At min 0:29 of this clip from FoxBusiness:
I suspect Antoni views these predictions as “suspicious” only because they run counter to his priors.
Remember this is the guy who looked at the import price index, and concluded tariffs hadn’t raised prices facing American households and firms, forgetting that the import price index doesn’t include tariffs…
In any event, Antoni takes issue with the 55% tariff pass through to consumers, saying that none of the apocalyptic price increases had yet shown up. I would say (as a person who actually took a PhD field exam in international economics) that there is actually substantial evidence of price increases to consumers, especially once one takes into account the timing of actually implemented tariffs (remember all those “pauses”), and the time taken for pass through to occur.
Regarding actual effective tariff rates, vs. Trump-declared tariff rates, we can show the disjuncture:
Figure 1: Average effective tariff rate (blue), and average declared tariff rate (tan), both in %. Source: OECD Interim Economic Outlook, Paweł Skrzypczyński.
The “effective” tariff rate shown above is calculated by dividing tariff revenue by imports. The relevant effective tariff rate only took off to around May, to 8.3%, while the Trump-declared tariff rate was much higher, much earlier. I think we can expect to see much higher effects once price data is reported again.
