In the first half of 2025, companies grappling with Donald Trump’s erratic tariff announcements admitted to being confused while making polite noises about the need for clarity.
Now they won’t speak at all. Uncertainty has turned to paranoia. Putting your head above the parapet in Trump’s America risks sanction.
This code of omerta was evident in IDA Ireland’s recent end-of-year results.
The State agency said it supported a record 323 investments in 2025, including 78 “new-name” investments.
READ MORE
What surprised most was not that this was achieved against such an uncertain backdrop but where had all these investments come from?
Normally they would have been announced along the way, as the year progressed, giving us, if not the full picture, some idea of how well Ireland was doing in terms of attracting foreign investment.
Trump vs the Fed: What does it mean for global trade and Ireland?
But there has been near radio silence from US firms operating in the Irish economy. An insider described the atmosphere as “paranoid”.
Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris and IDA chief Michael Lohan are on a trade mission to California this week to meet some of the State’s biggest investors.
Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Intel, Gilead Sciences and Amgen are all headquartered in California.
But nowhere in the press releases from the Department of Finance or from the IDA is there a mention of a single company that either man is meeting.
“Over the course of the visit, the delegation will meet with some of IDA Ireland’s largest clients in the technology and life sciences sectors headquartered on the west coast,” the IDA said.
The department said: “The Tánaiste’s programme will include a range of engagements with IDA and Enterprise Ireland client companies working in sectors such as digital tech, healthcare, medtech and pharma.”
Next week the IDA will host its annual dinner at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, a major set-piece event for the agency to bang the drum for Irish investment.
Typically up to 50 top executives attend the dinner. In 2024, the then taoiseach Leo Varadkar sat beside OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
But US chief executives don’t want to flag the fact they have big offshore operations in the midst of Trump’s nativist agenda and attending an event hosted by the country that sucks down a huge chunk of this investment falls into this category.
The invitation list for this year’s IDA dinner is like the recipe for Coca-Cola locked in a vault somewhere.
Last year I did an interview with Intel, one of Ireland’s largest employers (it employs close to 6,000, mainly at its Leixlip plant in Kildare).
The chipmaker typically makes a big splash at Davos, renting out one of the store fronts along the town’s main promenade.
A spokesperson said the company would not be attending this year, without saying why.
Addressing last year’s Davos via video link, the US president gave business leaders a pretty blunt either/or. Either make your product in the US or face tariffs.
“If you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then very simply, you will have to pay a tariff,” he said.
He hasn’t really made good on this threat. Many companies and industries remain outside the scope of US tariffs.
A recent working paper from economists at Harvard University and the University of Chicago also suggests that while tariffs have hit US importers, the tariff rates being paid are significantly lower than the figures originally announced by Trump.
The reasons include exemptions for certain countries and industries, lower-than-expected tariff rates, and an evasion of the rules by some companies.
But the White House has other ways of leaning on firms and individuals it deems to be acting against its interests, as chairman of the US Federal Reserve Jerome Powell found out this week.
Trump’s repeated attacks on Powell – threatening to have him fired, calling him a “loser” and “a numbskull” – were a feature of last year.
Trump wants interest rates to drop quicker but Powell is worried about the potential impact of Trump’s trade polices on prices.
The stand-off has, however, swerved into dangerous territory with the US department of justice’s move to open a criminal investigation into Powell over a $2.5 billion renovation of the central bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC, which most see as spurious.
Ex-Fed chairpersons Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen described the inquiry as an “unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine” the bank’s independence.
JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon, who has plied a soft line on Trump to date but remains a good barometer of Wall Street opinion, warned that attacks on the Fed by the Trump administration could “backfire and push borrowing costs and inflation higher”.
Either way, the move against Powell has escalated the level of paranoia coursing through the US financial community.
The Irish Government and the IDA must tread a delicate path through this minefield, particularly at the Davos next week, where Trump will appear in person this time and lead the largest-ever US delegation to the forum.
