Lexus, Toyota models to get modest price bump in US starting July
The decision comes as the auto industry navigates rising input costs and geopolitical pressures, including the impact of U.S. tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts. However, Toyota has denied that the latest price adjustment is a direct response to new trade measures.
"The latest price hike is part of our regular review of the prices," said Nobu Sunaga, a spokesperson for Toyota.
President Donald Trump recently imposed a 25 per cent tariff on imported vehicles and auto components, a move aimed at boosting domestic manufacturing. While analysts expect the new duties to put upward pressure on prices for foreign brands, Toyota has downplayed the link in this instance.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
29 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Company advised by Trump sons said it hoped to benefit from fed money, then took it back
NEW YORK (AP) — A public document filed by a company that just hired President Donald Trump's two oldest sons as advisers included a sentence early Monday that said it hoped to benefit from grants and other incentives from the federal government, which their father happens to lead. But when The Associated Press asked the Trump family business about the apparent conflict of interest, the document was revised and the line taken out. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are getting 'founder shares' worth millions of dollars in New America Acquisition 1 Corp., a company with no operating business that hopes to fill that hole by purchasing an American company that can play 'a meaningful role in revitalizing domestic manufacturing,' according to to the filing. The president has geared his trade policy toward boosting manufacturing in the U.S. The original version of the securities filing said the target company should be 'well positioned' to tap federal or state government incentives. That reference was taken out of the revised version of the filing. The Trump Organization didn't reply to a question about whether New America still planned to benefit from government programs or why the line was cut. But the outside law firm Paul Weiss that helped prepare the document sent an email to AP saying it was 'mistake' made by 'scriveners,' an old term for transcribers of legal papers. Kathleen Clark, an expert in government ethics, said any excuses are too late because the Trumps had already tipped their hand. Monday Mornings The latest local business news and a lookahead to the coming week. 'They just deleted the language. They haven't committed not to do what they said earlier today they were planning to do,' said the Washington University law professor and Trump critic. 'It's an attempt to exploit public office for private profit.' New America is what's know as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. It's a publicly traded company that exists solely to use its funds to acquire another company and take the target public. New America plans to raise money by selling stock on the New York Stock Exchange at $10 a share. That will hand the two Trump sons a total of $5 million in paper wealth on the first day of trading. The company hopes to sell enough shares to raise $300 million, which it then plans to use buying a yet unidentified manufacturer. A press release issued by New America saying it was focused on 'American values and priorities.' It made no mention of the aim to get government incentives. The filing to New America's potential new investors to Securities and Exchange Commission was explicit about what it was looking for in target company. It said, among other things, it would that can ride 'public policy tailwinds' by benefiting from federal or state 'grants, tax credits, government contracts or preferential procurement programs.'
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
How reliable is the jobs data? Economists and Wall Street still trust it
WASHINGTON (AP) — The monthly jobs report is already closely-watched on Wall Street and in Washington but has taken on a new importance after President Donald Trump on Friday fired the official who oversees it. Trump claimed that June's employment figures were 'RIGGED' to make him and other Republicans 'look bad.' Yet he provided no evidence and even the official Trump had appointed in his first term to oversee the report, William Beach, condemned the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics appointed by former President Joe Biden. The firing followed Friday's jobs report that showed hiring was weak in July and had come to nearly a standstill in May and June, right after Trump rolled out sweeping tariffs. Economists and Wall Street investors have long considered the job figures reliable, with share prices and bond yields often reacting sharply when they are released. Yet Friday's revisions were unusually large — the largest, outside of a recession, in five decades. And the surveys used to compile the report are facing challenges from declining response rates, particularly since COVID, as fewer companies complete the surveys. Nonetheless, that hasn't led most economists to doubt them. 'The bottom line for me is, I wouldn't take the low collection rate as any evidence that the numbers are less reliable,' Omair Sharif, founder and chief economist at Inflation Insights, a consulting firm, said. Many academics, statisticians and economists have warned for some time that declining budgets were straining the government's ability to gather economic data. There were several government commissions studying ways to improve things like survey response rates, but the Trump administration disbanded them earlier this year. Heather Boushey, a top economic adviser in the Biden White House, noted that without Trump's firing of McEntarfer, there would be more focus on last week's data, which points to a slowing economy. 'We're having this conversation about made-up issues to distract us from what the data is showing,' Boushey said. 