Business

Trump Will Hit Mexico, Canada and China With Tariffs

Published

10 months ago

February 1, 2025

Trump Will Hit Mexico, Canada and China With Tariffs

President Trump plans to impose stiff tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China on Saturday, a move aimed at pressuring America’s largest trading partners into accepting more migrants and halting the flow of migrants and drugs into the United States.

Mr. Trump will put a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada, along with a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a news briefing Friday.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, Mr. Trump said the tariffs were punishment for Canada, Mexico and China allowing drugs and migrants to flood into the United States.

Mr. Trump’s decision to hit America’s trading partners with tariffs could mark the beginning of a disruptive and damaging trade war, one that is far messier than the conflict that defined Mr. Trump’s first term.

Back then, Mr. Trump placed tariffs on nearly two-thirds of Chinese imports, resulting in China hitting the U.S. with levies of its own. Mr. Trump also imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, inciting retaliation from the European Union, Mexico and Canada.

While the tariffs against allies were viewed as controversial, they were relatively limited in scope. It remains to be seen exactly what products Mr. Trump’s new tariffs apply to, but the president has implied that they would be expansive and cover imports from Canada and Mexico, close allies of the United States.

Mr. Trump said on Friday that he would also “absolutely” impose tariffs on the European Union, saying they had “treated us so terribly.” He added that the United States would eventually put tariffs on chips, oil and gas — “I think around the 18th of February,” he said — as well as later levies on steel, aluminum and copper.

Canada, Mexico and China are America’s three largest trading partners, supplying the United States with cars, medicine, shoes, timber, electronics, steel and many other products. Together, they account for more than a third of the goods and services imported to or bought from the United States, supporting tens of millions of American jobs.

The three governments have promised to answer Mr. Trump’s levies with tariffs of their own on U.S. exports, including Florida orange juice, Tennessee whiskey and Kentucky peanut butter. All three of those states have Republican senators representing them in Congress and voted for Mr. Trump in 2024.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs would immediately add a surcharge for the importers who bring products across the border, most of which are U.S. companies. In the nearer term, that could disrupt supply chains and lead to shortages, if importers choose not to pay the cost of the tariff.

If importers do pay the tariff, it will probably translate into higher prices for some American goods, as those companies generally pass the cost of tariffs on to their customers.

“Hopes that Trump’s tariffs threats were merely bluster and a bargaining tool are now crumbling under the harsh reality of his determination to deploy tariffs as a tool to shift other countries’ policies to his liking,” said Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Cornell University.

Mr. Trump had said in November that he would put the tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, in an effort to halt the flow of migrants and drugs, particularly fentanyl, into the United States.

The threat set off a scramble from Canadian and Mexican officials, who tried to persuade the administration to hold off on tariffs by engaging in last-minute talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and detailing the efforts they were making to police the border.

Auto, agricultural and energy companies have all been pushing the Trump administration hard not to apply tariffs, and have called for an exclusions process that could give some products an exemption.

Marcelo Ebrard, the Mexican economy minister, said Friday that tariffs would most likely lead to shortages in specific goods, and that U.S. prices on Mexican goods would increase. He called the move “a strategic mistake” by the Trump administration.

“The main impact is clear: Millions of families in the United States would have to pay 25 percent more,” he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, in a post on X on Friday afternoon, said that “no one — on either side of the border — wants to see American tariffs on Canadian goods.” He said that “if the United States moves ahead, Canada’s ready with a forceful and immediate response.”

A spokesman for the Chinese embassy said that China firmly opposed tariffs and that any differences or frictions should be resulted through dialogue. “There is no winner in a trade war or tariff war, which serves the interests of neither side nor the world,” the spokesman said.

Mr. Trump’s advisers had been weighing different options for the tariffs, like applying them to specific sectors, such as steel and aluminum, or delaying their effective date for several months, according to people familiar with the planning.

Ms. Leavitt said the president had chosen to impose tariffs because the countries “have allowed an unprecedented invasion of illegal fentanyl that is killing American citizens, and also illegal immigrants into our country.”

“The amount of fentanyl that has been seized at the southern border in the last few years alone has the potential to kill tens of millions of Americans,” she said. “And so the president is intent on doing this.”

At both borders, the number of illegal crossings has dropped sharply.

The number of unauthorized crossings at the southern border in December 2023 reached nearly 250,000, overwhelming the Border Patrol and causing the government to shut down a port of entry. At the northern border, the flow of migrants crossing illegally skyrocketed during the 2024 fiscal year. During that time, more than 23,000 arrests were made of migrants crossing illegally — two years before that figure was around 2,000.

The situation at the border has changed since then.

In December, agents made roughly 47,000 arrests at the southern border and 510 at the northern border.

The economic fallout from the tariffs would depend on how they were structured, but the ripple effects could be broad. Canada, Mexico and the United States have been governed by a trade agreement for more than 30 years, and many industries, from automobiles and apparel to agriculture, have grown highly integrated across North America.

Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the tariffs would be “very costly” for U.S. businesses.

U.S. factories rely on inputs from both countries, including minerals and timber from Canada and auto parts from Mexico. The tariffs would also go against efforts that U.S. companies have made in recent years to move out of China, at the urging of the Trump and Biden administrations, Ms. Lovely said.

According to economists at S&P Global, the auto and electric equipment sectors in Mexico would be most exposed to disruption if tariffs were enacted, as would mineral processing in Canada. In the United States, the largest risks would be to the farming, fishing, metals and auto sectors.

Jonathan Samford, the president of Global Business Alliance, which represents international companies, said the tariffs might result in rising costs for U.S. consumers, slowdowns for U.S. businesses and lost opportunities for future investment.

In his remarks from the Oval Office Friday, Mr. Trump said he would “probably” reduce the tariff on Canadian oil to 10 percent. Roughly 60 percent of the oil that the United States imports comes from Canada, and about 7 percent comes from Mexico, and experts have warned that cutting off those flows could cause American energy prices to spike.

While the United States is the world’s largest oil producer, refineries need to mix the lighter crude produced in domestic fields with heavier oil from places like Canada to make fuels like gasoline and diesel.

The potential economic implications from tariffs are also complicating matters for the Federal Reserve, which is still trying to wrestle inflation down to its 2 percent target. The Fed this week held interest rates steady, after a series of cuts, amid persistent inflation and questions about how the tariffs would play out.

On balance, most economists expect higher trade barriers to raise prices for U.S. businesses and households, which could lead to a temporary burst of higher inflation. Whether that escalates into a more pernicious problem will depend on whether Americans’ expectations about future inflation start to shift higher in a meaningful way.

Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab, estimates that a 25 percent tariff on all Canadian and Mexican imported goods — paired with a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese imports — would lead to a permanent 0.8 percent bump in the price level, as measured by the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. That translates to roughly $1,300 per household on average. Those estimates assume that the targeted countries enact retaliatory measures and that the Federal Reserve does not take action by adjusting interest rates.

Mr. Tedeschi expects tariffs on that level to eventually shave 0.2 percent off gross domestic product once inflation is taken into account.

Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers have disputed the idea that the tariffs fuel inflation, and argued that exporters from countries such as China would lower their prices in the face of higher U.S. tariffs.

In the press briefing, Ms. Leavitt said inflation had remained subdued in Mr. Trump’s first term, despite tariffs being imposed. And she said the president was undertaking other policies that would lower inflation, like passing tax cuts and encouraging energy production.

Hamed Aleaziz, Vjosa Isai and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.

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Business

Podcast industry is divided as AI bots flood the airways with thousands of programs

Published

2 hours ago

December 12, 2025

Press Room

Podcast industry is divided as AI bots flood the airways with thousands of programs

Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.

Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.

“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”

AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.

Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.

Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.

She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.

“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.

Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.

Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.

“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.

In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.

Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.

Jason ⁠Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.

“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”

Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.

Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.

“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.

Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.

Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.

The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.

Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.

“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.

One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.

“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.

Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.

The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.

When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.

“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.

Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.

“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.

Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.

Business

L.A. County sues oil companies over unplugged oil wells in Inglewood

Published

14 hours ago

December 11, 2025

Press Room

L.A. County sues oil companies over unplugged oil wells in Inglewood

Los Angeles County is suing four oil and gas companies for allegedly failing to plug idle oil wells in the large Inglewood Oil Field near Baldwin Hills.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court charges Sentinel Peak Resources California, Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. with failing to properly clean up at least 227 idle and exhausted wells in the oil field. The wells “continue to leak toxic pollutants into the air, land, and water and present unacceptable dangers to human health, safety, and the environment,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit aims to force the operators to address dangers posed by the unplugged wells. More than a million people live within five miles of the Inglewood oil field.

“We are making it clear to these oil companies that Los Angeles County is done waiting and that we remain unwavering in our commitment to protect residents from the harmful impacts of oil drilling,” said Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose district includes the oil field, in a statement. “Plugging idle oil and gas wells — so they no longer emit toxins into communities that have been on the front lines of environmental injustice for generations — is not only the right thing to do, it’s the law.”

Sentinel is the oil field’s current operator, while Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. were past operators. Energy companies often temporarily stop pumping from a well and leave it idle waiting for market conditions to improve.

In a statement, a representative for Sentinel Peak said the company is aware of the lawsuit and that the “claims are entirely without merit.”

