A Tariff Anecdote

On my iPad so this will be short.

We were having dinner with a family friend the other day. She’s does construction project management and property management part-time. One of the projects she was working on was a mixed-use new build (retail on the first floor, apartments upstairs). It’s in limbo because the bids she’s getting are way higher than her original estimate for the project. She said that contractors are bidding high due to uncertainty about tariffs. So, her clients, successful retailers who wanted to expand, put the project on hold since they didn’t want to basically throw away money.

Canada supplies most (all?) of the lumber in the mountain west red state where she lives. Nobody has any idea what the “agreement” that Canada and Trump will negotiate will look like, but it’s a near certainty that it won’t be in force for long since Trump’s trade policies are pure amateur hour. Trump looks at everything as a win/lose, but the end result of most of his deal making is lose/lose. This is a great example.