Global markets are being rattled again by President Donald Trump’s latest foreign policy and trade threats, but the central question remains the same one investors grappled with for much of last year: is this the start of a sustained escalation, or another burst of volatility that ultimately dissipates as capital returns to the same concentrated set of “winning” assets?

The argument for a fade is familiar and, on recent precedent, plausible. Investors have been conditioned by the last 12 months to treat many dramatic Trump pronouncements as negotiating tactics, temporary dislocations, or noise that is later neutralized by deals, exemptions, or simple non-implementation.

The Trump administration is preparing to escalate its trade war on multiple fronts, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirming that the results of a national security investigation into semiconductor imports will be released within two weeks.

The probe, conducted under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, could pave the way for new tariffs on imported chips, adding a high-stakes layer to President Donald Trump’s broader strategy of reshaping global trade around U.S. industrial self-sufficiency and national security concerns.

The European Union’s eleventh-hour abandonment of the emissions labeling system for steel, scrapped from the Industrial Accelerator Act just days before publication, represents a devastating policy retreat that exposes the hollowness of Brussels’ green industrial strategy and demonstrates how regulatory ambitions divorced from market realities inevitably collapse when confronted with implementation complexities.

The removal of the labeling mechanism that green steel producers desperately requested to differentiate their expensive products leaves the entire market development framework in shambles, eliminating the basic information infrastructure that would allow consumers, manufacturers, and investors to distinguish between conventional and low-carbon steel while pushing crucial decisions “further down the road” precisely when the nascent industry requires immediate certainty to justify the billions in capital investments that EU climate goals ostensibly demand.