Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

Even assuming that there were no other federal, state or local YoY differences [1] that could explain this change (and that the numbers are right as presented in the first place), New York City private sector employment is nothing like most other parts of the US: it's the largest city in the US by a large margin, it has a concentration of employment in a few major industries (finance, fashion, publishing, software) that aren't represented elsewhere, and...it hasn't been a manufacturing center since the victorian era.

You can't wave this away with "NYC is a leading indicator for the US economy". To the extent that it's true at all, you could say it about any large city in the US.

[1] Like, say: interest rates, the business cycle, AI, the slowdown in software hiring, or the minimum wage increase that NYC implemented on January 1, 2025.

This dismissal of a massive drop in hiring (literally 1.5% of the previous half year’s reported hiring) is wishful thinking.

“Ignore this data point, NYC is special.” Color me skeptical.

I'm not ignoring it, but I’m not falling into a post hoc fallacy, either.

I'll put it this way: if I were ignoring it, I'd be ignoring one more data point than you are in cherry-picking a single example.

I'd be ignoring one more data point

whoops. fixed.

It's true that NYC private sector employment is different from the US labor market as a whole, but NYC private sector employment is better representative of what readers of this site care about than overall US employment. Readers are much more likely to be affected by changes in the professional services and information sectors than, say, agriculture.

Yes, a tariff can be a good measure. But for that the tariffed goods need to be selected carefully and rationally und not whatever the heck the Trump administration is doing.

For example you can tariff bananas all you like, that won't spark widespread banana production in a climate that can't grow them.

And again, even if you assume that all of that is true, you're still making a leap of logic that these changes are because of the tariffs.

The agricultural section indicators are that there's about to be a big, expensive bailout for ag:

> “Right now, we have zero bushels of soybeans on the books with China for this fall harvest that has begun in the Deep South,” Ragland said. “Normally by this time, close to 40% of our sales for the marketing year are on the books. And with zero on the books right now, it is alarming for American soybean farmers.”

https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/us-soybean-exports-to-c...

The first time that Trump screwed over with tariffs, they got tons of bailout money that we all paid for.

Not all sectors of the economy are so lucky. The big man at the top must be paid with either bribes or allegiance or both.

What else changed?

I named several in my original comment.

The big, blinking, obvious YoY change for anyone here is tech employment.

No but it could shift consumer demand a bit to favor apples, for example, which largely come from domestic sources.

Not arguing one way or another, but your reduction isn’t quite accurate with the affects tariffs can have

ICE raids are freeing up a lot of spots in the agri sector.

Hawaii produces 6.3 million lbs per year of bananas which is a tiny fraction of the 8 million metric tons per year Ecuador produces. Labor and land cost is the primary reason Hawaii can't compete with Latin America, but long-standing tariffs could change that.

About 2m people are employed directly or indirectly in the Ecuadorean banana industry. The total population of Hawaii is only 1.5m. Also you could fit Hawaii in a corner of Ecuador.

Unless you turned over all the islands exclusively to bananas, and forget about tourism, pineapples or anything else, you’re not even going to get close.

Hawaii is already heavily agricultural. Most of the non-agricultural land is reserved for conservation. Banana production would likely replace other production, and then we've got less of that stuff.

Also, shipping to continental US is limited by the Jones Act and the lack of capacity in US built, owned, and crewed shipping lines. Assuming a desire to produce things in the US, I don't think it's sensible to tarrif bananas to grow them in Hawaii, and then relax the Jones act so they can be shipped to the continental US on foreign carriers.

It's part of the plan. Small farms will be the ones to go bankrupt. The large corporate, black rock et al owned, "farms" (read businesses) will be bailed out and allowed to scoop up the little ones for pennies onto the dollar.

As a result of tariffs

Isolationists would say we should be eating corn instead

No, that was R&D deduction changes.