CNBC Daily Open: Will the State of the Union address bring another 'TACO' moment?

In this article

• AMD
• META

Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT

Security fencing outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026.

Daniel Heuer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

		_
			Taken from CNBC’s Daily Open, our international markets newsletter — Subscribe today_

The term “TACO” or “Trump Always Chickens Out” has been bandied around every time the U.S. president has announced strong policy actions, only to walk back following a strong negative reaction from the market.

As such, will Donald Trump’s State of the Union address lead to another round of the TACO trade? Investors have largely shrugged off Trump’s imposition of Section 122 tariffs globally, so the incentive to water them down is less for the U.S. president, though clarity on how they will work could be a positive for markets.

Experts told CNBC that “people are now used to his little explosions,” and investors have “bigger issues to grapple with,” such as artificial intelligence.

There is little clarity on what the new Section 122 duties will be. Currently, a published Customs and Border Protection document has set the levies at 10%, but Trump said that tariffs will be raised to 15% “effective immediately” on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported the tariffs would come in at 10%, but White House was “working” to raise it to 15%, with no clear timeline.

To put it in the words of top EU trade lawmaker Bernd Lange: “We need clarity, and this is also my clear request for the United States government.”

If Trump wants to clear up anything, he would get a prime opportunity on Wednesday morning Asia time as he delivers the State of the Union address.

Public polling showed that 57% of respondents said what they most wanted Trump to speak about in his speech was the economy, especially after the Supreme Court tariff ruling.

While investors await clarity on tariffs, they are back to betting on software stocks helping them stage a recovery on Tuesday after Anthropic revealed new partnerships, quelling some fears that the sector could be displaced by artificial intelligence.

Anthropic launched new updates to Claude Cowork that allow companies to integrate the productivity tool into apps like Slack, FactSet and Google’s Gmail.

The rally helped U.S. markets rebound, helped in part by the jump in AMD shares after Meta Platforms announced a multiyear deal with the semiconductor company.

What you need to know today

**U.S. breaches Europe trade deal **and the bloc is ready to retaliate if necessary, according to Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s international trade committee. The European Parliament announced Monday that it has paused work on ratifying the U.S.-EU trade deal while it sought clarity from the White House on whether the deal still stands.

**The State of the Union speech **from U.S. President Donald Trump will focus heavily on the economy and immigration. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the speech will highlight how, in “one year, President Trump has turned our country around from the brink of disaster.”

Anthropic accused three Chinese AI companies of coordinated campaigns to extract information from its model. According to a statement, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax — the three firms in question — flooded Claude with large volumes of specially-crafted prompts to train proprietary models.

**U.S. stocks rebounded Tuesday **with support from software stocks. with the S&P 500 advancing 0.77%, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 1.04%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.76%.

**[PRO] Attractive yields in bonds. **The window is still open for investors to grab attractive income in the bond market, but it won’t last forever, according to BlackRock’s Rick Rieder.

And finally…

FILE PHOTO: A front-end loader is used to move material inside the open pit at Molycorp’s Mountain Pass Rare Earth facility in Mountain Pass, California June 29, 2015.

David Becker | Reuters

Governments are rushing to hoard critical minerals as the ‘resource nationalism’ era arrives

A new race to secure critical minerals is unfolding across the global economy.

From Washington’s proposed $12 billion Project Vault stockpile to expanding buffers in Asia and the European Union, governments are moving to secure access to metals increasingly viewed as essential to national security and industrial policy.

_— Lee Ying Shan            _

		Get the CNBC Daily Open report in your inbox every morning and keep up to date with the markets wherever you are. 

APAC Edition

EMEA Edition