by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
No signs yet of tariffs getting passed through to consumers, neither in durable goods nor in clothing and footwear.
A lot of durable goods sold to consumers are imported or contain imported components or materials subject to the new tariffs. Durable goods are where tariffs being passed on to consumers would show up first. They include new and used vehicles, furniture, appliances, floor coverings, tools, sporting goods, computers, smartphones, audio and video equipment, etc. So we look at the Consumer Price Index for durable goods to see if tariffs – companies paid an additional $23 billion of them in April and May – are getting passed on to consumers, or if companies along the way eat the tariffs with their profits that ballooned during the high inflation era.