“This suit appears to be an attempt to generate sensationalized publicity rather than adjudicate a legitimate legal matter,” general counsel Erin Gleaton said in an email. “We have full confidence in our position, supported by the facts and our record of regulatory compliance.”

Chevron said it does not comment on pending legal matters. The others did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

State regulations define “idle wells” as wells that have not produced oil or natural gas for 24 consecutive months, and “exhausted wells” as those that yield an average daily production of two barrels of oil or less. California is home to thousands of such wells, according to the California Department of Conservation.

Idle and exhausted wells can continue to emit hazardous air pollutants such as benzene, as well as a methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas. Unplugged wells can also leak oil, benzene, chloride, heavy metals and arsenic into groundwater.

Plugging idle and exhausted wells includes removing surface valves and piping, pumping large amounts of cement down the hole and reclaiming the surrounding ground. The process can be expensive, averaging an estimated $923,200 per well in Los Angeles County, according to the California Geologic Energy Management Division, which notes that the costs could fall to taxpayers if the defendants do not take action. This 2023 estimate from CalGEM is about three times higher than other parts of the state due to the complexity of sealing wells and remediating the surface in densely populated urban areas.

The suit seeks a court order requiring the wells to be properly plugged, as well as abatement for the harms caused by their pollution. It seeks civil penalties of up to $2,500 per day for each well that is in violation of the law.

Residents living near oil fields have long reported adverse health impacts such as respiratory, reproductive and cardiovascular issues. In Los Angeles, many of these risks disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color.

“The goal of this lawsuit is to force these oil companies to clean up their mess and stop business practices that disproportionately impact people of color living near these oil wells,” County Counsel Dawyn Harrison said in a statement. “My office is determined to achieve environmental justice for communities impacted by these oil wells and to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with a huge cleanup bill.”

The lawsuit is part of L.A. County’s larger effort to phase out oil drilling, including a high-profile ordinance that sought to ban new oil wells and even require existing ones to stop production within 20 years. Oil companies successfully challenged it and it was blocked in 2024.

Rita Kampalath, the county’s chief sustainability officer, said the county remains “dedicated to moving toward a fossil fuel-free L.A. County.”

“This lawsuit demonstrates the County’s commitment to realizing our sustainability goals by addressing the impacts of the fossil fuel industry on front line communities and the environment,” Kampalath said.

Business

Instacart is charging different prices to different customers in a dangerous AI experiment, report says

Published

1 day ago

December 11, 2025

Press Room

Instacart is charging different prices to different customers in a dangerous AI experiment, report says

The grocery delivery service Instacart is using artificial intelligence to experiment with prices and charge some shoppers more than others for the same items, a new study found.

The study from nonprofits Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports followed more than 400 shoppers in four cities and found that Instacart sometimes offered as many as five different sales prices for the exact same item, at the same store and on the same day.

The average difference between the highest price and lowest price on the same item was 13%, but some participants in the study saw prices that were 23% higher than those offered to other shoppers.

The varying prices are unfair to consumers and exacerbate a grocery affordability crisis that regular Americans are already struggling to cope with, said Lindsey Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.

“In my own view, Instacart should close the lab,” Owens said. “American grocery shoppers aren’t guinea pigs, and they should be able to expect a fair price when they’re shopping.”

The study found that an individual shopper on Instacart could theoretically spend as much as $1,200 more on groceries in one year if they had to deal with the kind of price differences observed in the pricing experiments.

At a Safeway supermarket in Washington, D.C., a dozen Lucerne eggs sold for $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, and $4.79 on Instacart, depending on the shopper, the study showed.

At a Safeway in Seattle, a box of 10 Clif Chocolate Chip Energy bars sold for $19.43, $19.99, and $21.99 on Instacart.

Instacart likely began experimenting with prices in 2022, when the platform acquired the artificial intelligence company Eversight. Instacart now advertises Eversight’s pricing software to its retail partners, claiming that the price experimentation is negligible to consumers but could increase store revenue by up to 3%.

“These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable,” an Instacart spokesperson said in a statement to The Times. “The tests are never based on personal or behavioral characteristics.”

Instacart said the price changes are not the result of dynamic pricing, like that used for airline tickets and ride-hailing, because the prices never change in real time.

But the Groundwork Collaborative study found that nearly three-quarters of grocery items bought at the same time and from the same store had varying price tags.

The artificial intelligence software helps Instacart and grocers “determine exactly how much you’re willing to pay, adding up to a lot more profits for them and a much higher annual grocery bill for you,” Owens said.

The study focused on 437 shoppers in-store and online in North Canton, Ohio; Saint Paul, Minn.; Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

Instacart shares were down more than 5% in midday trading on Wednesday and have risen 1% this year.