NEW YORK, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The unpredictability of U.S. government policies has frustrated global investors over the last few months, according to business insiders at a recent industry forum at New York University.
"We had expected U.S. President (Donald) Trump's inauguration would be positive to the economy, real estate, stock markets and investments. Actually, no such reaction happened," said Sam Zhang, founder and managing partner of New Land Capital, a real estate private equity fund based in New York City and Hong Kong.
Speaking at the industry forum on Saturday, Zhang said he didn't anticipate the chaos from policies of the Trump administration. He highlighted headwinds from high interest rates, rising building costs and tightening supply of construction workers amid immigration enforcement and tepid property prices.
Both the high-level and speedy imposition of tariffs by the Trump administration caught investors off guard, said Jeremy Gao, co-founder and chief investment officer of Mint Finance, a financial service provider for international students.
Gao noted that safe haven demand amid the plunge of stock and bond prices drove up gold prices recently.
Over 50 percent of U.S. individual investors were bearish for seven consecutive weeks about the outlook of the stock market in the next six months, according to weekly surveys issued by the American Association of Individual Investors from Feb. 26 to April 9.
The Nasdaq Composite Index plunged into a bear market on April 4, while the S&P 500 Index briefly dipped into bear market territory on April 7, as Trump's tariff policies rocked investor confidence.
With January's inauguration of the Trump administration, lawyers in private equity practice, who have undergone a downturn for the last three years, once counted on a repeat of the business boom seen in 2020 and 2021, according to Gao Yuan, a senior attorney of global law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
"But, there is nowhere to find such a boom and we don't know what happened. It's very much a surprise," he said, adding that the recent big swing of blue chip stocks also surprised many attorneys in the private equity business, and they chose to wait and see due to U.S. policy uncertainty.
The U.S. merger and acquisition (M&A) market tanked in the first two months of 2025. The volume and combined value of M&A deals in the United States saw year-on-year drops of 5.9 percent and 53 percent in February, respectively, according to a recent report by EY-Parthenon, the global strategy consulting arm of Ernst & Young LLP.
"Companies are closely scrutinizing the effects of volatile trade policies and economic trends before engaging in substantial mergers or acquisitions," said the report. ■
