ISQ, Raymond James Jan 2026

One of the biggest risks the US economy faced in 2025 was the uncertainty brought about by the Trump administration’s implementation of tariffs. Typically, uncertainty is one of the most important risks to economic activity, as economic actors react to policies. In general, the longer these uncertainties last, the higher the probability they could trigger a recession. But high tariff uncertainty was counterbalanced by an impressively strong surge in investment in data centers linked to the AI-driven burst that kept the economy from going under.