Trump's tariffs are costing Americans $1.4 billion each month, study shows

Source: NBC News/CNBC



The study concluded that “the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers,” with “no impact” on the prices received by foreign exporters.

March 26, 2019, 7:39 AM EDT / Source:CNBC .com
By Thomas Franck, CNBC

President Donald Trump’s trade policies and tariffs reduced U.S. income at a rate of $1.4 billion per month by the end of last November, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton University, and Columbia University.

The collaborative study found that businesses and consumers saw “substantial increases” in the price of goods throughout last year, including a “complete passthrough” of U.S.-imposed tariffs onto imported items. The economists — the New York Fed’s Mary Amiti, Princeton professor Stephen Redding, and Columbia professor David Weinstein — also said Americans suffered by a lack of import variety and disruptions to supply chains.

“Economists have long argued that there are real income losses from import protection. Using the evidence to date from the 2018 trade war, we find empirical support for these arguments,” the researchers wrote. “Losses mounted steadily over the year, as each wave of tariffs affected additional countries and products, and increased substantially after the imposition of the wave 6 tariffs on $200 billion dollars of Chinese exports.”

Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein found that while losses were accumulating at a rate of $1.4 billion per month by last November, total losses from January 2018 through November 2018 ballooned to a conservative estimate of $6.9 billion.

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-s-tariffs-are-costing-americans-1-4-billion-each-n987336