sal Guatieri.

Sure, he wrote, that’s down from an estimated tariff rate of 26 per cent in early May, before Trump announced his initial 90-day pause, “but high enough to do some harm to the U.S. economy.”