Latest news with #Barba
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
We finally got a detailed look at how America's businesses are managing through Trump's tariff whiplash
It's been difficult to get a clear view on how US businesses are dealing with President Donald Trump 's tariff roller coaster. Now, two reports show how they're raising prices and slowing hiring. The Federal Reserve released its Beige Book on Wednesday, which explores economic conditions across the Fed's 12 regional banks based on interviews and surveys of business owners, economists, and others. Half of the districts reported "slight to moderate" declines in economic activity, and three reported no growth. The Beige Book and a separate report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that businesses stockpiled goods expected to be hit by tariffs. "All Districts reported elevated levels of economic and policy uncertainty, which have led to hesitancy and a cautious approach to business and household decisions," the Beige Book said. Trump's administration has maintained that the tariff policies are in the best interest of the US, even if they create some short-term pain. Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told Business Insider that "the Trump administration is closely tracking every economic indicator that has come out in recent months — expectation-beating jobs and inflation reports, surging consumer confidence, and strong real income growth — to evaluate the current state of the economy." Trump's roller coaster tariffs are hitting small businesses Beatrice Barba, who owns a small business that produces plastic-free items for babies and young kids, like sippy cups, told BI that the tariff whiplash is "almost worse" than having a consistently high tariff rate because it's made it nearly impossible for her to predict the prices of her purchases. "I don't know what it's going to be tomorrow, what it's going to be today, what it's even going to be later today," Barba said. "No one can run a business that way." The Beige Book echoed some of Barba's concerns. Examples the book highlighted on the impact of tariffs on businesses included: "A manufacturer of store displays noted that clients became flighty due to uncertainty and tariffs, leading to postponed and cancelled orders," New York's regional bank said. "Staffing services contacts said that employers across many industries delayed hiring because of uncertainty related to tariffs," Boston's regional bank said. "Manufacturing contacts echoed that description, reporting that headcounts were down slightly amid cautious hiring." "Many auto dealers reported an increase in purchases ahead of planned tariffs, and one dealership expected tariff-related sticker shock to hit customer demand starting in early June," Cleveland's regional bank said. "Capital expenditures were largely unchanged; however, one firm considered making additional investments in the U.S. to mitigate the impact of tariffs," Boston's regional bank said. "While some firms said they were absorbing tariff-induced cost increases, most reported that they were passing through some or all of such cost increases to their customers by raising prices," New York's regional bank said. Additionally, survey results from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that many service firms and manufacturers in the New York—Northern New Jersey area that import goods have increased prices, and some have done so for goods not directly affected by tariffs. Half of manufacturers in the region saw an increase in prices for tariffed goods, 31% stockpiled inventories, and 43% reported lower net income. Service firms reported similar results on prices, inventories, and incomes, and nearly a quarter said they were reducing capital investments in the US. Small business owners told BI that they were facing headwinds amid the uncertainty. Bookstore owner Emily Autenrieth could be facing the slowest month for her business for the year so far. "The chaos and fear Trump has created in the American and global economies has damaged businesses like mine," Autenrieth, owner of A Seat at the Table Books in California, told BI. She said sales and profits are looking low for May. "We had to pull from our line of credit to cover bills this month," Autenrieth said. The changing tariff policy makes it difficult to keep track of which ones are and are not, in effect. Most recently, Trump doubled the 25% tariff on steel and aluminum to 50%, while the 10% baseline tariffs on most imports that started in April remain in effect. Trump's sweeping tariff announcement on April 2, in which he announced "Liberation Day" tariffs on over 100 countries, was blocked by a federal court following a lawsuit brought by small business owners who said the tariffs would have been catastrophic for their companies. An appeals court lifted the block soon after, while a separate case to block Trump's tariffs is still pending. Michael Salvatore, who has multiple Chicago businesses, had a short-lived glimmer of hope with the trade court's decision. "But the more I think through the legal back-and-forth, the more I realize we're entering a period of more uncertainty," he told BI. Salvatore — whose businesses include bars and a combination coffee and bike shop — has had to think about raising prices directly due to tariffs, but said "it's a delicate balance." "As a small business owner, uncertainty is just as damaging as the tariffs themselves," Salvatore said. "I can't make clear purchasing decisions or long-term plans when I don't know what rules I'm playing by."
