As America hikes tariffs sharply, the jobs market slips, and President Donald Trump turns his ire from Harvard to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the stock market refuses to collapse.

Despite these economic speed bumps, the S&P 500 Index is up nearly 8% so far this year. How long this rise can continue depends on whether the fundamental strength of the U.S. economy can withstand the wrenching transformation to the global trading system that President Trump has forced.

Economics textbooks insist that stock prices reflect the future stream of a company’s profits on any given day. For all the brainpower devoted to these forecasts, however, they are essentially rough estimates of what may happen over the next twelve months and wild guesses about anything after that.

Over the past sever

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