'Revisions of this magnitude in a negative direction may indicate bad things to come for the labor market.' Here are some things to know about the jobs report: Economists and Wall Street trust the data Most economists say that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a nonpolitical agency staffed by people obsessed with getting the numbers right. The only political appointee is the commissioner, who doesn't see the data until it's finalized, two days before it is issued to the public. Erica Groshen, the BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said she suggested different language in the report to 'liven it up', but was shot down. She was told that if asked to describe a cup as half-empty or half-full, BLS says 'it is an eight ounce cup with four ounces of liquid.' The revised jobs data that has attracted Trump's ire is actually more in line with other figures than before the revision. For example, payroll processor ADP uses data from its millions of clients to calculate its own jobs report, and it showed a sharp hiring slowdown in May and June that is closer to the revised BLS data. Trump and his White House have a long track record of celebrating the jobs numbers — when they are good. These are the figures is Trump attacking Trump has focused on the revisions to the May and June data, which on Friday were revised lower, with job gains in May reduced to 19,000 from 144,000, and for June to just 14,000 from 147,000. Every month's jobs data is revised in the following two months. Trump also repeated a largely inaccurate attack from the campaign about an annual revision last August, which reduced total employment in the United States by 818,000, or about 0.5%. The government also revises employment figures every year. Trump charged the annual revision was released before the 2024 presidential election to 'boost' Vice President Kamala Harris's 'chances of Victory,' yet it was two months before the election and widely reported at the time that the revision lowered hiring during the Biden-Harris administration and pointed to a weaker economy. Here's why the government revises the data The monthly revisions occur because many companies that respond to the government's surveys send their data in late, or correct the figures they've already submitted. The proportion of companies sending in their data later has risen in the past decade. Every year, the BLS does an additional revision based on actual job counts that are derived from state unemployment insurance records. Those figures cover 95% of U.S. businesses and aren't derived from a survey but are not available in real time. These are the factors that cause revisions Figuring out how many new jobs have been added or lost each month is more complicated than it may sound. For example, if one person takes a second job, should you focus on the number of jobs, which has increased, or the number of employed people, which hasn't? (The government measures both: The unemployment rate is based on how many people either have or don't have jobs, while the number of jobs added or lost is counted separately). Each month, the government surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies at over 630,000 locations — including multiple locations for the same business — covering about one-third of all workers. Still, the government also has to make estimates: What if a company goes out of business? It likely won't fill out any forms showing the jobs lost. And what about new businesses? They can take a while to get on the government's radar. The BLS seeks to capture these trends by estimating their impact on employment. Those estimates can be wrong, of course, until they are fixed by the annual revisions. The revisions are often larger around turning points in the economy. For example, when the economy is growing, there may be more startups than the government expects, so revisions will be higher. If the economy is slowing or slipping into a recession, the revisions may be larger on the downside. Here's why the May and June revisions may have been so large Ernie Tedeschi, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, points to the current dynamics of the labor market: Both hiring and firing have sharply declined, and fewer Americans are quitting their jobs to take other work. As a result, most of the job gains or losses each month are probably occurring at new companies, or those going out of business. And those are the ones the government uses models to estimate, which can make them more volatile. Groshen also points out that since the pandemic there has been a surge of new start-up companies, after many Americans lost their jobs or sought more independence. Yet they may not have created as many jobs as startups did pre-COVID, which throws off the government's models. Revisions seem to be getting bigger The revisions to May and June's job totals, which reduced hiring by a total of 258,000, were the largest — outside recessions — since 1967, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. Kevin Hassett, Trump's top economic adviser, went on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday and said, 'What we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers.' Hassett blamed a sharp drop in response rates to the government's surveys during and after the pandemic: 'When COVID happened, because response rates went down a lot, then revision rates skyrocketed.' Yet calculations by Tedeschi show that while revisions spiked after the pandemic, they have since declined and are much smaller than in the 1960s and 1970s. Other concerns about the government's data Monday Mornings The latest local business news and a lookahead to the coming week. Many economists and statisticians have sounded the alarm about things like declining response rates for years. A decade ago, about 60% of companies surveyed by BLS responded. Now, only about 40% do. The decline has been an international phenomenon, particularly since COVID. The United Kingdom has even suspended publication of an official unemployment rate because of falling responses. And earlier this year the BLS said that it was cutting back on its collection of inflation data because of the Trump administration's hiring freeze, raising concerns about the robustness of price data just as economists are trying to gauge the impact of tariffs on inflation. U.S. government statistical agencies have seen an inflation-adjusted 16% drop in funding since 2009, according to a July report from the American Statistical Association. 'We are at an inflection point,' the report said. 'To meet current and future challenges requires thoughtful, well-planned investment … In contrast, what we have observed is uncoordinated and unplanned reductions with no visible plan for the future.
