Trump's tariffs are a nightmare for companies big and small
Why it matters: The cycle is just starting now, but the pain is immediate.
From clothing retailers who get all of their production from heavily tariffed Asian countries, to bakers whose pastries depend on newly levied imported vanilla, to the tech companies whose batteries need the minerals China just cut off in retaliation, this weekend will be a scramble to figure out how to survive the new world order.
The big picture: The stock market is not the economy, but if you want a decent proxy for Main Street businesses, look at the Russell 2000, a broad measure of the stock market's small companies across industries.
It's down almost 20% this year alone.
That in and of itself doesn't make a business turn the lights off, but it says something about public confidence in their prospects.
"The market is like a real time poll ... this is going to impact all businesses in one way or another undoubtedly," Ken Mahoney of Mahoney Asset Management wrote Friday.
Zoom out: The early signs are everywhere, large and small.
Electronics trade group IPC estimates the cost of critical components coming from overseas will rise 30% to 50%. Even if you're already manufacturing domestically, the parts you need from somewhere will get expensive, quickly.
Automaker Stellantis paused production at multiple factories and laid off hundreds of people.
Irrigation company Lindsay Corp. said the tariffs would increase its cost of goods, which it would pass through to customers. Those customers are farmers, who are now getting squeezed by foreign retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.
It's only April, but already Christmas is getting complicated, too. Forty-eight hours after announcing a pre-order date for its new video game console, Nintendo had to cancel it. Turns out there's now massive tariffs on the countries where it's manufactured.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Electromed Joins Key Indexes Backed By Solid Growth And Stability
Electromed, Inc. (NYSE:ELMD) is one of the . Analysts maintain a Buy rating stock amid strong Q3 earnings and the company's inclusion in the Russell 2000 and Russell 3000 Indexes. A smiling healthcare worker holding a SmartVest airway clearance system. . Minnesota-based company, Electromed, Inc. (NYSE:ELMD), develops, manufactures, and markets the SmartVest System, a high‑frequency chest wall oscillation device for airway clearance therapy. Bypassing traditional equipment channels, it operates via a direct‑to‑patient and provider model. The company serves patients with pulmonary conditions such as bronchiectasis, cystic fibrosis, and neuromuscular disorders, in both home and acute care settings. The Q3 earnings report released on May 13, 2025, indicated the 10th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue and net income growth. The company has achieved a year-over-year increase in revenue of 13.1% and a net income growth of 26.7%. Later, on May 27, 2025, the company announced that it will join the small-cap Russell 2000 Index and the broad-market Russell 3000 Index, effective after the close of U.S. equity markets on June 27, 2025. Following these announcements, Freedom Capital Markets initiated coverage of the stock with a Buy rating and a price target of $29. Electromed, Inc. (NYSE:ELMD) maintains the same rating and price target at Roth Capital as well. Now part of the Russell 2000 and Russell 3000 Indexes, the company sustains an anticipated 5-year EPS growth of 23.66% while keeping the volatility in check with a low beta of 0.39. While we acknowledge the potential of ELMD as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 10 Metal Stocks with Insider Buying in 2025 and 10 Energy Stocks with Insider Buying in 2025 Disclosure. None. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CNBC
5 hours ago
- CNBC
Two brokers vie to be Asia's Robinhood as Hong Kong expands crypto support
Stock analysts are getting excited about the potential boost to Asian crypto trading after Hong Kong's stablecoin bill takes effect on Friday. Stablecoins are virtual assets that reference government-issued, or fiat, currencies. Hong Kong's bill formalizes the process for financial companies to issue and manage the virtual assets, similar to the U.S. GENIUS Act . For now, Morgan Stanley analysts expect the main application for stablecoins centers around crypto trading, and say it could attract more institutional investors to the asset class. They view online brokerage Futu Holdings as the best play, and rate it overweight with a $164.25 price target. Citi analysts prefer its rival Up Fintech , also known as Tiger Brokers, and upgraded it to buy from neutral, according to a report published late on July 21. They maintained a neutral rating on Futu, citing the stock's recent run higher. Both companies, which listed in the U.S. in 2019 before Robinhood went public, operate online brokerages for trading stocks and cryptocurrencies. They have their roots in mainland China, but have evolved to focus more on Hong Kong and Singapore due to Beijing's capital controls and crypto bans. The crypto trading market in Hong Kong and Singapore is $640 billion large, even after accounting for competition from unlicensed mainstream crypto exchanges, the Citi analysts said. That positions Up Fintech and Futu to potentially see gains similar to those of Robinhood, the analysts said. They said a major support for Robinhood's stock surge in the last several months is the company's crypto trading revenue – the segment doubled in the first quarter from a year ago, far faster than Robinhood's 50% growth in overall revenue during that time. Crypto has also grown from 3% of Robinhood's total revenue to 21% between 2020 and 2024, the Citi report said. Robinhood is set to release earnings Wednesday local time. Up Fintech and Futu have not yet disclosed the date of their next earnings releases. The Citi analysts raised their price target on both stocks: to $14 from $9.50 for Up Fintech, and to $176 from $113 for Futu. Part of their additional optimism on Up Fintech comes from possible business opportunities with Avenir Group, an investment firm linked to the founder of bitcoin trading exchange Huobi. Avenir acquired a 5.9% stake in the stock in late April. "We see potential upside for TIGR if i) Avenir Group could use TIGR as the designated crypto exchange for OTC trading; ii) if Avenir Group could potentially use TIGR as its designated custodian bank, paying TIGR a higher custodian fee to help support TIGR's crypto biz development," Citi said. To be sure, there are many differences between the U.S. crypto environment and that of Hong Kong. In contrast to Beijing's more conservative stance in mainland China, Hong Kong, as a special administrative region of the country, has become the nation's test bed for remaining globally competitive in finance. Both Citi and Morgan Stanley analysts expect Hong Kong's stablecoin support to initially focus more on how the Chinese yuan can be used for international payments. But the region's bigger ambitions remain clear as U.S. President Donald Trump's son Eric is slated to headline a bitcoin conference in Hong Kong next month. —CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
Boston Globe
8 hours ago
- Boston Globe
No, Mr. President, race is not a biological reality
But the fight over race in education is not confined to the classroom, and the embrace of perverse and offensive narratives is by no means restricted to the progressive left. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up In March, President Trump issued an executive order titled ' Some of what Trump objects to is indeed troubling. It is appropriate to be concerned about ideological litmus tests, Advertisement Yet buried in the executive order is a statement so wrongheaded that it should have set off alarms. In a section excoriating the Smithsonian Institution, the document condemns the museum because it 'promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct' and because it states 'Race is a human invention.' But race is a human invention, not a biological truth. For any educated person to claim otherwise is on par with claiming that diseases can be cured through bloodletting or that astrology is a reliable guide to the future. That the president of the United States would make such a claim in an official statement of policy is appalling. By now it is a firmly established scientific truth that race has within populations commonly categorized as racial groups. The differences between such groups are so few as to make them genetically indistinguishable. For all intents and purposes, in other words, the DNA of white people is impossible to differentiate from the DNA of Black people, Asian people, or Native American people. Of course there are physical variations among populations that originated at points far apart on the globe. But the idea that those variations are racial is a relatively recent fiction. It was not until the late 17th century that the notion that mankind could be sorted into distinct biological races first made its appearance. In Advertisement Today such taxonomies seem absurd. So does the view, If the president truly believes that race is a fixed biological reality, he is endorsing a view long discredited by science and rejected by Americans across the political spectrum. 'Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life,' asserted Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. ' Marshall was speaking as a constitutional lawyer, but modern genetics has confirmed what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Racial categories have no objective biological basis. That doesn't mean that race is meaningless, but that its meaning is social, not biological. It is a product of historical, cultural, and political forces. The concept of race was invented to categorize and rank human beings, often for purposes of domination and exclusion. Over time, those categories may have come to feel 'natural' or self-evident, but they are anything but. They are constructs, not codes etched in our genes. Advertisement It is deeply unsettling to see the White House resurrecting the idea that race is a fixed, objective, biological reality. Such thinking has an ugly pedigree. It undergirded slavery, segregation, and eugenics. It lent scientific respectability to white supremacy. It's the reason 'one-drop' rules existed and why anti-miscegenation laws once barred people from marrying across racial lines. It is not the language of truth and sanity — it is the language of race science and racial hierarchy. Trump may imagine that he is striking a blow against leftist dogma, but this isn't a left-vs.-right issue. The point has been underscored across the political spectrum — including by the Supreme Court's most conservative jurist. 'Race is a social construct,' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his 2023 concurrence in the landmark case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. 'We may each identify as members of particular races for any number of reasons, having to do with our skin color, our heritage, or our cultural identity.' But that doesn't change reality, he continued. 'All racial categories are little more than stereotypes, suggesting that immutable characteristics somehow conclusively determine a person's ideology, beliefs, and abilities. Of course, that is false.' Clearly there are some human groupings that are genetically determined and have clear physical and reproductive markers — blood type, biological sex, Advertisement That is why the stakes here are so high. A government that treats race as a biological certainty is a government that legitimizes inequality and division. It is not 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History' to claim that people's character, capabilities, or civic status can be inferred from inherited traits. It is doing the opposite. And it opens the door to even more alarming policies. If race is 'real' in a biological sense, what follows? Race-based restrictions? Genetic profiling? The lionizing of historical figures with The president often casts himself as a fighter against political correctness and progressive overreach. But in this case, he isn't fighting back — he's reaching back, to a time when science was bent to serve bigotry. The right answer to racial dogma from the left isn't racial pseudoscience from the right. It is fidelity to truth, and to the ideal that all men are created equal. Jeff Jacoby can be reached at
