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

(www.wsj.com)
462 points JumpCrisscross | 6 comments | 30 Aug 25 20:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.733s | source | bottom
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lazarus01 ◴[30 Aug 25 22:32 UTC] No.45078568[source]▶
In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created.

Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.

NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html

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timr ◴[30 Aug 25 22:51 UTC] No.45078679[source]▶
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.

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1. atoav ◴[30 Aug 25 23:55 UTC] No.45079076[source]▶
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.

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2. californical ◴[31 Aug 25 07:11 UTC] No.45081050[source]▶
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

3. m348e912 ◴[31 Aug 25 10:54 UTC] No.45082186[source]▶
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.
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4. simonh ◴[31 Aug 25 11:48 UTC] No.45082452[source]▶
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.

5. toast0 ◴[31 Aug 25 12:20 UTC] No.45082620[source]▶
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.

6. xnx ◴[31 Aug 25 16:24 UTC] No.45084399[source]▶
Isolationists would say we should be eating corn instead