Jeanne Whalen

I think everyone thought when Trump started really hiking tariffs up very quickly in his term,

that we were going to have runaway inflation, we were going to have even goods shortages over the summer.

What we've actually seen, while the effective tariff rate overall is quite a bit higher now than it was at the beginning of the year, still that hasn't fed through to prices as much as everyone was expecting.

Why?

Why is that?

I mean, there are a lot of theories.

One is that, first of all, Trump has rolled back some of the tariffs, right?

He ratcheted them way up on China and then brought them back down and then ratcheted them up again and brought them back down.

The administration has exempted some goods from paying the tariffs, so they're not quite as broad brush as initially feared.

Right.

And then a lot of companies have found workarounds.

They are, instead of importing things directly from China, their Chinese suppliers are sort of rooting them through Southeast Asian countries.

So those things have helped keep the effects on price increases down a little bit.

That leads me to my next question, though, which is one of the aims of the Trump administration by imposing these tariffs was to bring jobs back to the U.S.,

It sounds like by routing goods from China through other countries to kind of get around the tariffs, it's like not probably achieving that objective.

It's not.

No, I have not seen evidence of broad reshoring, not in such enormous quantities that we've seen the revival of U.S.

manufacturing in the way that the Trump administration has promised.

Still, despite this.

As Gene said a minute ago, economists were worried that tariffs could lead to higher inflation.