Owen Tucker-Smith

speaker

68 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard 5d ago

Owen Tucker-Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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WSJ What’s News · Trump Says He Talked to Warsh. What Does That Mean for Fed Independence? · 17 Sep 2026 podcast

Many business owners over the last six months they've started to see high energy prices start to creep into their costs.

These people at the beginning thought of this as something that they were going to have to get through, but they'd get through it.

And so they weren't necessarily jumping to raise prices, especially because if you raise prices, it could turn off consumers who are stretched pretty thin.

But at this point, we've gotten to this sort of breaking point for a lot of businesses where they're starting to say, we can't really treat half a year of sustained high energy prices as a temporary thing anymore.

And so some of these businesses are starting to try to rescue their profit margins by increasing prices.

So when their supplier maybe imposes a ten percent fuel surcharge on them, that's gonna go down to their customer.

I spoke with a business owner in New Hampshire who is part of a big supply chain for plastics that powers the electric grid.

And she for months and months was convinced that they could get through it.

They were not a business that raised prices very often.

But the cost of resin, which is used in the plastic parts that she makes, had spiked 40%.

And that just became unsustainable.

So she started.

Passing that cost to launch her customers.

A lot of these businesses are catering to consumers who they're dealing with prices go up and up and they're now seeing their gas bills go up and up.

And so if there's a cheaper option, they're gonna go for it.

And so if you're a mass retailer that's catering to these people, you might see this as a time where you could try to get some market share.

There is also a degree to which these are the decision makers of the economy.

It's not always these people that we imagine in Washington.

It's the people who just are sitting in rooms deciding has this gotten to the point where we have to increase prices?

You know, that'll have big implications for the rest of the year, the prices that consumers see when they go to the store.

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