Week 18 Wrap: Oz election here; China and US reportedly chat tariffs & ASX revival

02 May 2025 15:38 (AEDT)

Welcome back to HotCopper’s weekly wrap for Week 18!

Due to a tight conflation of public holidays, we’ve missed out on weekly wraps for the last two weeks. The good news is that despite a lot of headlines, not too much has changed.

Here’s the big news over the last two/three weeks (depending on how you want to count it):

China and the US are now reportedly talking tariffs after much hubbub
We’re still waiting for pharma, microchip and copper tariff announcements
Trump has said he’ll water down tariffs on automakers in the US
Gold has eased off highs above US$3.4K to ~US$3.25K at time of writing
Brent Crude is back to ~US$62.50/bbl at time of writing
In Australia, the ALP are tipped to win the Federal election
The ASX200 has returned to where it was before April 2
The UK stock market has had its best run in 8 years
Wall Street earnings season has revived some AI bullishness…
But McDonald’s has pointed to a weakening consumer

Outside of that, where not related to tariffs, it’s been mostly tariff talk.

(Except for Australia, where the Federal election has dominated attention spans across this sunburnt country.)

When it comes to tariffs, I wrote up a Tariff Wrap for the start of May earlier today, and much of what this Weekly Wrap would otherwise be can be found by clicking this link to check out that article.

Here’s the headlines that caught my eye this week: