Chapter 1: What significant economic events occurred one year after the tariff announcement?
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.
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Chapter 2: How have tariffs impacted small businesses in the U.S.?
Something as simple as like a roller skate helmet or a skateboard helmet used to be when we opened our store was $35. Now they're almost $100. And I know that after 15, you know, 17 years that we've been in business, that's going to happen.
But most of that, I'd say like $60 and above was in the last year. Profit-wise, it's definitely a lot lower than past years. We've had to absorb some of these tariffs just to be able to sell the consumer something that is reasonably priced.
And it's also been challenging on me as an employer. You know, we've had to make sure that we maybe have less employees. We don't have as much cash on hand as we would like. It's also been challenging as far as the mental aspects because, you know, taking out a loan when you're not sure where the economy is going to be is...
kind of stressful and you know looking towards am I going to have am I going to have a business for my employees or are we going to have to shut down this year you know so it's like those are the kind of things that you start to think about when I've never had to make those thoughts before normally we have a five-year plan and normally we have a three-year plan but right now it's just stay above water stay above water that's all we keep saying to ourselves
Ali Trela Jones, owner of Bruised Boutique in Nashua, New Hampshire. In related news, Bloomberg spotted this tariff tidbit. In a court filing yesterday, Customs and Border Protection said its systems are set up to handle 63 percent of the refund claims submitted so far. No word on the fate of the remaining 37 percent of those claims. Wall Street today. War? What war?
We'll have the details when we do the numbers. All right, let's talk sneakers. On a day, by the way, when Nike had its worst day on Wall Street in almost two years. It does seem, though, that there is always a hot, hot sneaker brand. And some handful of years ago, it was Allbirds. The sustainable shoe company went public in 2021, topping out at a market capitalization of more than $4 billion.
Now, though, the other shoe has dropped, if you will. Allbirds is going to sell its assets to the brand management company American Exchange Group for just $39 million. And as Marketplace's Kristen Schwab reports, it is not the only direct-to-consumer name from the mid-2010s suffering from slow sales.
Direct-to-consumer businesses weren't a newfangled idea when they took off a decade or so ago. Remember, mail order catalogs came first. But Mark Cohen, former director of retail studies at Columbia, says the Internet refreshed the strategy.
Anyone with an idea was relatively easily able to present it.
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Chapter 3: What are the global implications of U.S. tariffs on trade relationships?
But becoming more than that product is hard. Ramirez says some direct-to-consumer companies get lost in the expansion and lose sight of their core customer.
It's not the model that is broken. It's mostly, are you still relevant?
Allbirds, once a tech bro staple, lost its cool. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.
He doesn't talk about it so much anymore, but back in the day, by which I mean a year ago, when he was tariffing the whole world, President Trump offered a couple of different reasons why. One of them was to bring back American jobs, specifically manufacturing jobs. We talked to Matt Notowidigdo about that idea right after the president's tariffs announcement.
Matt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. And we thought it might be a good idea to talk again a year on. Matt, welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me back. Here we are a year and a day shy of one year since the president's tariff palooza. What, if anything, has changed in American manufacturing?
Well, we've got fewer manufacturing jobs than a year ago, which suggests maybe the tariffs weren't having their intended impact. But overall, I would say the impacts have been pretty minimal. We're not in a recession yet, for example. Well, there is that, although there is the war. So we're going to keep an eye on that one. But let me ask you the bigger picture question.
Is there something about the American economy that has made this tariff thing that the president's been trying to do, for all the harm it has done, for all the uncertainty and for all of that, expectations had been that it would be far, far worse. And it turns out that's not the case. Why? Yeah, I think this is a reminder that the U.S., it's a big country. It's a big economy.
