Business
Trump’s Tariffs: How the Math Affects Over 100 Countries
President Trump’s new tariffs on more than 100 countries used the same simple formula to calculate the rate for each of them.
The formula’s central value is the trade deficit, the difference between imports and exports between each country and the United States, for the year 2024.
The slightly more detailed math looks like this:
Mr. Trump has said these tariffs will reduce trade imbalances and level the international playing field.
But his one-size-fits-all formula is blunt: It applies the exact same math to countries whether they have hefty trade barriers or wide-open markets. It considers only the size of a trade deficit, not why the deficit exists.
And it has some key choices hidden within it. Change any one of those choices, and the resulting tariffs would look very different.
Here, we take you through these variables so you can see how different choices might yield big changes for the countries that trade with the United States.
Goods and services
The Trump administration calculated the trade deficit using only goods — physical items that can be shipped — and not services, such as technology, media, banking and tourism. (A DVD counts; a Netflix subscription doesn’t.)
That’s great news for Bermuda, the archipelago nation that exports few goods but plenty of financial services to the United States (thanks to its favorable tax laws, American companies like to bank there). Under the current rules, it pays a 10 percent tariff. If its service dollars were counted, it would pay 37 percent.
But it’s bad news for most of America’s other trading partners. The United States imports more goods from the European Union than it sends. But it exports more services than it buys. If you counted services in the trade gap in Mr. Trump’s formula, the tariffs on the E.U. would shrink almost in half.
Many countries are in the same boat as the European Union, because the United States is the world’s largest exporter of services. Switzerland, in particular, would see its tariffs drop quite a bit if services were taken into account. It exports plenty of pharmaceuticals and watches to America, but if you count all the services it imports from America, its trade deficit shrinks significantly.
How tariffs would change if the deficit included goods and services
country
current rate
new rate
change
Bermuda
10%
37%
+27 pts.
Costa Rica
10%
15%
+5 pts.
Philippines
17%
20%
+3 pts.
South Africa
30%
22%
-8 pts.
India
26%
18%
-8 pts.
European Union
20%
10%
-10 pts.
Brunei
24%
14%
-10 pts.
Switzerland
31%
10%
-21 pts.
The Trump administration has emphasized goods because it blames large goods deficits for a decline in manufacturing jobs. But many economists argue that ignoring services leaves out a key area of trade.
Yearly variation
The Trump administration used 2024 data to calculate the tariff rate, but trade deficits can vary year to year.
Consider this: In 2024, the United States exported more to Saudi Arabia than it imported, but the opposite was true in 2023. Bolivia was the reverse — the United States had a trade deficit with Bolivia in 2024 but a surplus in 2023.
Picking the most recent year might not really capture whether a country has significant trade barriers. It might, instead, be telling us something about the state of a country or the world’s economy at that moment.
If the administration had smoothed out any oddities by using the average trade deficit over the last five years, tariffs on large countries wouldn’t change much. China’s tariffs would rise by one percentage point; the European Union’s would shift by even less.
But for some countries, a different time frame could have meaningfully changed the calculated values — not necessarily to their benefit.
For example: The United States had a tiny trade deficit with Equatorial Guinea in 2024, so the African country is getting a much better deal than it would have in previous years, when the deficit was several times higher. Brunei, on the other hand, has sold more to the U.S. than it has bought the last couple of years. Look back a little further, and it would’ve benefited from the years it spent as a net buyer of American goods.
How tariffs would change if the deficit were based on a 2020 to 2024 average
country
current rate
new rate
change
Equatorial Guinea
13%
30%
+17 pts.
Kosovo
10%
27%
+17 pts.
Ghana
10%
21%
+11 pts.
Malaysia
24%
32%
+8 pts.
Moldova
31%
23%
-8 pts.
Tunisia
28%
19%
-9 pts.
Namibia
21%
10%
-11 pts.
Brunei
24%
10%
-14 pts.
The new tariffs will very likely cause changes in trading patterns, meaning even more year-to-year variation than before. If the administration decides to keep the formula intact for years, it may need to update the trade deficit values regularly.
The 10 percent floor
The Trump administration set a 10 percent minimum tariff for every country. At least 100 countries and territories that buy more from the United States than they sell — which seems to be what Mr. Trump wants — were still given the 10 percent tariff.
