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In the scramble to figure out how exactly “Liberation Day” is going to upend global trade, nuclear errors may occur.
Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond released a great chart (covered in mainFT) identifying the sectors that will be most impacted by Trump’s sweeping trade levies.
The first four — leather goods, apparel, furniture, and textile product mills — made a lot of sense. These industries all import heavily from the countries facing the steepest tariffs, like Vietnam, China and Cambodia.
But the fifth item prompted a bit more head-scratching. And when the Richmond Fed kindly provided the underlying data for the chart, they also supplied a clarification for the ages.
PS: we had a typo in one of the industries, instead of “Nuclear Warheads” it should have been “Support Activities for agriculture and forestry.”
You might be wondering how “nuclear warheads” ended up in place of “support activities for agriculture and forestry.” And if you’re developing conspiracy theories about the cover-up of nuke inflation, we’re afraid we must let you down: it seems it really was a typo.
The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code for “support activities for agriculture and forestry” is 115. The Product Service Code (PSC) code for “nuclear warheads and warhead sections” is 1115.
As fat-finger errors involving nuclear warheads go, it’s probably one of the better ones.
Feeling a little more relaxed, FT Alphaville started asking the obvious question: what on earth are “support activities for agriculture and forestry”?
Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Industries in the Support Activities for Agriculture and Forestry subsector provide support services that are an essential part of agricultural and forestry production.”
So that’s that all cleared up.
The chart on the Richmond Fed’s website has now been “updated to accurately reflect the proper industries” and the original work has been lost to history. Here’s the disarmed version:
