Make lovely buildings, not trade war!

You can feel that investors and developers are holding back after the publication of disappointing growth figures for Q1, and as they take in the forecasts for the rest of the year that have subsequently been revised downwards. As a result, much of the optimism of the end of last year has since evaporated. What has caused this turnaround in the general mood? There is only one obvious suspect: the trade war launched by the new administration in the US. The weird and erratic urge to impose tariffs on every-one and everything that doesn’t originate from the US, seemingly at the whim of just one economically illiterate person, has plunged markets back into the mire of uncertainty while risking an entirely unnecessary global recession – just when things were looking so bright again on the economic front. There is one silver lining in all this for our sector: clearly, the fundamentals of our market and economy are strong, and if the US President is eventually forced by reality to