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- Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood is betting on President Donald Trump’s tariffs: the chaos could be a setup for trade deals, and any economic slowdown could be the thing that pushes the administration and central bank into action, she wrote in a recent note.
Ark Invest founder and Chief Executive Cathie Wood, famous for her bets on Tesla, appears to be betting on the president’s tariffs, too.
“While many observers fear that the Trump tariff policy is a recipe for economic and geopolitical disaster, we believe that what looked at first glance like the largest and most regressive tax increase in U.S. history could turn out to be quite the opposite,” Wood wrote in a note on Friday.
President Donald Trump announced a sweeping tariff regime on so-called “Liberation Day” that sent the stock market spiraling and sparked chaos in the bond market. He later announced a 90-day grace period while raising tariffs on China but keeping the door open to a deal.
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s apparent elevation as the lead on trade negotiations over other administration officials turned Wood bullish.
That comes after reports said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would play “bad cop,” while trade advisor Peter Navarro would be sidelined.
So “what once seemed like a chaotic situation based on incomprehensible ‘reciprocity’ calculations could have been a setup—premeditated or otherwise—for serious negotiations that will lead to lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers, neither of which would have been possible without the shock therapy that President Trump administered,” Wood wrote in the note dated April 11.
She mentioned Elon Musk, too, who she said was “still influential” in the administration and holds a zero-tariff stance. Navarro and Musk clashed over tariffs.
Wood isn’t the first to be critical of the reciprocal tariff calculation, or the first to suggest this could have been the strategy all along. And late Friday night, another tariff reprieve was declared: smartphones, computers, semiconductors, and more, were exempt from tariffs.
But mixed signals followed. Lutnick said exemptions won’t last and tariffs were coming later, and Trump posted on his social media platform that no one was “off the hook” on tariffs. Still, Monday began with a tech rally and the situation has somewhat calmed.
Wood said that throughout recent volatility in the stock and bond markets, she held that the president was aiming for robust economic growth and a strong market for the second half of the year—an expectation she had before the tariff whiplash began, coming off what she called a “rolling recession.”
A tariff-induced shock could push the administration and the Federal Reserve, which is in wait-and-see mode, to intervene more forcefully with fiscal and monetary stimulus.
“Now that much of the economy has seized up in response to the fear of tariffs, the drop in activity is likely to be more severe than otherwise would have been the case, a clarion call for tax cuts, deregulation, and lower interest rates,” she wrote.
Ark Invest did not respond to Fortune’s request for further comment.
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