Click to view full size

An analy­sis finds that a crit­i­cal group of U.S. em­ploy­ers would face a di­rect cost of $82.3 bil­lion from Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s cur­rent tar­iff plans, a sum that could be po­ten­tial­ly man­aged through price hikes, lay­offs, hir­ing freezes or low­er prof­it mar­gins.

The analy­sis by the JP­Mor­gan­Chase In­sti­tute is among the first to mea­sure the di­rect costs cre­at­ed by the im­port tax­es on busi­ness­es with $10 mil­lion to $1 bil­lion in an­nu­al rev­enue, a cat­e­go­ry that in­cludes rough­ly a third of pri­vate-sec­tor U.S. work­ers. These com­pa­nies are more de­pen­dent than oth­er busi­ness­es on im­ports from Chi­na, In­dia and Thai­land — and the re­tail and whole­sale sec­tors would be es­pe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble to the im­port tax­es be­ing levied by the Re­pub­li­can pres­i­dent.

The find­ings show clear trade-offs from Trump’s im­port tax­es, con­tra­dict­ing his claims that for­eign man­u­fac­tur­ers would ab­sorb the costs of the tar­iffs in­stead of U.S. com­pa­nies that re­ly on im­ports. While the tar­iffs launched un­der Trump have yet to boost over­all in­fla­tion, large com­pa­nies such as Ama­zon, Cost­co, Wal­mart and Williams-Sono­ma de­layed the po­ten­tial reck­on­ing by build­ing up their in­ven­to­ries be­fore the tax­es could be im­posed.