It was a Friday morning and Walmart had a less that enthusiastic earnings forecast the night before. First off, WMT tends to take a conservative view at the start of the year and gets progressively more optimistic as the year goes on - so I'm not convinced consumer spending is dead. But yes, every CEO in America has uncertainty about tariffs and immigration.
Second topic was all about rate cuts. I'm not really concerned about what Fed governor said what about how may cuts we will see this year. Nobody knows because it's 100% dependent on the data and we could see a summer inflation spike due to tariffs - or just the overall hot economy. While I'm not exactly in the camp that we could see a rate hike (could you imaging the markets reaction to that???), it's best to assume no cuts until employment really falls off a cliff or we see inflation under 3% for three to six months.