Globe and Mail
2 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
How will Canadian consumers be affected by Trump's de minimis changes?
U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order suspending the de minimis exemption for imports could have blowback for Canadian consumers as some smaller sellers pull back from the country, larger players focus on this market and deliveries temporarily slow for everyone. The order signed on Wednesday means imports valued at or under US$800 soon will no longer be exempt from tariffs and instead be subject to the blanket fees the U.S. has imposed on trading partners. 'The de minimis rule was a golden ticket for smaller Canadian exporters,' said Markus Giesler, a marketing professor at the Schulich School of Business. 'Right now, without this, they may be forced to pay high prices, reroute logistics or walk away from the world's biggest market.' For many small Canadian businesses selling lower-value goods, such as arts and craft businesses and Etsy sellers, the suspension makes the U.S. market unviable, said David Nagy, founder of consulting firm eCommerce Canada. The paperwork and brokerage fees may not make sense for lower-value transactions, he said, adding that a $55 order could now require an additional 45 minutes spent on documentation, with no added financial benefit. Trump to suspend duty-free exemption for low-value shipments Chris Jarvis, chief operating officer at Ecom Logistics, said Canadian small e-commerce businesses he works with rely heavily on U.S. sales, and their need to maintain U.S. customers may lead them to leave the Canadian market entirely. 'Any small Canadian merchant who got traction in the Canadian market … ends up seeing 90 per cent of their sales happening in America,' he said. To maintain that customer base, some businesses will need to move inventory into the U.S. and effectively run a U.S.-based business. Options are even more limited for businesses importing some of their goods or materials from China or other tariffed countries, leaving them exposed to additional tariffs with less of a chance at becoming compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada free-trade agreement. Many up-and-coming American and Canadian creators selling niche products via Instagram, TikTok or Etsy, for example, may elect not to come to Canada or stay here. They're thinking, 'Why would I want to open up another inventory position in the country of Canada, when 90 per cent of my volume is going to come from the US anyway,' said Mr. Jarvis. How U.S. duties targeted at China are disrupting Canadian businesses If they pull away, this will limit product availability in Canada and consumers will have fewer opportunities to access unique or small-batch goods they once could easily order. On the other hand, U.S. restrictions may push larger companies such as Temu and Shein to 'aggressively look at other markets,' including Canada, said Jonathan Calof, a professor of international business and strategy at the University of Ottawa's Telfer School of Management. Data provided to The Globe and Mail by marketing-intelligence firm Sensor Tower shows Temu's Canadian ad spend jumped 61 per cent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2025 following Mr. Trump's tariff threats, while Shein's rose 34 per cent. Whether doubling down on markets outside of the U.S. would mean lower prices for Canadian consumers depends on how companies react. 'They're going to try to gain market share, and they're going to try to stay competitive … some will lower prices, some will try better quality, some will diversify,' said Prof. Calof. But when it comes to small e-commerce businesses, they don't have much runway to sustain long-term price cuts, he said. The bigger risk is that their business may disappear altogether. In addition to reduced selection, the de minimis suspension on U.S. imports could mean that Canadians ordering from the U.S. will face slightly longer waiting times because of increased border scrutiny more broadly, said Matthew Melvin, a spokesperson for Canadian shipping company Chit Chats. Shoppers trying to return something that they bought from the U.S. could also be hit with added hurdles, he said. While the effect to Canadians' wallets from the de minimis change may not be immediate, the economic ripple effects will ultimately be significant, said Steve Bozicevic, CEO of A&A Customs Brokers. 'If Americans start buying less, then you'll just have less jobs, and you'll have more inflation,' he said. 'It's more the macroeconomic impact.'
