I spent a lot of time early this week lamenting the rampant uncertainty engendered by the Trump administration’s domestic and foreign policy.

To let White House apologists tell it, the fact that equities remain largely unbothered — which is to say near enough record highs — and credit spreads undisturbed — which is to say near enough record tights, tech widening notwithstanding — suggests the uncertainty narrative’s a “hoax.”

That’s the same sort of reasoning which says that because there are still ice storms in the winter, global warming isn’t real. Or because there’s a black man in the cubicle next to you, discrimination in hiring no longer exists.

Last year, Fed chair hopeful David Zervos (in)famously said the following about the pervasiveness of the word “uncertainty” in the macro-market discourse:

Now to be perfectly honest, if I see one more sell side research report with the word “uncertainty” in the title, hear one more C-suite executive on TV opine about elevated
“uncertainty,” or listen to another PM use “uncertainty” as cover for disappointing returns, I might just lose it. The bottom line is that from trade policy to fiscal policy to immigration policy to regulatory policy, the administration’s agenda has substantially strengthened both fixed income and equity markets in 2025. There is nothing “uncertain” about that. The only missing policy link left to push us even further into the green this year is on the monetary side.

Believe it or not, that was the least abrasive passage from a longer note.

Zervos went on to excoriate Jerome Powell as “a card-carrying member of [the] overly hostile ‘elevated uncertainty’ crew” bent on keeping policy rates restrictive as an expression of  “politically-inspired hostilities.”

There are two issues with all of that. First, and as I’ve been over ad nauseam, profit margins have never been fatter and the outlook in that regard’s robust.

The simple figure above underscores the point. As long as profit growth’s respectable and expected to remain so for the foreseeable future, there’s only so much damage Trump’s temper can do, particularly considering how well-socialized the “TACO” meme became post-April 9 tariff U-turn.

That’s not to say there was no concern about the tariffs eating away at margins. There was, and still is. Relatedly, companies which try to pass too much of the tariff costs along risk losing market share or, worse from a macro perspective, undercutting consumer spending.

But the C-suite has a helluva cushion: If you consult the BEA’s more comprehensive data sets, you discover that economy-wide corporate profit margins in America remain 150-200bps wider than at any point pre-pandemic. The margin for error (no pun intended) is therefore quite large.

The second issue with Zervos’s critique (and others like it) relates to the use of strawmen. Sure, lots of executives and PMs lamented the mercurial nature of US trade policy in 2025, but the idea that they were each and every one trying to explain away “disappointing returns” isn’t necessarily true.

Consider, for example, that although I spend every day thinking about and decrying inequality of opportunity in America, it doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m trying to explain away my own impecunious circumstances. (I’m a well-off white man with multiple college degrees who’s benefited enormously and repeatedly from the nine lives America’s hopelessly biased system affords to people like me.)

If you’re searching for evidence of angst and uncertainty, it’s not hard to come by. You just have to look beyond stock prices.

If you’re not satisfied with civil unrest across America and a fast-motion fracturing of the post-War transatlantic security architecture, you could look to gold, which is up nearly 90% since Trump’s second inaugural.

Or you could consult the term premium which, while nothing to be overly concerned about, hasn’t shown any evidence of retracing lower from multi-year wides near 80bps.

Or you could look at the dollar, which was on track Tuesday for a fourth day of losses and a sixth in seven after slipping to the lowest since 2022 early this week amid yen intervention headlines.

The figure below shows one-week riskies or, more simply, the relative cost of playing for near-term dollar weakness in options.

As you can see, that measure hit a record this week and as Bloomberg noted, bearish sentiment “isn’t confined to the front-end [as] investors are the most pessimistic on the dollar’s long-term outlook since at least May 2025.”

Again, some of what you’re seeing in the dollar is the yen soap opera. Washington and Tokyo are either intervening or about to intervene to stop the yen’s slide. But make no mistake: Concerns about anything and everything to do with US policy, both domestic and foreign, are in play.

As one analyst quoted by Bloomberg in the above-linked article put it, “Unpredictable US politics is unambiguously dollar-negative [and] developments over the past week have pushed markets to embed a renewed political risk premium.”

Bear in mind, this comes as the US economic outlook continues to improve. “The consensus 2026 US GDP forecast has now risen to 2.4%, leapfrogging Sweden and Australia into top place among G10 economies,” SocGen’s Kit Juckes remarked on Tuesday.

But dollar bears have one thing going for them, and it’s the only thing they need: Trump. “The president wants a weaker dollar,” Juckes went on. “[He’ll] either persuade the FOMC to ease monetary policy enough to help him get one, or will create sufficient policy uncertainty in general, that he weakens the dollar regardless.”

There’s that word again: Uncertainty.