Apologies in advance, but we've got to do a little math to get going today.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Wednesday today. It's what the third of April.

It is always to have you along, everybody. Take 145. Cut it in half. More than half, actually. What do you got?

What you've got, according to reporting today in the Wall Street Journal,

is that perhaps soon-to-be new tariff rate on most Chinese imports to this economy.

The journal stresses President Trump hasn't made an actual decision yet,

but the paper says the new rate could be somewhere between 50 and 60%. To be clear, that would still be an astronomically high tax on imports, just less astronomically high.

The response from Chinese officials today, and I'm paraphrasing here, kind of goes like this.

We can talk or we can fight, Beijing says, it's up to you.

The reason, of course, that these tariffs matter so much is that we are fundamentally

a services economy. The services sector, and this is according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis,

it accounts for more than 70% of gross domestic product, which I mention because this month,

services grew at its second weakest pace in the past year. That's according to

S&P Global this morning. And the weak growth is thanks in part to weaker demand, and the

business is surveyed by S&P pinned the blame for that on, yeah, tariffs. So, Marketplace's

Justin Ho looked into how vulnerable the U.S. services sector might be to the ongoing trade war.

The U.S. exports about a trillion dollars worth of services each year. That's about a third of all U.S. exports.

Abby Samp is with Oxford economics.

This would be things like law, consulting, accounting, financial services.

Services like these are not directly subject to retaliatory tariffs right now,

says Robert Johnson, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame.

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