Happy Liberation-Day-tariff-palooza-versary
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What significant event does this episode reflect on?
This is one of those days, gang, where there is all kinds of other news. But I'm obliged to remind you, as always, the economy doesn't just stop, you know. From American Public Media, this is Market Class.
In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdell. It is Wednesday. Today, this one, is the first day of April. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Well, let's see. There was that Supreme Court oral argument this morning. There was a rocket going to the moon this afternoon. And a speech by the president tonight signifying nobody knows quite what just yet about the war. So while we wait for things to play out, we here are going to stick to our knitting. And we are going to do it with an eye on the calendar. Tomorrow makes it a year to the day since President Trump decided he was going to tariff goods from just about every country on the planet, including—and I am not making this up— a colony of penguins near Antarctica.
The Supreme Court, as you know, said the president couldn't do tariffs the way he wanted to do tariffs. So the White House is and has been working hard to find new ways to tax Americans for the imported products that they buy. Other countries, meanwhile, as if we needed another reminder that incentives matter, other countries have been turning away from the United States and toward each other. Marketplace's Sabri Beneshour gets us going with that. Well, well, well, how time flies when you've been throwing global supply chains into chaos. It really has been a crazy year. Ted Murphy is a partner at law firm Sidley Austin. While the U.S. has been putting up its own tariff walls, other countries have been tearing down theirs.
And we see it almost every day now where new negotiations or new agreements are being reached without the United States.
Malaysia signed a trade agreement with the UAE. The U.K.
signed one with almost the entire Pacific Rim. Europe has been on a free trade rampage. Finalizing its deal with the Latin American bloc, then inking a deal with India, and just this week signing another agreement with Australia. Scott Lincecum is VP of Econ and Trade at the Cato Institute. Now, you may be thinking, oh, well, the U.S. has signed a bunch of deals, too. Yes, but those deals are very different. For starters, they're not very detailed. Ambiguities mean uncertainty, a vague deal with just a few broad terms. Like Europe has to pay a 15 percent tariff, but maybe not on pharmaceuticals. We'll deal with that later. Really hides tons of devils in the lack of details. Businesses don't like that. Also, U.S.
tariffs aren't approved by Congress, so they can change literally at any time.
The U.S. deals are not in any way binding.
Jennifer Hillman is a professor at Georgetown Law. So other countries' trade agreements have brought their companies certainty. The U.S. agreements have brought U.S. companies the opposite. But the big difference is that the U.S. 's deals raised its tariffs. Everybody else's deals lowered theirs, which means, Hillman says, U.S.
manufacturers are paying more for their parts and everybody else is paying less. If you look, for example, at what's happening in the steel industry, you know, the price now of a ton of hot road sheet steel in the United States is over $1,000 a ton. The price in the rest of the world is around $400 a ton.
Anybody making stuff out of steel in the U.S.
How have tariffs affected U.S. small businesses?
is at a global disadvantage. Still, she says, the U.S. has extracted a lot of concessions from other countries.
provisions that we've been fighting for for years in terms of getting countries to lower a number of their non-tariff barriers.
like Vietnam easing regulations on U.S. cars, for example. U.S. companies, though, are paying a price for those wins, literally paying tariffs and having to live with a lot more uncertainty. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour for Marketplace. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the overall tariff rate in this economy for most of last year was 14.3 percent. That's the highest it has been since 1939. And while we have all been feeling that in one way or another, it's small businesses that have been dealing most directly with the president's tariffs.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What significant event does this episode reflect on?
0:02–3:41
2
How have tariffs affected U.S. small businesses?
3:41–7:46
3
What impact have tariffs had on global trade relationships?
7:46–14:50
4
How are American manufacturers coping with tariffs?
14:50–23:36
5
What challenges do small businesses face due to tariffs?
23:36–25:06