NEW YORK CITY — Stakeholders discussed uncomfortable economic possibilities at NYISO’s 2025 Spring Economic Conference. The Trump administration’s unpredictable policies on import tariffs, diplomacy and immigration are creating difficulties for businesses.
“We are calling that the economy will slow very significantly, running on the precipice of recession,” said Adam Kamins, senior director at Moody’s Analytics.
This was the first time in six years that NYISO and its stakeholders convened the annual Spring Economic Conference at Consolidated Edison. The mood leading into the presentation was congenial and relieved. The intense heat wave that gripped New York like a fever had broken the night before.
Kamins said the Trump administration’s “tariff roller coaster” had created an unstable situation for global trade. He displayed a timeline of the tariffs, showing the erratic spikes, plateaus, dips and valleys that have affected imports since February.
“It’s whiplash for importers and exporters,” Kamins said. “If you narrow it to the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in April, you have these very aggressive 10% baseline tariffs, plus these aggressive reciprocal tariffs … . It’s honestly pretty haphazard.”
Kamins said the administration’s attempt at reciprocal tariffs didn’t make sense. Typically, a government would set these based on another nation’s goods equal to the rate taxed abroad. Instead, Trump’s import duty rates were based on trade deficits. This led to poor nations that cannot afford U.S. goods, like Lesotho, receiving high tariffs on raw materials exports.
“We aren’t exporting anything there,” Kamins said. “They aren’t placing a tariff on us because it wouldn’t matter. Nothing is going there anyway.”
A stakeholder said that even if you supported tariffs, the way they were implemented created a “chilling effect” on investment decisions. Kamins replied that the stakeholder had intuited one of his next slides.
“If firms are thinking about investing or hiring, they need to know the rules of the game,” Kamins said. He said the roller coaster effect limited any potential upside of tariffs by making it difficult to onshore manufacturing, something the Trump administration has said it wanted to do.
Kamins then showed several economic indicators that captured some of what he saw as the fallout of the Trump administration. Container ships were arriving at port empty at Long Beach, Calif., the largest shipping harbor in the U.S. Hiring and job switching have slowed. GDP growth has slowed. Investment plans for the next year have declined sharply. While the overall economy isn’t showing signs of crashing yet, things aren’t headed in the right direction.
While overall workforce growth was flat, Kamins said, the decline of immigrant participation has disproportionately impacted specific industries, like construction, generating headwinds against growth. New York is more dependent on immigrants than other states for labor and population growth, Kamins explained.
New York’s Outlook
Kamins projected that New York generally would follow national trends with some specific exceptions. Compared to nearby states and peer large states, New York’s economy was doing well. Its metro areas were growing in terms of payroll, primarily buoyed by growth in New York City and the health care sector.
“New York is the best-performing state in the region as of last fall and was No. 5 nationally at the time,” Kamins said. “The only other semi-large state that was outperforming New York was South Carolina.”
Metro-area indicators showed most of the growth in the state was concentrated in New York City, with some pockets of growth in Albany and Syracuse.
“When we talk about Syracuse, the most important factor in the outlook is the semiconductor industry and the Micron chip fab [fabricator],” Kamins said. “Construction firms are ramping up hiring in anticipation of that.”
Albany’s strong growth was due to the state government and the performance of local universities.
New York City will be unusually affected by Trump administration policies, Kamins predicted. He referenced sharp declines in Canadian cross-border traffic. European tourism also is down. While tourism has recovered since the pandemic, these factors could cause headaches in the near future.
“New York City relies heavily on international tourism, far more than the rest of the country,” he said.
A stakeholder based in the North Country concurred, noting that Canadians no longer were coming to shop. Kamins noted that immigration restrictions, closed borders and Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity made the U.S. a far less attractive option for tourism or international studies.
New York statewide also suffered from a profound lack of housing inventory, Kamins said, which creates inflationary pressure.
“Price growth for single-family homes is well above the national average,” Kamins said. “This is primarily owed to the supply side of the market. Supply shortages are present pretty much everywhere in the state, but they are most acute in Rochester.”
He said the amount of supply for housing could be measured in “weeks” in certain parts of the state. Homes just don’t stay on the market. While New York City isn’t affected by single-family home prices generally, there also was a supply shortage creating rent inflation.
The presentation closed on an optimistic note: The state still is seeing billions of dollars in investment in semiconductor manufacturing upstate. Micron and Wolfspeed remain committed to developing microchip fabricators, despite delays and financial difficulties.