President Trump delivered an address at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, this week that struck a softer tone around Greenland and NATO tariff threats. Earlier in the week, US leader touted his administration’s economic achievements and domestic policy from the first year of his second term.
Raymond James managing director Ed Mills comes on the program to discuss investors’ reactions to Trump’s speech that turned out to be more geopolitical policy-focused than expected. Also catch Ed Mills comment on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s latest stance against Trump’s tariff.
Watch President Trump’s full World Economic Forum address.
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00:00 Julie
Ed, it’s good to see you. So as we sort of consider all of the hubbub over the course of the week in Davos, I am prompted to ask whether really anything is fundamentally different now than it was as at the beginning. I mean we knew that Trump wanted Greenland. That doesn’t I mean, I’m curious what you think has changed.
00:20 Ed
Yeah, Julie, I think what was really interesting and where I got the most questions here at Raymond James was, um, there was an expectation that the speech by President Trump was going to be very domestic focused, about affordability, uh a lot of details about housing, about credit cards, maybe about energy. In the vast majority of it was about geopolitical risk. Um, I do have a lot of questions about how much of this is about near-term priorities, how much of it was potentially a diversion. Uh there is a carrier group going to the Middle East. Uh Iran still is very much high on the list. Uh so coming out of this, um we are going to see where this flows. President Trump is in Iowa next week. Are we going to come back to those domestic issues or are those geopolitical issues going to remain front and center for investors uh throughout 2026.
01:21 Julie
I I talked to um a peer of yours earlier in the week right after the speech who said that maybe the speech was a bit of a dud um from that perspective, um that there wasn’t anything new on the sort of domestic policy front.
01:40 Ed
Yeah, so I was getting a flood of inbound client calls here at Raymond James about what exactly was going to be there for housing. How much was this going to be about expanding supply, lowering mortgage rates? Were we going to have an announcement that you can use your retirement funds as a first-time home buyer to possibly get that? What was going to happen with restrictions on single family rentals? Last week, a lot of the c- client questions were on credit cards. Were we going to see a push again for that 10% cap? Were we going to shut down some of the fees that credit card companies and networks uh charge. Uh we saw that in the speech, but that was on the back end of the speech. I don’t think that’s over just yet, Julie, uh but I do think it is second, you know, to the geopolitical issues. I do think that the breakthrough this week was about the fact that uh we started off with a tariff threat against a number of European countries. That has been removed. Uh Greenland, there is a uh structure of a potential deal with the NATO Secretary General. I I don’t think that really fundamentally removes the Greenland question from a lot of investor minds. But really what the concern was is we were probably at consensus that we were at or near the top for tariff rates. But if we were starting to renegotiate some of these tariff deals, were we biased higher? I think that’s where investors really didn’t like that on Monday uh and where we saw the sell off. But when we got the removal of those February 1st and maybe June 1st escalation of tariffs against European countries, that’s where we saw the market rally uh and the relief from that, is that kind of extreme position only to pull back kind of practice that President Trump uses quite frequently, back, probably.
02:44 Julie
Yeah.
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