Trash Haulers to Carmakers Are Feeling the Pain of Trump’s Tariffs
The latest batch of industrial results was filled with warnings of crippled decision making, a consumer spending pullback and rising costs.
Tariffs have frozen decision-making on investments, with the pullback weighing on US industrial companies.
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The biggest reset of international trading relationships in a century is starting to hurt — particularly in the manufacturing industry that President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff policy is meant to help.
For those countries who haven’t yet brokered agreements on tariff rates with the White House — including Canada, Taiwan and Switzerland — the clock ran out on Friday for a temporary reprieve from higher levies. The deals that have been reached include tariffs that range from 15% to 20% — lower than what Trump had threatened but enough to boost the average tax on goods imported to the US to more than six times what it was in the year before he took office, according to Bloomberg Economics.
Such a significant across-the-board increase is pinching profit margins and wreaking havoc on supply chains. Moreover, the trade deals that have been announced are merely bare bones frameworks, with certain important terms still under negotiation and partners offering varying descriptions about what exactly was agreed upon. Deborah Elms, the head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation, has aptly dubbed them “napkin deals” — as in the kind of thing one might jot down on a cocktail napkin and about as durable under scrutiny.