This week on the Capitol Gains podcast, it’s all about the “exemption season” for tariffs.
President Trump first scaled back tariffs on auto imports on Wednesday by granting the Big Three automakers a one-month reprieve. Then on Thursday, days after 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada went into effect, Trump issued a one-month pause for goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
“Trump went forward with these tariffs on Tuesday. In the immediate days, the economic cost of them became very evident,” Yahoo Finance Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul said. “The CEOs and business leaders were getting to anyone they could at the White House, and they’re clearly getting through in the sense that there certainly has been a walk-back [on tariff policy]. The question is what this looks like in a month when the big tariffs are in place.”
Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman noted that this tariff-then-exempt approach allows the president to exert an extraordinary amount of control over the economy by allowing Trump to make one-off decisions about individual companies or industries.
For context, Trump has “already imposed more tariffs in six weeks than all of 2018 and 2019,” Newman explained. “There were 125,000 requests for exemptions from those tariffs [during his first term]. … The Trump administration approved 41,000 exemptions, or about one-third of the requests.”