New York Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Film Alchemist Lights Up MoMA With Her Love of Cinema
Rosa Barba makes artworks with film. But you wouldn't call them movies. Sometimes she shoots them with 35-millimeter cameras and beams them onto screens. Other times, she turns celluloid and projectors into whirring sculptures, or choreographs musical performances with flickering light. 'Film is kind of the key word,' Barba, 52, said recently. 'But, in the end, maybe you can't say they are films anymore: It's a film about film, or it's about the idea of a film.' Film might be her medium, material or subject, but there are many other ideas in Barba's works, too — about ecology, landscape, science and the nature of knowledge. All her signature obsessions come together at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from May 3, where an installation of her work, called 'The Ocean of One's Pause,' runs through July 6 in the museum's Kravis Studio, a space devoted to experimentation. The presentation brings together 12 works from the last 16 years, with performances on six dates throughout the run, that add up to a statement on her expanded understanding of cinema 'Cinema, for me, is the moment when you start a kind of embarkation,' Barba said in an interview at her Berlin studio. It wasn't just light, sound, or movement, she said; it was 'a chemical reaction' when those elements come together and trigger or unveil something for the viewer — Holland Cotter of The New York Times once described this as an ability 'to knock the pins out from under tyrant logic and clear a space where difference can thrive.' Barba, who was born in Sicily but grew up mostly in Germany, has been working with film since the beginning of her career — and liberating it from its original use. As a teenager interested in photography, she was traveling yearly by train to visit relatives in the south. 'I was basically just looking out of the windows for two days and also taking pictures,' she said. The shifting landscape, and the difference between the teeming chaos of Sicily and her organized German hometown left an indelible mark on her work, in which precisely controlled machines create exuberant effects. Her studio suggested a similar push and pull, with its clutter of sculptures in progress and a neat archive of film reels against one wall. 'Looking at those contrasts, they were so formative for my work,' she said of her childhood trips. 'There was a lot of material that came from going back and forth.' When she was getting started, in the '90s, most movies and art films were shot on celluloid. As digital technology began taking over in the early 2000s, Barba stuck with analog. She still sometimes shoots on a 16-millimeter camera she has owned since her early 20s, and her sculptures often repurpose the mechanical devices of film-era cinema. A work in the MoMA show, for instance, called 'Composition in Field,' is a light box overlaid with a lattice of text-printed celluloid strips, cracking as they turn on motorized reels. Another sculptural installation, 'Spacelength Thought,' has a typewriter tapping out a poem onto a length of blank film, so that the letters shine onto a wall when the strip runs through a projector. 'It's not so much about being obsessed with equipment, or nostalgic for film,' Barba said. 'It's just that I think I can't really be so playful with the new technologies. There are just a lot of things that you can set free — in your mind or in the space — when you play around with these objects and machines.' 'I don't think I'm super nerdy about it,' she said, laughing. 'Though maybe that's what it feels like.' When Barba embarks on a major project, the first step is a long period of research. For her installation 'Aggregate State of Matters' — which is downstairs in MoMA's permanent collection — she spent weeks living and traveling with Indigenous Quechua people in Peru across a rugged landscape that was changing as a nearby glacier melted. The group welcomed her, Barba said, and though she does not speak the Quechua language, she was able to communicate through a member who spoke Spanish. (Barba spoke to her in Italian, and somehow they muddled through.) 'There was also a lot of body language and just going with the flow,' she said. This part of the process was, in some ways, similar to the method of a documentary filmmaker, Barba said, though it was also like a scientist's: 'You have absolutely no clue if anything useful comes out of it.' The result of her experiment in Peru, however, is nothing like a documentary. Back in her studio, Barba edited the material from the field trip into a 21-minute film that is beamed from a customized projection system. There are no talking heads, just a succession of fleeting landscape images, overlaid with chattering voices and text, set to a thrumming soundtrack. As the stories of the Quechua people float layered over the visuals, the film draws something ineffable and sublime from the landscape in a way that would be out of scope for straight reportage. As an artist, Barba said, she can bring 'different elements into play.' That alchemy is also a feature of her 26-minute film 'Charge,' which MoMA commissioned with the Vega Foundation, a Toronto-based nonprofit, as a focal point for 'The Ocean of One's Pause.' The piece began with immersive research as Barba and her camera roamed a space observatory in Nançay, central France, where scientists use radio waves to build a picture of the universe. She had many long conversations with Philippe Zarka, the observatory's deputy director, to spark her work. 