The United States has a large trade surplus with Australia — it exports more than twice as much to Australia as what it buys — indicating the kind of trade relationship Mr. Trump is seeking. And yet Australia will be charged the same 10 percent tariff rate as New Zealand, with which the United States has a calculated 20 percent trade deficit. (If anything, Australia would impose a steep tariff on U.S. goods if it followed Mr. Trump’s system.)
If the administration had not imposed a 10 percent minimum, the tariffs on some of America’s major trading partners might look like this:
How tariffs would change if there were no floor
country
current rate
new rate
change
Australia
10%
0%
-10 pts.
Brazil
10%
0%
-10 pts.
Chile
10%
0%
-10 pts.
Colombia
10%
0%
-10 pts.
Saudi Arabia
10%
0%
-10 pts.
Singapore
10%
0%
-10 pts.
Britain
10%
0%
-10 pts.
United Arab Emirates
10%
0%
-10 pts.
Everything else
Using the current Trump formula as a starting point, there are many arbitrary choices that would result in different tariffs and a different world economy. We played out every iteration of our choices from above, to see what tariffs might look like under different decisions.
Here are the countries with the widest ranges of possible tariff rates, based on those scenarios.
These ranges include eight possible scenarios, based on three decision points: including versus excluding services; using 2024 data versus 2020-24 data; a 10 percent floor versus no floor.
Changes to the formula would lead to big changes for some countries
country
Bermuda
Kosovo
Brunei
Switzerland
Equatorial Guinea
Monaco
Mozambique
Venezuela
Nigeria
Kenya
Beyond that, the Trump administration made several other arbitrary choices in its formula.
The biggest is that the formula divides the result by two. Mr. Trump said this was chosen to be “kind,” essentially halving the calculated tariff rates. Of course, he could have chosen to divide by three or four to be more kind or not divide at all to be less kind.
The full formula also multiplies the tariff rate by two other variables that we didn’t show above, meant to approximate the “price elasticity of import demand” and the “tariff pass-through to retail prices.” But the numbers the administration chose for those variables are 4 and 0.25, which cancel out (4 × 0.25 = 1) and have no effect on the final rate.
The tariff for Afghanistan is set at 10 percent, though the formula would have resulted in a 25 percent fee. The administration has not explained why Afghanistan is the sole country with different math.
A handful of countries were excluded from the new tariffs, including Canada and Mexico, which face separate tariff negotiations with Mr. Trump, and Russia and North Korea, which have other sanctions already placed on them. For China, on the other hand, the new tariffs are in addition to existing tariffs already in place, bringing China’s total tariff rate to at least 54 percent.
Exceptions on certain products also create some quirks. The United States will charge a 39 percent tariff on all goods from Iraq, largely because Iraq exports a lot of oil. However, oil and gas imports have been excluded from tariffs. This means that products like textiles or dates imported from Iraq will be charged a large tariff because of Iraq’s oil exports, even though the oil exports themselves will not be charged tariffs.
It is hard to say how long the formula will remain intact. Mr. Trump said Thursday that he was willing to make deals with other countries if the United States received something “phenomenal.”
Business
Billionaire exodus? California drew 10 times more venture capital than any other state this year
Despite concerns that California’s costs and regulations are bad for business, the state has attracted an unprecedented pile of capital this year, and no other state is even close.
The Golden State’s deep pool of talent, rich investors and other tech infrastructure have made it ground zero for the artificial intelligence explosion. That has helped it attract more than $335 billion in venture capital funding this year, according to PitchBook’s private market funding data released Thursday.
Its next biggest competitor, New York, raised less than a tenth of California’s total. Texas raised 1/40th of the amount.
“California has far and away the most [deals], obviously, a huge amount of that sits in the [San Francisco] Bay Area,” said Kyle Stanford, director of U.S. venture capital research at PitchBook. “Los Angeles, San Diego has a really strong tech market that I think benefits a lot from capital moving easily between San Francisco and L.A.”
Although a campaign for a new tax on billionaires has convinced some ultra-rich residents to shift to other states and businesses often complain that high property and energy costs and an anti-business regulatory regime make it too tough to make money in the state, the inability of the top talent, companies and investors in AI to set up elsewhere shows California’s enduring attraction.
