from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, July 28th.

So you've probably been hearing the tariffs and trade deals headlines in recent days.

Yesterday with the EU, last week with

Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In some cases, it seems like the U.S. will be imposing

tariffs on their exports to us, like 15 percent now for most things coming from the EU, but they

won't be taxing U.S. exports to them. But an article in Kiplinger,

the personal finance publication, had this headline the other day, GM not planning to raise

car prices despite tariff hit, their CFO says. So let's talk about that and the bigger picture

of the relationship between

these tariff changes and what Americans are paying and will pay for things with Alexandra's

Focos, personal finance reporter for Kiplinger. Alexander, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Of course. Thank you so much for having me. So, Alexandra, you reported that GM's quarterly report

released this month showed more than a billion dollar cost of tariffs to the company. Did they get

specific? Or can you about how they're feeling that? Yeah, absolutely. So this is a trend we've seen

basically across the automobile industry

that across the board, no matter where the company is based, basically every car company

is taking a major hit that is coming from a 25% tariff that the president imposed earlier this

spring.

And so for GM in particular, they reported their second quarter earnings last week. They announced that it was a $1.1 billion hit that they say is from tariffs.

And again, this is a trend.

Stalantis said they've taken a $2.7 billion hit so far this year.

In the first half of 2025, Volkswagen had a $1.5 billion hit.

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