We don't rely a lot on imports and exports. There's a lot of internal domestic factors. And so it's a reminder that tariffs can only do so much harm or maybe on the flip side, they can only do so much good. There's only so much that tariffs can do because at the end of the day, the U.S.
economy is just mostly driven by our own internal supply and demand, not really what's happening internationally. That seems to be an important point. We are so big, so resilient and do so much here that international trade is not huge for us. I mean, we're not Belgium.
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Chapter 4: How have U.S. tariffs affected domestic manufacturing jobs?
But, you know, my own view is just focusing so much on manufacturing jobs and manufacturing is already a very small part of the economy feels feels pretty misguided to me. Matt Notable-Digdo is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business there. Professor, thanks a lot for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
The Trump administration did remove its tariffs on certain commodities back in November, specifically what are called non-domestic commodities, things we just can't produce here. Think, in our case right now, bananas and coffee and cocoa. The catch, of course, is that a lot of businesses are still dealing with input costs on all kinds of things that are still being tariffed.
Those two things are handy to know. As you hear from Kristen Talheimer-Bingham, she's the co-owner of Dean's Sweets in Portland, Maine.
I don't know quite why this is or how this is, but it feels like business is just as hard as ever and at the same time, it feels like business is harder than ever. If the idea around tariffs is to confuse everyone, I think that's been successful. We're still growing. We're still investing. Our sales are more and more centered around the fourth quarter of the year.
So as we approach the spring and summer, that's a little scary. But of course, we're doing everything we can to stay in the game. But more than ever, we're watching our spending very carefully. Our rent, our payroll, our ingredients all cost more and our sales truthfully have pretty much flattened out over the last year. The costs of cocoa skyrocketed in 2024 and then doubled in 2025.
But so far this year, we're told cocoa and chocolate costs will be more stable. So that's good news. It definitely makes me feel hopeful that 2026 could be a better year for us.
Here's hoping. Kristen Solheimer Bingham. She's the co-owner of Dean Sweets in Portland, Maine. Coming up. I mean, I like to think of myself as brilliant, but there's been a lot of dumb luck. Don't sell yourself short, man. First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials up 224 points today, a half percent, 46,565. The NASDAQ added 250 points. That is 1.2 percent, 21,840.
The S&P 500 gained 46.7 percent, 65.75. Allbirds, Christian was just talking about that, down four-tenths of one percent. Warby Parker, which has announced it's ending the home try-on program for glasses it was once known for. And really, I use that like a lot. It stinks. Shares grew one-third of 1%.
Peloton, purveyor of exercise equipment that may or may not turn into clothes racks, was essentially flat. Also, why don't you just ride a bike outside? Seriously. Bonds down. Yield on the 10-year T-note rose 4.32%. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Don't look now, but the American consumer just ain't giving up.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do small business owners face under current tariff policies?
But we really want to take a step back and look at the general trajectory of the consumer.
That trajectory is looking relatively good, says the National Retail Federation's Mark Matthews.
Consumers are willing to get out there and spend despite their weak sentiment about the economy and where the country might be headed.
He says the sales data and projected Easter spending show that consumers continue to be the shining star of the economy.
If we're spending our sentiment, the economy would be in a lot more trouble. If we look at, you know, 2025, almost all the GDP growth came from consumer expenditures. The data show that despite some rough winter weather that might have slowed traffic at grocery stores, consumers still went out and spent, explains Catherine Black at the Kearney Consumer Institute.
They're being more social than ever, and they're prioritizing that, and they're spending money when they do it. Though even if February was a bright spot, she says, With March and the level of uncertainty, I don't know that it's a sustained bright spot. We'll have to wait and see. Take the war in Iran, for example.
While consumers are feeling the effects immediately in gas prices, they might not see other impacts until the second quarter and beyond, according to Rick Miller at Big Chalk Analytics.
If you think about the effect on packaging products for food, if you think about the impact on fertilizer, that's not going to affect food prices until later in the year.
For now, Miller says the companies he's working with are continuing to focus on pricing and promotions and convincing consumers it's still worth spending with them. I'm Carla Javier from Marketplace.
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