That didn’t take long. It appears Donald Trump has lost his Trade War with Adam Smith in record time: 41 days to be exact, from his April 2nd Liberation Day Tariff announcement to yesterday’s rollback.
Fortunately for all of us, Trump’s “golden age” of tariffs lasted less than two months. Who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks?
I am sure the lackeys and sycophants that surround Trump will spin this into some great victory: they blinked first.
However, the reality is a stock market panic, plummeting consumer confidence, and spiking bond yields brought order to Trumps singularly disordered mind, dispensing with this worst of all possible fever dreams.
With any luck, crack pot economist Peter Navarro, the main architect of this fiasco, will be dispensed with too. Plucked from the California state system of ‘Higher Education,’ perhaps he is a mole or sleeper agent, secretly tasked by Governor Gavin Newsom to wreck the Trump administration.
Let’s be clear, Trump was elected to do three things: close the border, bring down inflation and kill DEI, not reorder the global economy based on some nativist rust belt fantasy.
Similarly, Biden was elected to restore normalcy in the wake of Typhoon Trump, not be the most progressively transformative president since FDR.
Executive hubris left his legacy in tatters; it could do the same thing to Trump. He is warned.
On to business. What does the great tariff retreat mean to CRE generally and DSTs specifically? Perhaps we avoid the much discussed and anticipated but yet to arrive recession. That would be good for both main street and Wall Street, despite JD Vance and others sophistic attempts to separate them.
The great Trump tariff rollback may have a salutary effect on capital markets. The turmoil of the ‘first one hundred days’ could, operative word here ‘could,’ be followed by greater stability and predictability.
It may also take some pressure off the Fed doing battle with Trump over its independence, allowing for additional rate cuts in the second half of the year.
Investors, businesses, and households would likely welcome this. It’s not ideal, but it’s a heck of a lot better than Smoot-Hawley 2.0.
Anticipating the 2026 mid-term elections, Deal King Donald should want to see the economy firing on all 8 cylinders with higher stock prices and lower interest rates.
If this proves to be the case, the log jam that has been the residential housing market could begin to break up.
Housing has been and continues to be a primary wealth building mechanism for Americans. Buying a home is often the first rung on the wealth accumulation ladder.
If this market finally begins to pick up the ripple out effect both materially and psychologically could be significant.
Constraint is not inherent to the American psyche. The orange man himself is a model of excess: materially and libidinally.
Trump’s great tariff walk back and its unspoken nod to the Federal Reserve’s inflation concerns could ultimately galvanize those interest rate sensitive sectors of the economy like real estate that have been stuck in a holding pattern.
That could be good for all property types and DSTs.
