April 14, 2025

Hi, everyone. My name is Taylor St. Germain with ITR Economics. Welcome to this edition of TrendsTalk. We at ITR, you’re a political and unbiased source of economic intelligence. And today, I wanted to discuss tariffs because that seems to be what we’re all the most concerned about for good reason, and it’s capturing a lot of the media attention. I know I just did a previous TrendsTalk talking a little bit about tariffs, but I wanted to approach it from a slightly different angle this time.

Now, I first wanted to give a shout out to my colleague, Michelle, who wrote our executive summary in the latest edition of the Trends Report. Michelle’s a brilliant economist, and please go check out that executive summary because there’s a lot of good information as it relates to tariffs. But I wanted to call out a chart that Michelle shared in that executive summary.

What this chart highlights is the different commodity good and whether it’s something that we source domestically or is imported. Now, Michelle highlighted a number of different industries and categories, but there were some industries that really stood out to me.

And the question, again, is important because it begs the question of how much are we producing domestically versus how much are we having to import from overseas? And of course, if the percentage of this industry or good is primarily imported from overseas, then tariffs are going to have a lot bigger impact on that. And so Michelle did a great job of laying this out, and she highlighted industries that have a higher percentage of their commodities domestically sourced versus imported from overseas. So let me share some examples of exactly what I’m detailing here.

For example, when we look at petroleum and coal products, about 91.1% of petroleum and coal products are domestically sourced. So only 8.9% are imported from overseas. Again, an industry that might be less likely to be disrupted in a major way or experience major inflation as a result of tariffs, because so much of that production happens here domestically.  You know, another example is food. Is food is 88.3% domestically sourced, only 11.7% being imported from overseas. The, you know, one of the other ones I’d share with you is wood products, for example, 85.8% domestically sourced versus the only 14.2% that are being imported overseas.

Now, the challenge here is there are industries that we are heavily reliant on imported goods. I share computer and electronic products. When it comes to computer and electronic products, only 15% are domestically sourced from the US. So 85% of computer and electronic products are coming in from overseas. That industry is going to be one that can be very exposed to tariffs, very exposed to additional inflation and very exposed to disruptions as a result of these tariff policies.

A couple of others I’d share for you, leather, 93.1% of leather products are imported from overseas. Apparel is another one that’s up there very high. 96.1% of apparel and accessories are actually imported into our country from overseas. So industries that have these high import percentages, those are industries that are going to face a lot more disruption as a result of tariffs. Again, Michelle detailed on this chart a number of different industries. And it’s important that we’re evaluating this in light of all of the tariffs that we’ve seen being put into place from this administration.

Listen, folks, some industries are winners from tariffs, some industries are losers. That’s very clear. It’s not a one size fits all. And that’s why it’s so important that we take this industry by industry approach to understand which industries are going to be more exposed and disrupted from tariffs and which will be less. And a lot of that comes down to, are we domestically sourcing, or are we importing from overseas?

So please check out that article in our Trends Report, that’s the executive summary from April. There’s this tariff situations changing by the day, and there’s a lot that we’ll continue to need to monitor and talk about on future TrendsTalk episodes.

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of TrendsTalk. Please remember to like and subscribe to Trend Stock wherever you listen to your podcasts. And I’m looking forward to seeing you all in the next one.