“President Donald Trump’s tariff regime is making everything from American-made steel weights, imported yarn, and Amazon’s “everyday essentials” more expensive while his immigration crackdown is causing worker shortages in key industries. These policies will work in tandem to slow down already expensive deliveries of your favorite goods.
“President Donald Trump overstepped the limits of executive authority when he used emergency powers to levy tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.
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the tariffs in a chaotic state of limbo. Three courts have now ruled that they were unlawfully imposed, and yet they will remain in place (at least for now).
That’s an outcome that seems to create even more uncertainty for American businesses that are bearing the brunt of the tariffs. Rather than providing relief in the form of a new or renewed injuction, the appeals court has effectively said that Trump is illegally taxing nearly all imports into the country and that Americans will have to continue paying those taxes while the rest of the legal process plays out.”
““Deals with the Trump administration simply do not create the kind of lasting certainty everyone is desperate for, because certainty, predictability and strict fidelity to treaties are not White House objectives,” said Dmitry Grozoubinski, a former trade diplomat and author of the book “Why Politicians Lie About Trade.””
“The new levies — imposed, in part, to pressure Russia to end its war on Ukraine by punishing one of its largest oil buyers — will raise the country’s tariff rate to 50 percent and are likely to inflame tensions between the world’s two largest democracies.
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The Indians, meanwhile, have shown little sign of budging on their Russian oil purchases, which the government has framed as purely an economic decision.
Now, India’s 50 percent tariff rate will be nearly as high as the 55 percent levy Chinese goods face.
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For much of this century, U.S. presidents have sought to pull New Delhi into closer strategic ties — and pry it away from its traditional relations with Moscow — through India’s membership in the China-countering group known as the Quad, which also includes Australia, Japan and the United States.
Those efforts appeared to be bearing fruit as recently as January following a meeting in Washington with top diplomats from Quad countries when India’s Foreign Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told reporters that New Delhi was willing to nudge the grouping toward a greater defense and security focus. That initiative is likely dead as long as the Trump administration’s tariff punishment continues.”
Because of the trade war, China is getting more agriculture goods from Brazil than the U.S.. China is building a port in Brazil to get even more from Brazil and even less from the U.S.. Too bad for U.S. farmers.
“Overall, the producer price index (PPI), which measures the prices paid to domestic producers for their output, climbed by 0.9 percent last month (well above expectations) and 3.3 percent on an annualized basis. A few categories saw particularly large increases. Wholesale prices for food, for example, rose by 1.4 percent, while wholesale prices for consumer electronics increased by over 3 percent.
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Lots of domestic products rely on imports of raw materials and intermediate goods. You can’t make a chocolate bar without cocoa beans, for example, and over half of all imports are things that domestic businesses use as inputs.
Economists have warned that tariffs would increase the cost of importing component parts and force domestic firms to increase the prices they charge for their outputs. That seems to be exactly what today’s PPI report shows.
Second, the PPI is often seen as an advance warning system for higher inflation at the consumer level—because higher prices at the wholesale level will likely be passed along at the retail level.”