It gets worse before it gets better, they say. An economy full of uncertainties makes it extremely hard to project the future—not to mention surprises that may be lying under a rock during audits. We saw Q1 start with an AI stock market boom as Tempus AI, BigBear AI, and others try to align with Nvidia chips. Nvidia earnings continue trending up as their future looks bright. The DeepSeek launch presented questions about whether Nvidia is overvalued, based on the cost of recent projects coming in extremely low for DeepSeek.
Unfortunately, we saw the largest drop in the 2025 stock market during the last week of February. This comes as tariff negotiations have corporate America on the edge of their seats. This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo implementing trade tariffs. The upside is that it exposes complacency in companies’ supply chains on a micro level and non-reciprocal global trade deals on a global scale. America in 2025 is not the America of the 2000s or 1990s. Therefore, U.S. global trade will not tolerate excessive product flooding into its markets without mutual reciprocity—a lost word not heard much in this day and age that my Grandmother used growing up, but an impactful one: RECIPROCATION.
RFQ bidding season with ocean carriers will be interesting. Whether companies will lock in float vs. fixed contracts for imports is up in the air. There is concern about urgently importing machinery and equipment for supply chain adjustments. In 2021, we saw China sidestep tariffs and duties by strategically shipping into neighboring Southeast Asia countries and exporting from those destinations to avoid paying its fair share. Additionally, China was importing into Mexico to escape tariffs at the destination. Businesses are shell-shocked from 2021’s inflation because of a combination of the trade war and COVID. Inflation is inevitable, but I doubt we’ll see logistics disruptions like we did in 2021 that caused prices to increase the way they had.
The trade war is the best thing for America in my opinion, but it will require extreme cooperation, problem-solving, and humility. It will require new systems and being flexible to change instead of the “this is how we always did it, and it’s working” attitude. More so, we need to study our competition because defense is always the best offense. The great reset ripple is happening.
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