‘Inflation beats market expectations again': White House touts CPI report amid Trump tariff showdown
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Time of India
14 minutes ago
- Time of India
Trump tariffs: Small businesses in America need to pay an extra $202 billion a year
Bloomberg Live Events Bloomberg The economic policies passed in the first six months of President Donald Trump 's term may yet bring a Golden Age, but so far they haven't for small farms and businesses. According to an estimate by the right-leaning US Chamber of Commerce, Trump's levies mean that small businesses will have to pay an extra $202 billion a year on tariffs, which works out to about $856,000 per company on optimism soared on Trump's victory and plunged when he announced tariffs; the right-leaning NFIB Small Business Optimism Index has recovered somewhat since 'Liberation Day' but has yet to reach the heights of Trump's first term in office, and response rates to the survey have fallen, suggesting some business owners may be too busy struggling to remain solvent to complete surveys. The Purdue University-CME Group Ag Economy Barometer index has declined for two months in a with large companies, smaller enterprises are struggling to wait out the vicissitudes of Trump's on-again, off-again tariffs. Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear told me recently that he is already seeing the impact across his state on small businesses, small farms and consumers alike. 'We're all paying a hidden tax in the form of widespread tariffs,' he said. 'Look, it's not just me saying this. If Andy Beshear, [former GOP Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell and [GOP Senator] Rand Paul are all saying this is a bad idea, it's because it's a really bad idea.'Companies with fewer than 500 employees contribute 43.5% of the nation's gross domestic product. Small family farms still constitute 86% of all farms, according to federal data. But they lack the leverage and resources of larger enterprises and can find themselves at the mercy of forces over which they have little influence.'They're what economists call 'price-takers,'' Louis Johnston, an economist and professor at St. John's University in Minnesota told me. 'It means you accept the world as it is. You don't have enough power to affect prices and you don't have much wiggle room on wages. You're stuck.' Big businesses, he said, are price-makers. 'They can eat some costs , pass some to consumers, reduce stockholder dividends or shave a bit off wages,' he said. 'If you're small, all you can do is take the hit.'Investors agree, and publicly traded small companies have seen their stocks become less attractive since Trump unveiled his tariff agenda on 'Liberation Day' in in Congress seem unwilling to place the slightest restraint on a president convinced of his infallibility on companies are finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of absorbing the increased costs of tariffs, according to Scott Lincicome, director of general economics and trade studies at the Cato Institute. That's not sustainable, especially for smaller businesses, and Lincicome is projecting higher consumer prices this fall. Even before its most recent estimate of tariff costs, the Chamber of Commerce had rung the alarm in a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that warned 'small businesses could suffer irreparable harm' from tariffs. 'The Chamber is hearing from small-business owners every day who are seeing their ability to survive endangered by the recent increase in tariff rates.'The GOP tax bill does grant some benefits to small businesses, such as a permanent extension on deductions. Doug Loon, president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, told me that those benefits may become a lifeline. 'It would have put a lot of small businesses out of business if those provisions had not happened,' he a longtime Republican, remembers when his party saw free enterprise as an article of faith. He also recalls that the free-trade era carried its own challenges, particularly for smaller businesses that 'didn't always get a fair shake.' Loon believes that targeted tariffs, skillfully applied, 'can be incredibly beneficial.' Trump's broad-based approach 'has created great uncertainty among our businesses. And that is where disparities can occur.'Trump portrays tariffs as free money paid by countries that have 'ripped off' America . His new levies have already begun sending billions to the US Treasury. But the reality is that tariffs are a hidden tax mostly borne by US companies and consumers. According to Goldman Sachs data, US consumers have paid 22% of the cost of Trump's tariffs. Only 14% of the cost has been borne by foreign other 64%? Eaten by American businesses Trump has reset the table on trade. Unfortunately, in his hands, tariffs are a blunt instrument used to punish enemies, reward friends and bully other nations. He substitutes threats and intimidation for negotiations and diplomacy. The deals, such as they are, remain vague, with details often disputed by trading was just seven months ago that the International Monetary Fund declared the US economy would continue to lead the world in 2025. IMF officials said the US was growing at a faster clip than its economic competitors, with more productive workers and a more welcoming business environment, leaving Trump and the GOP well positioned to capitalize politically on those economic several key economic indicators are pointing in the wrong direction — a scenario largely of Trump's own making. Businesses are struggling to adapt to his ever-shifting landscape of tariffs. Farmers are getting clobbered by higher inputs and they've lost markets thanks to an administration that ended foreign food aid and cut nutrition the president brags about the revenue tariffs are bringing, as if everyone didn't already know who is really footing the bill.
Time of India
14 minutes ago
- Time of India
SoftBank payments app unit PayPay submits application for US listing
Japan's PayPay Corp has applied to list American depositary shares in the United States, its parent SoftBank Corp said on exact schedule, size and price for the public listing have yet to be determined, SoftBank said in a will continue to be a consolidated subsidiary of SoftBank Corp following the listing, it reported earlier this week that SoftBank had selected banks for the U.S. listing.
