The 2025 Year-End Review: Bulls, Bears, and the "Made in America" Reality Check

If you look at a stock chart of the last three months, it resembles a lie detector test on someone who just got caught stealing lunch from the office fridge—spiky, nervous, and all over the place.

As we wrap up the year, the market is giving us a classic "good news, bad news" scenario. The good news? The year is almost over. The bad news? The Federal Reserve still treats interest rates like a high-score on an arcade game they refuse to reset. Between the tight monetary policies and the tariff wars, business owners are feeling a bit like they’re trying to build a house of cards inside a wind tunnel.

But if we look past the ticker tape, there is a deeper conversation happening across the Western and Central states—one that requires less panic and more perspective.

The Fed, The Freeze, and The Squeeze
Let’s be honest: The Fed’s "soft landing" is starting to feel a lot like circling the airport for three hours because the pilot forgot where the runway is. The housing market is frozen solid, businesses are clutching their cash like pearls, and the job market is doing an awkward shuffle.

Then we have the tariff wars. While some call it "economic strategy," others call it "why is my supply chain on fire?" It has certainly made volatility the flavor of the month. But volatility isn’t just numbers on a screen; it’s the anxiety of small business owners wondering if their margins can survive the next headline.

The Elephant in the Room: Patriotism and Unease
Here is where the jokes stop and the reality sets in. Drive through the heartland—from Utah to the Midwest—and you feel a palpable shift. There is a surging, unapologetic "Pro-America" sentiment. It is powerful, and frankly, it is overdue. We should want our businesses to win. We should prioritize our own backyard.

But there is a shadow side to this energy. The rhetoric has spilled over, creating a tangible uneasiness among legal immigrants—the engineers, the doctors, the entrepreneurs who followed every rule to be here. When "government talks" start sounding less like policy and more like exclusion, we risk cutting off our nose to spite our face.

A true "Pro-America" stance recognizes that legal immigration isn’t a bug in the system; it’s a feature of the Free Market. You cannot scream "Build it in America!" while simultaneously alienating the skilled talent required to pour the foundation.

The "I Told You So" Moment for Business
Perhaps the ultimate irony of 2025 is that this crisis was entirely preventable. If corporate leadership had spent the last decade actually aligning with American interests—keeping production local instead of chasing the absolute lowest dollar overseas—we wouldn’t be panicked about tariffs right now. We would be insulated.

We are currently suffering from a hangover caused by cheap global labor. The headache we feel now is the cost of not putting "America First" in our business models ten years ago.

Ending the Year: Less Doom, More Dialogue
So, how do we close out the year? Not with doom and gloom. Pessimism never built a skyscraper, and it certainly never launched a startup.

We need a "Pro-America" mindset that is confident, not fearful. A mindset that says, "We can out-compete anyone," rather than "We need to close the doors to everyone." We need open dialogue that separates the noise from the nuance.

The challenge for 2026 is simple: Build businesses that are locally rooted but globally smart. Let’s keep the production here, keep the dialogue open, and maybe—just maybe—convince the Fed to let us land the plane.