2026 Letter to Stakeholders
A reflection on 2025 and a projection forward to 2026
Dear friends and colleagues,
In these times of unprecedented and unprovoked uncertainty, I want to begin on a note of hope. Despite the main conclusions and predictions of my letter, there is still a glimmer that lives in the collective hearts of resistance against tyranny across the world. In the darkest times, there is always a promise of light to come. In the despair and wreckage, there is always a new birth.
There is a collective spirit contained within all of us to prosper and endure, to straighten crooked things, and to conquer injustice in all forms. Humans will find a way to endure beyond our perceived capacity for now and forever.
2025 The Beginning of Uncertainty
2025 was a marked year, we will remember as an inflection point for global economies and geopolitics. The word we heard from global central bankers on refrain was “uncertainty.” From the G10 perspective, approximately 80 Monetary Policy Committee statements were given throughout 2025, and 64 mentioned United States-driven uncertainty in key rate decisions.
The uptick to 80% of the G10 economies explicitly citing US-driven uncertainty in monetary policy decisions accelerated after the infamous “Liberation Day (LD),” when Trump announced an unprecedented global tariff campaign. What did LD ultimately accomplish?
A shift to US Short-Termism and Transactionalism
An Erosion of Trust in the United States as a Trading and Economic Partner
A US Retreat from a Global Cooperative Power to an Imperially Ambitious Dominator
Questions around the President’s Authority
Liberation Days and Trump’s Year 1 Accomplishments
Boasting and dusting off his old ways to be explored in a new capacity, Trump in 2025 insisted he is the master of “the art of the deal.” Donald’s wheeling and dealing on the global stage is dated and archaic, with a focus on short-term results and on transacting rather than building trust.
This lack of foresight and long-term planning creates havoc for relationships built over decades and centuries, because short-term incentives and goals are often misaligned with long-term alliance-building. Let’s stay high-level for a moment: beating allies, adversaries, and peers alike with trade-cruelty and unreasonable demands may secure a near-term trade deal that is slightly more favorable than your current arrangement, but in the long term, it demonstrates unpredictability.
If you have a dance partner who unexpectedly halts erratically and abruptly while accusing you of dancing with someone else, are you going to dance again with this person?
Most likely not. And what it signals to the world is an inward retreat with the literal rhetoric saying “America First.” This retreat from the world stage and multi-lateral institutions was as rushed and fumbled as the retreat from Afghanistan, leaving many leaders wondering what will happen next. Who will be the next world power? Does this power vacuum help or hurt globalization trajectories?
The truth we found out almost a year later was not solely a retreat from world cooperation but a reversal into self-assued global imperialism as we have seen in January 2026 with the build-up of troops in the Carribean and the ultimate capture of Maduro while in the post-celebratory press conference Trump directly threatens Columbia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland claiming the new “Donroe Doctrine” as the law of the jungle for the Western Hemisphere.
Despite all the first-year signalling of a retreat from global cooperation, we only understand now that this was a retreat from cooperation, not from domination. While many European leaders saw a power vacuum following the United States’ “retreat,” the Trump administration saw a buildup toward a new imperial vision. We still have yet to see the true nature of this ambition and vision, but I would argue it will become clear in 2026, creating many new questions around the President’s true authority.
Domestically and abroad, the basic questions have been presented:
Can Donald Trump create and command a paramilitary police and military force within the US?
Yes, Congress and the Supreme Court have supported DHS operations domestically, with a budget larger than that of most standing militaries around the world.
The goal for deportations in the US originally hovered around 15-20 million people, which many commentators pointed out was “logistically” impossible, but not deterring the government’s growing ambition to deport now 100 million people.
If all else fails, Trump has explicitly and repeatedly indicated he will invoke the Insurrection Act.
Can Donald Trump unilaterally expand the definition of terrorists domestically and abroad?
Yes, domestically it’s clear now.
Yes, abroad - it’s also clear
Can Donald Trump unilaterally take extrajudicial military action abroad?
Yes - to cite a few examples: Iran Nuclear Facilities, Venezuela’s Maduro Capture, and Caribbean boat strikes.
Can Donald Trump unilaterally impose unrestricted tariffs on trading partners and enemies alike?
