I've only seen a small portion of the chaos from my side of the market, but that's been chaotic enough.
All of this chaos has actually slowed down our US manufacturing buildout. We'd like to build US factories, but we're having to slow them because of the uncertainty. A foreign factory only has the uncertainty on the US import/export, while a US factory has uncertainty on all imports/exports.
Anecdotes __are__ data. How much weight you ascribe to it as being representative is different. But you cannot disqualify it as 'not data'. It is usually a leading indicator of what could potentially show up in these more robust datasets.
In other news, we’re still trying to backfill a reason for the Iran War.
One theory is that we’ll starve China for oil, so their navy won’t be able to hold Taiwan. (Projections show the US losing a war like that badly due to them have orders of magnitude more naval yards than us.)
Anyway, while enumerating all the ways in which that is a dumb plan, it occurred to me that the intentional slowdown in EV and solar uptake in the US is turning a manufacturing gap into an actual present day strategic gap.
China imports a lot of oil, but, as a percentage of their economy, they are way less dependent on fossil fuels than us, and tariffs on solar/batteries are basically equivalent to us shipping them free energy production and distribution infrastructure.
All of this chaos has actually slowed down our US manufacturing buildout. We'd like to build US factories, but we're having to slow them because of the uncertainty. A foreign factory only has the uncertainty on the US import/export, while a US factory has uncertainty on all imports/exports.