'She is not a scientist, of course,' Zarka said, but as an artist, she had a different job: 'to transform this interest into something that can generate emotions.' 'Charge' has a moody, mysterious tone, and there is a melancholy note when Barba's camera lingers on the observatory's weathered 1960s satellite dishes. There is awe, too, when she zooms out wide on one of the radio telescope's central contraptions, which chugs along a track in front of a huge white surface that looks like a movie theater screen. Barba sent a recording of that machine's sound to the jazz percussionist Chad Taylor, a frequent collaborator, and asked him to drum along with it for the soundtrack. The audio also features droning sounds, played by the artist herself on cello. For the performances in 'The Ocean of One's Pause,' Barba and Taylor will reunite with their instruments in the Kravis Studio, joined by the singer Alicia Hall Moran. Using software that Barba developed, the performers' sounds will activate projectors and set sculptures in the gallery in motion, filling the room with light and movement. This, in turn, creates a spirited interplay between the musicians and the visuals, Taylor explained by phone from his home in Chicago. 'The frequency triggers a projector, and that beams light,' he said. 'I'm also seeing that light, and that's going to determine what I'm playing next. So in a way, it's an improvisation with this art installation.' Stuart Comer, the MoMA curator overseeing the show, said the result would be 'thrilling for visitors, because you see the entire thing being activated and animated in this extremely dynamic way.' 'It's not just an image that carries a recording and sound together,' Comer said. 'It's all in dialogue, and it's all happening simultaneously.' Several art forms have been intersecting in Barba's life since her childhood near Stuttgart, in southern Germany, where she took classes in dance, flute and guitar before settling on cello. At 14, she got interested in photography and started taking portraits and landscape shots, which she developed in a school dark room or at home in the bathroom. 'I really loved this kind of alchemy,' she recalled, 'making the image come out, and also manipulating it.' She was also watching a lot of movies back then, and was drawn to the work of Italian auteurs like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, who thought of his own films like paintings. When she received a Super 8 camera as a gift, she began to experiment with making her own moving images. She studied at the forward-thinking Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany — 'one of the first schools where you could basically study film and art in the same space,' Barba said — and her teachers there included the experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki and the Austrian performance artist Valie Export. Postgraduate studies then took her to the prestigious Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and to the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden, which awarded her a Ph.D. for a dissertation, 'On the Anarchic Organization of Cinematic Spaces,' which ranges across astronomy, art history, color theory and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. These days, she spends a lot of time on the move. Though she has lived in Berlin since 2009, Barba estimated that she was traveling for about six months each year: researching projects, filming, or installing shows. Berlin was 'a good place to think and to work,' she said, 'but on the other hand, I guess I get most of the mental work done being on the road.' When Barba is away, she always makes time for the cinema. In New York, she loves going to Light Industry, the experimental film theater in Brooklyn, she said, and on a recent visit to the city, she caught 'The Brutalist' on a 35-millimeter print at the Roxy in downtown Manhattan. The idea of the movie's 15-minute intermission had excited her conceptually, she said. She carried a whole cosmos of theory with her into the theater. 'It is not always completely in the forefront, but it does mean I watch a film differently,' Barba said. 'But then, yes, also,' she added, 'sometimes I am just chilling out.'