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First Post
14 minutes ago
- First Post
How Trump has taken India-US-Pakistan dynamics back to Cold War era
The Pakistani generals are ready for the next round, post-Afghanistan, and they have a willing American president walking into a trap that he himself has set for his successors too US President Donald Trump has been escalating the way to America's India-Pakistan strategic re-set, back to the Cold War era. When everyone, starting with the Government of India, has conveniently addressed only his tariff talk viz India, no one, including the eternally pro-active sections of the Indian strategic community, has addressed the real and real-time issue which should be of greater concern to India and all Indians. Trump talked about tariff hikes and penalties, yes, but what he said even more about was the US' revived ties with Pakistan and his dumping India and Russia as 'dead economies going down together'. It is sad and sorry that both the Government of India and most commentators in the country have chosen to look the other way. When private commentators began taking note, it came a lil' too late on their instant tweets and mega FB posts. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Trump's references in this regard all at once imply that his America has begun re-hyphenating India-Pakistan relations. It was something the White House under his post-Cold War predecessors assiduously avoided and began treating India relations as a stand-alone affair, more worthy of advancing in the larger regional and global interests – be it in terms of geopolitics, geo-economics and geostrategy, not necessarily in that order. Today, Trump has told us Indians that it's all in the past. Better, New Delhi took note. Worse still, by clubbing India and Russia together but refraining from making political and geostrategic linkages, he has made sure that we miss out on the main, if not the real, aim of his combined statement. After all, tariffs and politics do not travel on the same page, and if he has had reservations, he could well have taken it up with the Indian leadership at a different level. If not, he could have tweeted separately on the matter, earlier or later. It does not stop there. Through Operation Sindoor, India also brought out well and deep how Pakistan was aligned to China in military matters. The fighters and missiles that Pakistan used to target India all bore the Made-in-China mark. Now, not only Pakistan and China, but even the US and its Nato allies could not close their eyes to reality. It's like India's Pokhran-II nuclear tests 'forcing' Pakistan, too, to test, thus denying the age-old deniability available to their US ally ever since A Q Khan's name began doing the rounds over two decades or so. It is not as if the Americans did not know but could get away by asking their Indian interlocutors to show 'more proof'. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Best of both worlds Be it as it may, from an Indian security perspective, the Trump announcement on the neo-normal US-Pakistan relations has pushed the region, too, into the Cold War era conundrum. Maybe, in the name of wooing Pakistan away from China, as the US wanted India and the rest of the world to believe — and possibly did not actually believe in it — Islamabad now has both nations on its side, or the best of both worlds, all over again. It will remain so unless Trump recasts his sights one more time. That is, if it makes sense for Team Trump to read the message emanating out of Balochistan that there are no oil reserves for the US to explore, export and exploit jointly, as Gen Munir seems to have convinced the Trump establishment. Pakistan is troubled by Balochistan in the post-Afghan era, and the generals are trying to talk Trump and the US into doing their bidding on the security front. The unspoken word is about Pakistan's unproven allegation that India is behind the Balochis' nationalist fervour. The Trump generation in the US does not know about its origins in the pre-Partition era, when the Balochis wanted to merge with India, despite their religious identity with the newly formed Pakistan, but contiguity rules did not permit it. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Indian street opinion Linked to all this is the Indian street opinion that continues to influence even the hardest of American allies in New Delhi's policy-making establishment — political, diplomatic or otherwise bureaucratic. Since before the Bangladesh War in 1971 and more definitely after the Nixon-Kissinger era's aborted despatch of the US Seventh Fleet to these parts before 92,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendered, the Indian public has always been sceptical about America and American support for India. In the self-belief that has not held for long, whether for South Asia or for other regions of the world, American policymakers have taken the rest of the world as less smart than themselves. They continue to do so in the case of India and South Asia all over again. Their lack of understanding of civilisational states, their cultural mores and what it does to their policy resilience are all to blame. Add to that the inevitability of American policy and military leadership not thinking about the day after, over which they actually do not have any control, which has shamed them no end, and repeatedly so. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Over the decades after the Second World War, this embarrassing lack of knowledge, compounded by their revolving-door entry-exit rule for policymakers, has all caused a massive loss of American face in Vietnam, Shah's Iran and, more recently, Afghanistan. Yet, their persistence with self-belief and consequent self-defeat continues. India is a functioning democracy, where, barring an occasional erratic shift or course correction, the nation's security and foreign policies have dovetailed. They have also withstood the test of time and remained predictable and self-correcting under changing regimes and new-generation leaders. In democratic terms, Pakistan is still much younger compared to India, a the political stability and continuity are provided by the generals sitting in Rawalpindi and not by the political leadership operating out of the capital, Islamabad. Peanuts and worse The Pakistan generals have seen more American presidents than you can count. They have remained steadfast in their own version of the 'Pakistan first' policy, which is self-destructive in many ways. They don't care. But as Gen Zia-ur Rehman said of President Jimmy Carter's aid offer as 'peanuts', every Pakistani general knows how to play around with Carter's successors. As an institution, they are playing for the long term and are adept at making small shifts and changes to suit the personal fancies of every American administration. In the end, they have thumbed the nose at Establishment America, and repeatedly so. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Now the generals are ready for the next round, post-Afghanistan, and they have a willing American president walking into a trap that he himself has set for his successors, too. Now, in turn, is the time for India to re-evaluate the nation's America policy, and not just the Pakistan or China policy. For, both Washington and Islamabad/Rawalpindi have forgotten that Pakistan is already Afghanistan in waiting and Afghanistan is Pakistan in the making—and in more ways than one. N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.
