What to Watch for This Earnings Season as Trump’s Tariffs Come Into Play
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What is the focus of this episode on tariffs and earnings?
Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, April 6th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. This week, we're bringing you an episode of our sister podcast, WSJ's Take on the Week, where co-hosts and WSJ reporters Telus Demos and Miriam Gottfried look at the role of the latest tariffs in the coming earnings season. There was only one word that seemed to matter to the markets this week. Tariffs. But how much will President Trump's new tariffs impact corporate earnings, and how are companies planning their futures around them? WSJ's Take on the Week podcast spoke with Christine Short, head of research of Wall Street Horizon, which is part of the financial services company TMX Group. They discuss what tariffs will mean for companies and consumers.
Hey, everyone. I'm Telus Demos. I write for The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street. And this is WSJ's Take on the Week, the weekly podcast where we give you a leg up on the worlds of money and investing. Each week, we bring you conversations with insiders and from inside The Wall Street Journal's newsroom about, well, mostly about tariffs, frankly. Frankly, we mostly talk about tariffs. I will briefly reintroduce someone that everybody should be familiar with now, who is Miriam Gottfried, who is on her last guest hosting assignment before Gunjan Banerjee returns, but first in our hearts still. Miriam, welcome again. It's great to be here, Telos, and I am very excited to talk to you about Tariffs again.
Yes. Well, this past week, there was obviously big, big news in the world of tariffs, the market's obsession. And it was, I mean, quite honestly, it was pretty dramatic. I was like having trouble sleeping last night just sort of thinking about how to pull it all together on today's podcast. We're recording this on April 3rd. You know, the market has obviously reacted quite strongly. But I think the drama is even beyond, you know, we'll talk about what's going on with stocks and earnings and things. But I think this is just like a kind of like it just feels like one of those – you read about in your history textbook kind of moments, right? And regardless of what comes next, it just certainly seems like this announcement has kind of knocked everybody off their axis a little bit. Miriam, can you take us through exactly what transpired last night?
Because I think just setting it up, I think that this was beyond what people were saying, I guess, depending on your point of view, best case or worst case scenario for tariffs would be what was ultimately announced was Maybe even in excess of those scenarios. I mean, the administration did not hold back. I think there had been a view beforehand that they will either take the across the board tariff approach, one flat rate for every country to pay on imports, or there will be this reciprocal approach where we're trying to bring other countries into parity with what the U.S. has to pay. And in fact, there was both. So we have first a 10 percent across the board tariff on all imports and then even higher rates on top of that for countries the White House considers to be bad actors on tariffs. And there will also be a 25 percent duty on all foreign made cars, which was sort of, you know, forecast. We kind of knew that was coming. Let's go to a clip from the announcement.
We will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us. So the tariffs will be not a full reciprocal. I could have done that, yes, but it would have been tough for a lot of countries who didn't want to do that.
So these are pretty extreme changes and the market reacted pretty dramatically right afterwards to this news. I mean, there are a lot of Yeah. And it seems like, like you said, you know, both things happen. Right. Even countries that have trade that the U.S. has trade surpluses with will be paying a I think it's a 10 percent is the is the proposal as it stands now as we record.
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