The state’s economy grew 5% last year to a record $4.25 trillion, making it larger than every country other than the U.S., China and Germany. It is home to nearly 400 billion-dollar startups — more than any other state, according to CB Insights.
Southern California has emerged as a go-to address for fast-growing space and defense tech companies.
“California’s workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators continue to prove that investing in California delivers real results,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement last week in response to strong productivity numbers for the state. “As one of the largest economies in the world, the Golden State demonstrates that a strong workforce, economic growth, innovation, and performance go hand in hand.”
In the three months that ended in June, 1,087 California companies raised $108.8 billion in venture capital. Just three companies — Anthropic, Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus and Anduril Industries — absorbed 75% of that total. Anthropic alone raised $65 billion, which valued it at nearly $1 trillion.
Among metropolitan regions, Los Angeles ranked behind only Silicon Valley and New York, which attracted $98 billion and $11.5 billion in venture investment, respectively.
“Capital is flowing back into American innovation with real force,” said Bobby Franklin, president of the National Venture Capital Assn., an industry group that put out the report with PitchBook. “Investment activity is picking up, fundraising is improving, and there are early signs the IPO market is beginning to reopen.”
Investors poured in nearly $8 billion across 207 deals in the Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Santa Ana metro areas, up 28% from a year earlier, according to PitchBook.
The top deals in the region were led by aerospace and defense companies Anduril Industries, which raised $5 billion, and Impulse Space, which attracted $500 million.
Companies in industrial parts, software, consulting and life sciences were the other sectors in the Southland that attracted venture investments. El Segundo-based industrial supplies company Advanced Manufacturing Company of America and Huntington Beach-based aerospace company Mach Industries each raised $300 million.
To be sure, the surge in the size and number of monster deals could be overshadowing other money-raising efforts from smaller companies and investment by smaller funds, industry experts said.
Nearly 90% of invested dollars went to AI firms, up from last year, when around 65% of new funds were allocated to AI.
“If you’re a tech company and you’re not an AI company, you have a very, very difficult opportunity ahead of you to raise capital,” Stanford said.
This concentration of capital in AI leaves smaller, middle-of-the-road venture funds without large AI holdings struggling to return capital to their investors.
Only the largest funds, such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital — which possess the war chest to back OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX — stand to gain from their initial public offerings of stock.
“It’s going to concentrate the fundraising over the next few years as well into these already very large names,” Stanford said.
Beyond the two potential blockbuster listings — Anthropic and OpenAI, each valued around $1 trillion — the IPO pipeline is thin.
“We don’t really have a strong IPO market,” Stanford said. “Obviously, SpaceX’s IPO is great. OpenAI and Anthropic, if they go out this year, will be very large drivers of distribution. But a vast majority of investors do not have exposure to them, and so that money will not make it back to them.”
Whether California’s venture-investing boom can continue at this record-breaking pace now hinges on how the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI perform.
“If Anthropic and OpenAI have really strong financials, that’s a big push of support for the rest of the market,” Stanford said.
Waymo, the driverless taxi company that operates in more than 10 cities, will soon serve customers in San Diego.
The company has been testing its autonomous vehicles in San Diego with a safety driver behind the wheel since earlier this year. Rides without a human driver became available to employees Thursday and will open to members of the public later this year.
Waymo, which announced the expansion Wednesday, will also bring its taxis to Tampa, Las Vegas and Denver.
“If you’re in one of these four new cities, download the app to be notified when it’s time to ride,” the company said in a blog post.
Waymo has offered fully autonomous rides in San Francisco since 2022 and in Los Angeles since 2024.
It also serves customers in Nashville, Phoenix, Miami and other cities.
In May, Waymo launched a cheaper robotaxi dubbed the Ojai, which is better equipped for difficult driving conditions such as snowy roads.
The Ojai will supplement Waymo’s fleet of Jaguar I-Paces, the company said. In San Diego, services will be provided with the Ojai.
Waymo also announced Wednesday it’s beginning autonomous driving with a safety driver in its newest retrofitted vehicle, the Hyundai IONIQ 5.
“This phase allows us to validate our technology for fully autonomous operations as we work to bring riders even more ways to enjoy Waymo in the future,” the company said.
