ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Corporate America is having a weird tariff summer. Some big companies said this week that President Trump's new import taxes are eating into their profits, but for others, business is booming, and so is the stock market. NPR financial correspondent Maria Aspan is here to make sense of this. Hi, Maria.
MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: Hey there.
SHAPIRO: You've been looking at corporate earnings, which gives some window into how big businesses are feeling about the economy. What do they tell us right now?
ASPAN: They have been all over the place. More than a hundred of the company - of the country's largest companies reported earnings just this week, and we've seen some big household names, like carmaker General Motors, warning that President Trump's new tariffs are eating into their business. Or there was Chipotle saying that customers are losing confidence in the economy, and so they're buying fewer burrito bowls.
On the other hand, some companies are having a great summer. For example, big tech companies like Google and Netflix and banks like JPMorganChase beat analyst expectations and made a ton of money in the last three months. There's been kind of a change from what we heard during the last corporate earnings season in April, which, as you remember, was just after Trump first unveiled his tariffs.
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
ASPAN: At the time, we saw a lot of big companies sounding the alarm about how this would harm both their businesses and the larger economy. But fast-forward three months, and the view from corporate America is looking a little rosier.
SHAPIRO: That's so interesting and kind of surprising. Do you know why?
ASPAN: Well, some of it is that many of the tariffs, as you know, haven't been finalized.
SHAPIRO: Right.
ASPAN: And as the White House announces more trade deals, some of these new taxes are lower than feared. For example, this week, the White House announced tariffs of 15% on Japanese imports, which is still a lot, but it's not as bad as the previously threatened 25%.
Another reason is that not every big company is directly affected by tariffs. I mean, think about banks or tech companies. They just don't rely as much on imports.
And also, some businesses are just a little tired of worrying about tariffs. I was struck by a comment last week by JPMorganChase's chief financial officer, who told journalists that the bank's business customers have accepted that they just need to navigate through this and get on with it.
SHAPIRO: Well, what about the consumers, the rest of us? What does it mean for us?
ASPAN: It is a little wait and see. I mean, it seems like prices are rising. We saw inflation ticking up a little last month. But it may be a while before we start to get the full picture, especially, again, while we're waiting for the White House to finalize more tariffs. I talked about this with Laura Veldkamp. She's a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School.
LAURA VELDKAMP: But it might first affect firms' profits and earnings and then show up as an increase in consumer prices.
ASPAN: Now, some big companies say they're trying to avoid passing on costs to consumers, at least for the time being, but we don't know yet what prices we'll be seeing a few weeks or months from now.
SHAPIRO: You're describing this kind of mixed bag from American corporations, so why is the stock market hitting record highs?
ASPAN: Well, some of it is investors focusing on the good news - better-than-expected earnings, better-than-expected trade deals - especially after all the panic and volatility of April. But Veldkamp and others are worried that after all the tariffs back and forth, investors have also started downplaying what President Trump says. Ultimately, what markets are doing right now and what big companies are reporting - they're both really useful snapshots of this moment in time, but we still don't know, and won't know for a while, what the full impact of tariffs will be on the economy.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Maria Aspan. Thank you.
ASPAN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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