WSJ What’s News
What to Watch for This Earnings Season as Trump’s Tariffs Come Into Play
Sun, 06 Apr 2025
President Trump’s latest tariff policy announcement has rocked companies, markets and investment portfolios. To get into what they mean for Americans from Main Street to Wall Street, What’s News brings you an episode of our sister podcast WSJ’s Take On the Week, where co-hosts Telis Demos and Miriam Gottfried discuss tariffs, Trump’s trade war and the upcoming first quarter earnings season. Christine Short, head of research of Wall Street Horizon, which is part of the financial services company TMX Group, discusses how companies are dealing with tariffs. You can also listen to this episode on WSJ’s Take On the Week. To watch the video version of this episode, visit our WSJ Podcasts YouTube channel or the video page of WSJ.com. Further Reading To read more from our co-hosts, catch up on Wall Street Facing Toughest Test in Years and Banks Don’t Pay Tariffs, but Tariffs Will Cost Them. What to Know About Trump’s Latest Tariffs A Market-Rattling Attempt to Make the American Economy Trump Always Wanted For more coverage of the markets and your investments, head to WSJ.com, WSJ’s Heard on The Street Column, and WSJ’s Live Markets blog. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this episode on tariffs and earnings?
Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, April 6th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.
This week, we're bringing you an episode of our sister podcast, WSJ's Take on the Week, where co-hosts and WSJ reporters Telus Demos and Miriam Gottfried look at the role of the latest tariffs in the coming earnings season. There was only one word that seemed to matter to the markets this week. Tariffs.
But how much will President Trump's new tariffs impact corporate earnings, and how are companies planning their futures around them? WSJ's Take on the Week podcast spoke with Christine Short, head of research of Wall Street Horizon, which is part of the financial services company TMX Group. They discuss what tariffs will mean for companies and consumers.
Hey, everyone. I'm Telus Demos. I write for The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street. And this is WSJ's Take on the Week, the weekly podcast where we give you a leg up on the worlds of money and investing. Each week, we bring you conversations with insiders and from inside The Wall Street Journal's newsroom about, well, mostly about tariffs, frankly. Frankly, we mostly talk about tariffs.
I will briefly reintroduce someone that everybody should be familiar with now, who is Miriam Gottfried, who is on her last guest hosting assignment before Gunjan Banerjee returns, but first in our hearts still. Miriam, welcome again.
It's great to be here, Telos, and I am very excited to talk to you about Tariffs again.
Yes. Well, this past week, there was obviously big, big news in the world of tariffs, the market's obsession. And it was, I mean, quite honestly, it was pretty dramatic. I was like having trouble sleeping last night just sort of thinking about how to pull it all together on today's podcast. We're recording this on April 3rd. You know, the market has obviously reacted quite strongly.
But I think the drama is even beyond, you know, we'll talk about what's going on with stocks and earnings and things. But I think this is just like a kind of like it just feels like one of those – you read about in your history textbook kind of moments, right?
And regardless of what comes next, it just certainly seems like this announcement has kind of knocked everybody off their axis a little bit. Miriam, can you take us through exactly what transpired last night?
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Chapter 2: How are tariffs affecting the market and companies?
Maybe that was just everybody selling off autos. Who knows?
Sell your winners. Maybe that's the old saying goes. So it'll be interesting to see what they report and what they say and also how the market reacts to it. Yeah. But I want to step back a little bit on earnings given the environment that we're talking about here.
Obviously, we know that there are worries about the economy amidst what's going on with tariffs and frankly other kind of big policy changes. There are recession risks that people are talking about. But that is not the same as saying how are companies themselves actually doing corporate earnings?
Because as much as big companies collectively make up, you know, our economy, you know, they employ us. We buy stuff from them. Their fates and the economy's fate are not exactly the same. Tariffs could increase costs. Maybe companies pass along those costs to consumers. Maybe some companies raise their prices because other prices are going up and they end up making more money.
That could at least improve profitability in the short term. We don't know.
Absolutely. What if companies lay people off and improve their profitability that way? Right. We could see a struggling economy, but companies doing OK to maybe well.
Or at least in the short term, because I think, you know, consumer spending is still an important part of the economy. And as that comes down, that will eventually affect companies need to sell stuff to someone. Yeah.
Those someone's being consumers, you, me, people.
Exactly.
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Chapter 3: What were the key elements of Trump's tariff announcement?
It's like we do one every week. God, we do one every week when you say it like that. Okay.