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Somebody has to pay the cost': Business owners break down tariff drama on social media
Founders and CEOs typically use social media to etch a human face onto their brand, forge a personal connection with potential customers, and put some pizzazz into product launches. WeightWatchers bankruptcy: WW stock plunges as company reportedly considers Chapter 11 Rising seas are destroying North Carolina homes. This high schooler designed a solution This stunning wildlife overpass helps animals cross one of Canada's busiest highways With the thundercloud of steep global tariffs looming overhead, though, many business owners have lately turned to TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit to explain the economic havoc those tariffs are poised to wreak on their brands—and in some cases, to search for a path forward. 'I wanted to make a video about tariffs and how it impacted my small business because I have continued to see incomplete information being shared online—and in legacy print media, too,' says Beatrice Barba, the Bay area-based owner of Tabor Place, which sells nontoxic cups and lunch boxes for kids. On her personal TikTok account, where she's built a healthy following under the handle Antiplastic Lady, Barba addressed customers and fans directly last Friday about the new financial reality. Without mincing words, she detailed how Trump's then-54%, now-104% tariff on Chinese imports stands to completely wipe out her profit margin. As the owner mentions in her TikTok, Tabor Place manufactures sippy cups and the like out of borosilicate glass, the same durable, nontoxic material used in Pyrex. She sources it from China, not for the region's low pricing or out of convenience, but because she simply cannot find borosilicate glass in the U.S., having searched some 80 domestic manufacturers since starting the business in 2018, with none of them panning out. Barba's video quickly amassed over 600k views on TikTok, where she says the response has been mostly positive—with thousands of commenters surprised to learn the harsh math of the tariffs' impact from a nontheoretical example. Elsewhere on the platform, Heather Pavone took a different tact. Last Friday, the Pashion Footwear founder posted a video playfully using the familiar visual vocabulary of a certain flavor of viral TikTok: the single-performer two-hander. In it, she poses as a supplicant trying to coax some relief from an authority figure—also played by the CEO—seated on the other side of an office desk. Pavone comes across like a worker asking her boss for a raise, only the worker is revealed in a caption to represent all small business owners, while the boss represents the U.S. government. Without anything resembling a Trump impression, Pavone as government avatar smugly steers her adversary toward domestic manufacturing, rather than imports. Each time, Pavone, speaking for her fellow owners, rebuts the suggestion. ('We actually don't have scaled footwear manufacturing—or, really, apparel manufacturing of any kind—in the U.S.,' she clarifies at one point.) Throughout the video, she makes clear how difficult it would be to ever rebuild sufficient manufacturing infrastructure in the U.S. starting from scratch, not to mention the impossibility of somehow doing so fast enough to survive sky-high import costs from the tariffs. At no point does the character representing the U.S. government seem moved in the slightest. The five-and-a-half minute TikTok quickly earned a whopping 3.5 million views. Pavone isn't the only owner of an apparel company to make such a video this week, though. Over on Instagram, the CEO of denim company 3sixteen posted a comprehensive Reel last Friday about how the tariffs will affect small fashion brands. Andrew Chen's video demystifies some of the thornier number-crunching that's taken place behind the scenes of his business all year. Using the 24% tariff on Japan as an example, he describes how the excess cost of importing fabric from the region will necessarily trickle down to the wholesale and retail levels. 'Somebody has to pay the cost,' he concedes. 'Either the brand or the retailer and the customer. Probably a combination of them.' Apart from the increased costs, Chen also describes how the uncertainty around the tariffs will create further upheaval. Trump seems open to negotiating the tariffs on some days; adamant about staying the course on others. This inconsistency creates an environment where any planning for the future involves unreliable guesswork. In the fashion industry, brands presell garments to sellers at certain prices—a process that could become terminally complicated by charging higher-than-agreed-upon prices with the arrival of fresh, unforeseen tariffs. Chen's video both explains why the brand's denim will almost certainly become pricier, and prepares fans for the possibility that, in these volatile circumstances, prices might keep going up. Another apparel brand owner, though, went in an entirely different direction on Instagram. Although the underwear outfit MeUndies isn't exactly a small business, it responded as nimbly as newer upstarts by addressing customers directly about the current turbulence. While the tariffs are set to impose a 44% increase in its costs, founder and CEO Jonathan Shokrian's Sunday Instagram Reel announced that MeUndies is offering customers 44% off all inventory. He delivers the message in a jokey tone, with the occasional expletive, and lots of random cutaways to squawking animals. The short clip speaks candidly about the potential crisis, invites spending at an uncertain time, and maintains the cheeky tone the brand is known for. 