With Congress having agreed to a budget deal to keep things open until September, the new U.S. focus is Trumpcare 2, the return of the healthcare reform.

However, as the Wall Street Journal explains, the risk for President Donald Trump is that it is far from clear that Republicans can round up the 216 votes they need on healthcare, especially from GOP centrists, after making changes in their initial proposal to win over conservatives.

The centrists are especially spooked by a provision allowing insurers in some states to charge higher premiums to patients with pre-existing medical conditions who have let their coverage lapse.

The White House is declaring that, in spite of not getting its way over the budget, it will get a healthcare bill passed by the end of this week.

The issue here for markets is less about the healthcare reform as economically this matters less in the short term, but obviously, it does matter to insurers and healthcare companies.

More significant is what the success or failure of Trumpcare 2 tells us about the president’s ability to work with Congress to get things done.

In other events, Trump is “looking at” breaking up Wall Street banks in the manner of Glass-Steagall Act that was an act the U.S. Congress passed in 1933 as the Banking Act that prohibited commercial banks from participating in the investment banking business.

Yesterday, we also got the release of an opinion poll on U.S. business sentiment in the form of the manufacturing ISM survey.

The April PMI came in at 54.8 percent, a decrease of 2.4 percentage points from the March reading of 57.2 percent.

Investors should pay attention to the fact that this survey tells us absolutely nothing about the state of the U.S. economy and certainly better do not believe that U.S. manufacturing is declining.

There has been the normal hysterical overreaction of business sentiment on the upside because business sentiment always overreacts to the underlying economic reality.

We are now getting a reversion to the norm.

Staying with the U.S. economy for a moment, the Atlanta Fed released on Monday its first forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2017, which it estimated on May 1st at 4.3 percent on May 1 using its GDPNow forecasting model.

Only a couple of days ago, the U.S. Bureau for Economic Analysis (BEA) gave us its advance estimate of first-quarter real GDP growth that was 0.7 percent, which was by the way 0.5 percentage points above the Atlanta Fed’s final GDPNow number of 0.2 percent that was released the day before, but below the N.Y. Fed’s forecast Nowcast that signaled a growth rate of 2.7 percent in Q1 (Ref.

The jump of the Atlanta Fed’s own GDPNow from 0.2 percent for Q1 to 4.3 percent for the first estimate for Q2 is nevertheless somewhat too big to be ignored because if that reversal is confirmed, which is of course not a sure thing, then the Fed funds rate could easily surprise on the upside.

Besides all that and because it’s important for financial markets everywhere, over in Europe, the UK and the EU are setting out their bargaining stances for the forthcoming rebellion of the UK from the EU Empire.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has a plan, possibly hidden somewhere and that plan does not involve paying 60 billion euros or $65 billion dollars.

Meanwhile Jean-Claude Junker, one of the 3 European Union (EU) Presidents (Yes, EU Presidents never work alone!) was no doubt shocked to find that the confidential deliberations with the UK government have somehow found their way to the front pages on Sunday of the German “Frankfurter Allgemeine” that portrayed last Wednesday’s dinner between UK’s Prime Minister Theresa May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as a disaster.

In The Financial Times we read: “The leak highlighted the gulf between what the UK wants and what the EU considers realistic, but has also led politicians from across Britain’s political spectrum to emphasise that talks may fail to yield a deal … Juncker wants money but also wants to punish us — and deter any other member state from leaving…” a senior British government figure said.”

All this could easily be dismissed as posturing, but this is not perhaps the best of starts to negotiations and trust-building in a colossal agreement of some kind, that, if it ever happens, would reshape, among other things, trade and finance in the world.  

Etienne "Hans" Parisis is a bank economist who has advised global billionaires and governments on the financial markets and international investments.