In his most-recent appearance at the Detroit Economic Club, President Donald Trump spent much of his hour-long speech extolling the virtues of what he called a booming economy.
But a couple of hours before Trump took the stage, business leaders and economic experts speaking during a roundtable discussion at the DEC’s annual Michigan Economic Outlook meeting cast a more cautious, less optimistic picture.
And it’s Trump’s policies that are sowing some seeds of doubt, according to the panel. Mary Buchzeiger, CEO of Auburn Hills-based auto supplier Lucerne International Inc., said there was “so much uncertainty” around policies, particularly a haphazard roll-out of tariffs.
“(Uncertainty) … that’s the key word,” Buchzeiger said. “Businesses don’t like uncertainty, and it’s a very difficult environment to plan for the future, to invest in the future, to make … decisions when you have so much uncertainty.”
Joining Buchzeiger on the panel were Quentin Messer Jr., the Michigan Economic Development Corp. CEO, and Gabriel Ehrlich, a University of Michigan economic forecaster.
The meeting also served as the reveal for the DEC’s Michigan Economic Survey results, and respondents appeared to be fairly optimistic. The survey showed that 43 percent of respondents felt positive and 30 percent felt negative about the state’s 2025 economy. This year, the optimistic response jumped to 48 percent, while the negative dropped to 27 percent.
To underscore Buchzeiger’s point, though, only 35 percent of respondents thought Trump’s policies will have a positive impact on Michigan’s economy, while 55 percent thought they’d have a negative impact.
“I was a little surprised, honestly, the optimism,” Buchzeiger said. “We’ve seen Michigan decline in certain areas — education, per capita income — and I was a little shocked by the optimism and the points going up from last year. I feel like in Metro Detroit, we kind of live in a bubble. There’s a little bubble, especially in Rockland County. So maybe that optimism is … I don’t know where the surveys went and into the different areas of Michigan, but I questioned if maybe some of those surveys came out of the bubble.”
Erhlich said he was struck by the fact that survey results show more optimism about the economy in the long run than in the short term.
“That’s consistent with our forecast for Michigan’s economy,” he said. “So we do expect, if you look on the calendar year, Michigan to hit a little bit of a growth pause this year in terms of the labor market … in terms of payroll employment, but picking up in the back half of the year and into 2027. So I thought that was consistent with the survey results.”
Messer pointed out there’s always “an internal optimism that burns” among business leaders.
“I think this is what makes Michigan and America great,” he said. “There is always an internal optimism that burns. I think people, especially businessmen and business women, want to believe the best. Why else would you take the risks? Right. So I think there’s a little bit of that.
“I think that the last thing of it is … we just have to listen to the business community,” he added. “We have to do that intentionally and be willing to hear sometimes unpleasant truths.”
Ehrlich said there’s also some uncertainty among Michigan’s employment numbers. Some numbers show employment numbers falling, while others say total wage and salary jobs are up a bit. He said the count of employed Michigan residents, including self-employed, has been falling, down about 30,000 over the past 12 months (through November).
However, he said, there is payroll or wage and salary employment (excluding self-employment). That number, according to Ehrlich, has been rising, up some 40,000 jobs.
“I’m actually a little skeptical of those payroll numbers,” he said. “So I would take the slight under on that. So we have a very puzzling story about Michigan’s labor market right now. So that’s, I think, the backdrop to coming into the year. As I said, we do expect to hit a little bit of a soft patch this year in terms of job growth, but picking up as we get into the back half of the year.”