'One of the most powerful things about a direct-to-consumer brand is having a relationship with your customers and community,' Shokrian tells Fast Company. 'We're lucky to have a loyal and obsessed community that deeply cares about our brand, product, and values, so when something like tariffs threatens to impact our business in a massive way, we lean in and talk directly to our people.' Over on Reddit, small business owners have alternately been venting their frustrations and searching for answers. Multiple lively threads explore the idea of transparency as a bulwark against the inevitably balking at higher prices. But how to disclose the cost relative to the tariffs? On signage? With a tag on the product itself? One thread suggests adding a 'Trump Tariff Surcharge (37%)' line item on invoices and receipts. (An idea that may already be catching on.) A lot of the commenters agree on this approach; however, there is some dispute as to whether including Trump's name will 'politicize' the disclosure. Other, bleaker threads describe more existential dilemmas. Echoing the point Chen from 3sixteen made about the impact of uncertainty, one Redditor who sells imported goods described a Chinese distributor's plans to stop distributing their products in the U.S., citing that the market had simply become 'too difficult to sell in.' Like Tabor Place CEO Barba, the Redditor could not source any suitable domestic alternatives. Another Redditor with a similar issue solicited suggestions for finding U.S.-based manufacturers, a Hail Mary to avoid higher price tags. The commenters overwhelmingly encouraged this poster to just go ahead and raise prices. For the time being at least, Barba has not raised prices on her wares. Back in November, anticipating the tariff threats Trump had wielded throughout the election, she shored up supply with a large shipment of product. Since that surplus is already running low, though, the idea of starting to charge her customers more is now on the table. 'I don't want to raise my prices,' Barba says. 'I know how difficult it's been for so many families recently, so I'm trying to hold out from giving them even more hardship.' Whether the owners come right out and say it in each case, all the videos radiate resentment for the unprovoked, unnecessary nature of this disruption. They all project an awareness that Trump's quixotic quest has poorly defined goals and a slim chance of success; that the hoped-for pot of gold at the end of Trump's wayward rainbow is far from a foregone conclusion. As Chen says in his video: 'Tariffs do not guarantee a return to American manufacturing.' This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter: Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Yahoo
Men sentenced for stabbing fellow inmate under Mexican Mafia's orders
SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — Two men were sentenced in federal court Monday for assaulting and stabbing a fellow inmate at a downtown San Diego jail last year, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California. Jonathan Barba, 32, of Victorville, California and Abraham Gomez-Rodriguez, 26, of Imperial Beach, were sentenced to 51 months and 37 months in prison, respectively. 'Dangerous' drug trafficking ring shut down in Southern California Barba, Gomez-Rodriguez and the victim were all inmates at the Metropolitan Correction Center, according to the attorney's office. On March 27, 2024, Barba stabbed the victim repeatedly from behind with a metal shank while Gomez-Rodriguez held him in place. When the victim escaped, Gomez-Rodriguez chased after him and struck him multiple times, authorities stated. According to the release, the victim was hospitalized and had stab wounds in his abdomen, neck, head and close to an eye. Barba and Gomez-Rodriguez told the victim they assaulted him to please another inmate named 'Alex,' who was a 'shot caller' or person who makes decisions for the Mexican Mafia, authorities said. The attorney's office stated that Barba's criminal history included instances of domestic violence and drug importation. At the time of the stabbing, he was serving a 37-month sentence for importing methamphetamine and fentanyl into California in 2022. Gomez-Rodriguez was convicted in 2022 for possession with the intent to distribute methamphetamine and heroin in California, according to authorities. He was serving a 26-month sentence. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
