(Zero Hedge)—The key question facing equity markets now is whether the April 8 low marked a floor — or merely a trap door for bulls.
Veteran emerging-markets investor Mark Mobius joined Bloomberg TV earlier, warning, “Cash is king” as he waits for the trade war storm and mounting macroeconomic headwinds to blow over.
“At this stage, cash is king. So 95% of my money in the funds are in cash,” Mobius said in an interview, adding, “Right now, we’ve got to keep the cash and be ready to move when the time is right.”
Mobius continued: “If the market comes down further, of course we will put more money in.”
He said he owns “a little bit with S&P 500 funds” to track the market and expects higher prices by the end of the year.
“Trump doesn’t want to see a big market crash, so he will be making adjustments and announcements, which will give a little bit more confidence for people in the market,” the legendary investor said.
He pointed out that he has “become very bullish on China” and sees possibilities for Beijing to boost trade and domestic consumption amid the ongoing trade war.
“Right now, we’ve got to keep the cash and be ready to move when the time is right”
Veteran emerging-markets investor Mark Mobius is keeping the bulk of his funds’ holdings in cash as he waits out the trade-related uncertainty https://t.co/X3z6gg4pvE pic.twitter.com/bHNvjszfUM
— Bloomberg (@business) April 30, 2025
By late Tuesday morning in the US, main equity futures tumbled following a series of negative prints that cast dark shadows over the US economy:
- Rate-Cut Odds Jump After ADP Reports Weakest Job Growth Since July 2024
- US Q1 GDP Contracts On Record Imports, Shrinking Govt, As Consumption Comes In Stronger Than Expected
Main equity futures were dumped following the bad macro prints.
However, there is good news:
*TRADERS FULLY PRICE FOUR QUARTER-POINT FED CUTS BY END-2025
Powell dragged in, kicking and screaming
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 30, 2025
Implied four cuts by year’s end.
Separately from Mobius’ interview, Goldman analyst Vickie Chang offered clients a market snapshot on Tuesday, assessing whether the April 8 low marked a concrete bottom for stocks — or if another leg lower is still ahead:
- The most immediate question for markets is whether there is fresh downside to come. We said that a shift in trade policy was the most obvious route for recovery in risk assets, and there has been a modest version of that dynamic since April 9. Even though the economic impact is yet to be felt, it is possible that we are past the peak of new tariff “shocks” and policy uncertainty.
- In past equity corrections, markets tended to bottom near the trough in economic activity. But if there was a clear cause of the weakness, it was enough for the market to see the peak in pressure from that source to conclude that activity would bottom soon, and for equities to trough ahead of that. In episodes where the source was less easy to track, the market did not trough until economic growth itself started to bottom.
- What matters now is whether the current episode is more like past “shock”-driven corrections where the tariff shock having seemingly peaked could be enough to mark the market bottom, or whether this will ultimately be a scenario where the economic data needs to stabilize first. It is possible that simply being through the worst of the shock has allowed the market to set some limits on the process, even if the damage is yet to be felt and if the underlying economic situation remains bad for some time.
- Despite that possibility, we still think there is significant vulnerability in a recession scenario, even if the worst of the underlying “shock” has passed, for three reasons: 1) It has generally been true that in shock-driven corrections, there has been a meaningful reversal and not just a peak in the source of the pressure. So the tariff reversal may need to be more dramatic to be equivalent to those past peaks. 2) The unemployment rate matters a lot for the pricing of risk, and it has been some time since the economy has undergone a period of job and portfolio losses happening together. 3) The 19% drawdown so far would be relatively mild relative to past recessionary drawdowns and would have entirely taken place before economic damage is seen, which would be historically unusual.
- It is worth keeping an open mind given the unprecedented nature of the current shock, but continued market recovery from here means putting an increasing weight on the belief that recessionary dynamics will not take hold, and requires confidence in the market’s ability to look through what is likely to be a further weakening in the data. We think the balance of risks still argues for expecting renewed declines in equity prices from current levels and for adding downside protection, especially if further relaxation makes that protection cheaper.
Just days ago, Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett told clients to “sell rips” and stay long “BIG” (his favorite trade idea for 2025, namely Bonds, International Stocks, and Gold).
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
