Joshua Lott/Getty Images
- The costs of punitive tariffs that rolled out against China over the past year have largely fallen on US businesses and consumers, the New York Fed said Monday.
- The findings added to a long string of independent research with the same results.
- That contradicts a repeated claim by President Donald Trump that China pays tariffs.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The costs of punitive tariffs rolled out against China over the past year have largely fallen on US businesses and consumers, the New York Federal Reserve said Monday.
The central bank found in a new study that Chinese businesses have not significantly lowered prices on exports to the US in response to the trade dispute that began in early 2018. That signaled that Americans have instead had to absorb additional import taxes levied by the Trump administration, estimated at around $40 billion annually.
“The continued stability of import prices for goods from China means US firms and consumers have to pay the tariff tax,” Fed economists Matthew Higgins, Thomas Klitgaard, and Michael Nattinger wrote in the study.
The findings added to a long string of research that has contradicted a repeated claim by President Donald Trump: that foreign exporters have paid the import taxes of up to 25% on thousands of products.
The White House has continued to assert that claim even after the same conclusion was reached in several other major independent studies, including from Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago.
“China is paying us tremendous — and they’re paying for it,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting last week. “Those tariffs are not paid by us. Those tariffs are paid because they’re devaluing their currency and pouring cash into their economy.”
But the New York Fed said its findings suggested Chinese firms have not used exchange rates to maintain competitiveness through lower prices.
“Instead, they’ve accepted the loss in competitiveness in the US market and have used the weaker currency to pad profits on each unit of sales,” Higgins, Klitgaard, and Nattinger wrote.
