Good morning. I cover the world of institutional investors – a dull name for the very interesting pension funds and private equity titans putting trillions of dollars to work in almost any industry you can name.

With tariffs making investors’ heads spin, I went to New York to hear from Bruce Flatt, the low-key CEO of investment giant Brookfield Asset Management, who still thinks the glass is (at least) half full. More on that to come, but first:

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• Carney and Trump are holding direct talks on trade and security, according to the U.S. Ambassador to Canada.
• Economists are eyeing this morning’s jobs report from May after the Bank of Canada held its lending rate steady earlier this week.
• Trump and Elon Musk are breaking up.

If you’ve ever stopped to wonder who owns office towers, cellphone towers and data centres, or the companies that make the less glamorous stuff (car batteries!) we use every day, there’s a good chance Toronto-based Brookfield might be the answer.

I’ve followed Flatt for years, and the US$1-trillion investing behemoth he’s built, and as I’ve gotten to know him, I’ve noticed that the wide-eyed wonder he has for investing never really wavers.

In an elite corner of global finance where multibillion-dollar investments are table stakes and there’s huge money to be made, Flatt is known for being unassuming and unflappable, even in a crisis.

Last year, commercial real estate was in the doldrums. Office towers and malls were still struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and high interest rates were ratcheting up pressure on property owners who thrived on cheap debt. Brookfield owns major towers and shopping centres in New York, London, Toronto and other big cities, so it had billions of dollars at risk.

Flatt took a contrarian view: All that handwringing was old news, he told investors, and the next two years would be a “much different story.” In the newsroom, as I covered his comments, we were asking each other “How is Bruce always so happy, even when the forecast looks bleak?”

Part of the answer is that Brookfield has grown into an investing supertanker with the ballast to stay steady in choppy waters. It took 25 years for the asset manager to gather its first trillion dollars. It expects to be managing an additional trillion within five years.

But Brookfield’s next act could be more challenging.

When U.S. President Donald Trump’s destabilizing tariffs and threats to Canada’s sovereignty created much bigger headaches for investors, I flew to New York to see the outlook through Flatt’s eyes.

From Brookfield’s offices on Manhattan’s West Side, the view makes it hard to ignore how dramatically the past few months have changed the flow of people and goods around the world. Across the Hudson River, you can see the Statue of Liberty holding her torch in front of cranes unloading ships at a New Jersey port.

Inside Brookfield’s conference rooms, Flatt and the busy investment teams are doing their best to draw the blinds and tune out the noise. There are plenty of CEOs putting on brave faces right now, but Flatt’s confidence stands out.

When we look back in 20 years, he says, there’s a good chance the current turmoil “won’t be relevant.”

If that sounds far-fetched, Flatt expects the political upheaval will be dwarfed by “a retooling of the world” driven by new technologies such as AI and clean energy. And that will need trillions upon trillions of dollars of investment from companies like Brookfield.

As the dollar figures grower bigger and the stakes higher, it’s getting harder for Brookfield – which has tried to avoid the spotlight – to keep a low profile. That’s especially true since Prime Minister Mark Carney left a senior job at Brookfield to enter politics.