Johnson County area economists and financial advisers are counseling patience and a longer-term outlook amid this week’s stock market volatility that followed President Donald Trump’s announcement of global tariffs.
Last Wednesday, the president unveiled plans to impose a baseline 10% tariff on imports from nearly all countries and also announced higher taxes — what he termed “reciprocal tariffs” — on imports from dozens of individual nations, with some levies as high as 50%.
In response, the stock market has gone through a series of wild fluctuations in recent trading days, swinging with new developments and debunked false reports.
Major Johnson County-based corporations saw their stock prices dip late last week and continue their fall at the start of this week even as the stock market showed signs of a modest rally Tuesday.
Olathe-based Garmin’s stock price is down more than 17% in the past five trading days. Merriam-based agribusiness and commodities giant Seaboard’s stock price is down more than 5% over the past week, though its stock is still net positive for 2025 so far.
It’s a complicated situation, say local economic watchers, that will likely see a lot of ups and downs, depending on if President Trump and other countries come to the table to negotiate.
“Anything we say about what’s happening today may change tomorrow,” Donna Ginther, a University of Kansas labor economist, told the Johnson County Post on Tuesday.
“Don’t look at your [portfolio]”
In the past 24 hours, Trump has reaffirmed that he is unwilling to change his stance on tariffs, but that could change, economist Christopher Keuhl, managing director for Kansas City-based Armada Corporate Intelligence, told the Post.
“This is a classic Trump negotiation territory. Right now, he’s taking a hard position, but that’s what you would do at this point in negotiation,” he said. “There comes a time when you start to cut deals and you change arrangements and that kind of stuff, because once there’s been a certain amount of pain, then you can come in and be the hero that sort of gets everything back to where it’s supposed to be.”
In the meantime, individuals’ retirement plans and stock portfolios lie in the balance. Keuhl said they shouldn’t panic.
“Don’t look at (your retirement portfolio) for a few months and wait for the market to recover, because the fundamentals outside of the tariff are still good,” he said. “We still have low unemployment, we had a robust GDP growth until the last two or three weeks.”
He added: “This is one of those things where you get through the tariff crisis and everything kind of goes back to a dull roar, and it’s like, ‘Well there’s still a lot of indicators of growth once we get past the drama of the tariffs.'”
There is a chance that any pain brought on by the tariffs could be temporary if Trump and other countries can negotiate new trade deals, Peter Mallouk, CEO of the Overland Park-based financial firm Creative Planning, said on his “Signal or Noise?” podcast.
“If that can happen in a relatively quick period of time, you would see a quick market recovery. You wouldn’t see the collateral damage,” Mallouk said. “We wouldn’t see any inflationary effect. You’d probably still have lower interest rates, so mortgage rates would come down. You could really wind up in a Goldilocks world where we’re back to (a) world with trade but the U.S. has slightly better terms, interest rates are lower, mortgages are lower and inflation is under control.”
What could be affected by the tariffs in JoCo
The good news for Johnson County is that the county’s economy is one based more on services than on manufacturing, Kuehl said, and manufacturing sectors are likely to get hit harder by any long-term tariffs.
“The tariffs are going to be focused on goods industries, and we don’t really have that many here,” he said.
One of the biggest industries in the area likely to get hit by tariffs: construction.
“Those prices are going to go up pretty quickly and pretty significantly,” he said.
That could have an impact on local development projects and may pose new challenges to Johnson County’s already tight housing market, which has been low on new supply for years.
It could also impact individuals’ and families’ purchases of big-ticket items for the home.
“You’ve got a lot of things that go into a home, like appliances that don’t come from here, they come from China or Mexico or someplace else,” Kuehl said. “So I haven’t heard yet about severe shortages with those things, but that would be something that would probably pop up this summer.”
The politics of the tariffs
Late last week, Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids released a statement denouncing Trump’s tariffs.
“I agree that America must stay competitive globally, but Kansans are already feeling the squeeze — and now they’ll have to foot the bill for President Trump’s reckless tariffs,” she said in a press release. “His trade policies are driving up grocery costs, forcing Kansas businesses to close and cutting off markets for our farmers.”
Republican Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas this week signed onto bipartisan legislation that would let Congress take back its constitutional power over tariffs from President Trump. The bill would require the president to inform Congress within 48 hours of issuing a new or revised tariff.
In contrast, Kansas’s other Republican senator, Roger Marshall, has offered a more full-throated endorsement of President Trump’s approach.
Marshall said on the NewsNation program “The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt” that he wanted to see the tariff plan move forward.
“(Trump) proved in (his previous term) that he gave us the best economy that I’ve ever professionally lived in — low unemployment, low inflation … I believe in President Trump’s plan. I support his plan. I want to bring jobs back.”
How long could this last?
When comparing this time of tariffs and the stock market, Kuehl and Ginther cite different historical events.
The volatility is closer to that of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Kuehl said.
“If you go back to that period, it was kind of untrammeled territory, but that lasted two years, and it devastated the supply chain. Ninety million jobs were lost, and we kind of skipped past that with a certain amount of government money, but that that was a much more serious, because there’s no way to repair that one,” Kuehl said.
For Ginter, the KU economist, the tariffs Trump is implementing draw comparisons closer to the Great Depression, when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act signed by President Herbert Hoover applied tariffs to more than 20,000 imported goods in an effort to protect American industries from foreign competition.
“That was in 1930, and (economic historian) argue that [Smoot-Hawley] deepened the Great Depression,” she said.
With Trump’s unpredictability, Kuehl said the effects of the tariffs can be remedied quickly, if he chooses to do so.
“In this case, it’s like, well, a stroke of a pen started it, a stroke of a pen can end it,” he said.
Along with that, pressure from his party can change things, as well.
“Trump right now is standing firm, which is what you do in a negotiation,” he said. “But his own party is looking at him like, ‘Dude, you’re not running in the next election, regardless of what you think you’re going to do, we are, and if you think we’re going to sacrifice our political careers for you, you’re a second-term president. You are, by definition, a lame duck. So don’t screw all of us on your way out.'”
It’s a similar sentiment shared by Mallouk, who also compared this week’s wild stock market swings to the market fluctuations seen during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Things can change fast, he said, but long-term damage could be minimal.
“This is a traffic jam where we put the roadblock in the middle of it,” he said. “We know why the traffic stopped. If a week from now, if we remove the roadblock, the market’s going to recover and things are going to largely go back to normal. So not only is this not as serious, this is much more controllable.”