The company plans to eventually have tens of thousands of driverless taxis made per year, starting with the Ojai, then scaling using the IONIQ 5s.
The move into San Diego and three other cities widens the gap between Waymo and its competitors in the robotaxi race.
Elon Musk’s Tesla robotaxis and Amazon-owned Zoox are shuttling customers autonomously, but are nowhere near the scale at which Waymo operates.
Other companies are working on autonomous trucks and freight trains.
Waymo’s San Diego service area will include Pacific Beach, Normal Heights, La Playa and Southcrest, among other neighborhoods, the company said.
StubHub is getting a red card from some World Cup fans
Two World Cup customers are suing the New York-based ticket-selling company, alleging “false and misleading” advertising that left them without tickets or a refund for the World Cup games they paid to attend.
In federal court in New York last week, two Californians — Julia Reeker Moghal and Reuben Renteria — sued StubHub seeking monetary damages and a ban on the company selling World Cup tickets. The lawsuit aims to become a class action and comes after weeks of fierce criticism and complaints from customers regarding the company’s practices.
Throughout the World Cup, videos have emerged on Instagram and TikTok of StubHub customers describing their nightmare experiences with the ticket-selling platform.
Some said they had purchased tickets to World Cup games as early as November of last year, booked flights and hotels and arranged travel plans, then StubHub notified them days to weeks before the match of a refund for their tickets, which they never requested.
There were similar complaints about last-minute cancellations from people who bought Coachella tickets on StubHub.
In the lawsuit, Moghal said she had purchased three tickets for nearly $2,000 for the June 18 match between Switzerland and Bosnia-Herzegovina at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which were then canceled by StubHub. Moghal said she was contacted by StubHub and told her tickets would remain canceled, then was later told the tickets would be available one hour before the game.
When the match began, Moghal said she was at SoFi Stadium, but the tickets never came.
Renteria said he paid around $2,300 for the June 18 Mexico versus South Korea match in Guadalajara, Mexico, but they were canceled
“Devoted soccer fans have traveled from around the world to attend World Cup matches — and they reasonably relied on StubHub to provide the tickets they paid for as well as on StubHub’s warranty,” Blake Hunter Yagman, the attorney representing the two, said in a statement. “Instead of rewarding their business, StubHub sold them World Cup tickets that they either could not provide or on speculation, only to be stranded, in many cases, at the stadium gates without any recourse.”
According to StubHub’s website, its Fan Protect Guarantee states the platform will deliver valid tickets or refund in the event of a ticket issue, and that it will “go out of our way to find replacement tickets” of a comparable value. The lawsuit alleges the replacement tickets many fans were given by StubHub were worse than their original tickets.
FIFA, the World Cup organizer, states in its terms and conditions that the FIFA Marketplace, its own ticket-selling platform, is the only authorized platform for World Cup tickets, and that only tickets purchased through it are guaranteed by FIFA to be valid.
Despite the risk of purchasing through a third-party platform such as StubHub, many fans opted to do so to avoid the 30% FIFA resale tax, believing that the Fan Protect Guarantee would safeguard their order.
Since World Cup tickets began selling on FIFA Marketplace last September, fans have expressed disappointment in the expensive price tag. FIFA utilized a dynamic pricing system for the sale, and as sales phases progressed leading up to the games, the cost of tickets increased tremendously. In March, the extreme cost of tickets prompted 69 members of Congress to write a letter to FIFA urging them to lower their prices.
Tickets for the upcoming Friday match between Spain and Belgium in Los Angeles are selling on StubHub for over $1,300.
StubHub said in various statements to the news and in legal proceedings that ticket cancellations were a result of transfer problems and issues with FIFA’s ticketing infrastructure.
StubHub did not respond to requests for comment.
A FIFA spokesperson responded to this accusation in a statement, saying, “FIFA has no visibility over, or control of, secondary market ticket transactions carried out on third-party platforms. The transactions facilitated on these platforms occur entirely independently of FIFA’s official ticketing platform. With reference to the reliability of the services available to fans on FIFA’s official ticket platform, FIFA rejects any suggestion that the functional issues being experienced by users of third-party platforms with respect to FIFA World Cup 2026 tickets are the result of FIFA’s ticketing infrastructure.”
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