While the Supreme Court deliberates on this, my position has evolved to a middle ground, where the Court will likely need to establish a framework to assess these actions and for Presidents to use in decision-making going forward. I am highly doubtful of a complete stripping of tariff powers at this point.
Where are we going in 2026? An appetite for certainty.
My predictions globally for 2026 are the following:
The United States will continue to drift into War-Time Economic Development
We are likely to see a war start either domestically or abroad
The EU will reap the global benefits of the US retreat from cooperation
Let’s discuss the evolution of the US economy, starting with the US Labor Market. Despite the hawking of the Trumpian Economists, the US labor market posted its weakest performance in over two decades. Between January and April (pre-LD), the US accounted for 85% of the year’s total job gains! After April, monthly job growth averaged 15,000! The unemployed, long-term unemployed, and underemployed sectors outgrew the number of non-farm payroll additions! 2025 was the year of the jobless expansion, despite all the high talk of economic development, even manufacturing lost 68,000 jobs.
All of this data proves that the domestic economic agenda is clearly not working while Trump (the short-term thinking king) says the jobs will come back over time as data centers, manufacturing plants, and factories are built, while omitting the fact that none of these projects will prove to be significant drivers of job growth!
So what is happening… where will growth come from? If you believe DHS and its new 100 million-deportation goal, let’s extrapolate how many new people they would actually need to hire, and how you could stimulate economic growth by crowding out the private sector. For the current efforts of 13-20 million deportations, it’s estimated that, over 10 years, ICE and DHS would need between 220,000 and 450,000 new employees to dedicate to tasks across enforcement, corrections, detail, and data work. So if we do simple math, for 100 million deportations, we can roughly add a zero (so to speak) to the current estimate, bringing us to 2.3 to 5 million new hires. If you assume they want to hit the goal quicker than 10 years, then they would just add more people. Where there is a will, there is a way, with the total price tag (excluding hidden taxes from deporting ⅓ of the US population) close to $7T, and current estimates for arresting, detaining, and deporting per person. Obviously, there is another path to reduce costs across the board by degrading conditions at every stage of the deportation lifecycle and subcontracting to private companies (we are already seeing this occur actively across the logistics chain).
At the very least, we can say that the US is preparing for a deportation-driven economic growth, and for now, I will refrain from speculating on either a domestic or an international war, but I can tell you tensions are at the highest we have ever seen, both domestically and internationally. Without a doubt, we will see increased investment in defense and war technologies across the supply chain infrastructure, from start-ups to incumbents, to ensure the US is poised to address any threat with a sophisticated and comprehensive response. The solutions required as we progress through time only increase in cost. How is the rest of the world observing and interpreting the situation in the US?
I would like to focus on the European Union at the moment because I think we will see the starkest differences there. While this moment proves that the consolidation of power in the national executive is a recipe for disaster, I also believe it proves that the dissolution of national executive power across a transnational union is a recipe for prolonged success. I will list a few reasons for the success of the European Union, specifically: predictable legislation, predictable law enforcement, predictable trade, predictable immigration, and predictable procedures.
In a world where everything is built on trust rather than material resources, the most important resource is trust. Trust is the bedrock of the predictable procedural outcomes we crave intuitively. The human story is one of seeking order and harmony within disorder and chaos. In Financial Markets, the United States became a beacon to the world because of our Bankruptcy code, and the deterioration of this code at the whims of an executive has set in motion the ripples of a broader dissolution of trust in the United States that will affect all international markets. While I could cite specific examples, I will broadly say that the pardoning and waiving of regulatory fees in crypto, financial services, board of directors, and capital markets has created a new system for international investors to navigate that is uncertain and therefore unpriceable.
On the other hand, in Europe, we see a move toward greater harmonisation, unification, and standardisation across the Union, creating greater predictability, transparency, and certainty for international investors, trading partners, and market participants. As Ursula von der Leyen said in her speech at the Davos World Economic Forum, “Europe will always choose the world; and the world is ready to choose Europe.” Europe continues to show momentum towards global cooperation and collaboration, closer ties within the European Union, and the maintenance of the fundamentals of liberal democracy. In a world of choices, where the fundamentals of trust and risk assessment have not changed dramatically, what will people and investors choose?
For me, it’s clear - it’s certainty.
Michael Jordan Pilgreen