Economy

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldConsumers in Denmark and Mexico, as well as some in the US, are drinking less Coca-Cola as a result of President Donald Trump’s hardline foreign policies and his tough stance on immigration.Danish consumers are boycotting Coca-Cola amid anger at Trump’s threats to take Denmark’s territory of Greenland. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola attributed a slowdown in consumption in Mexico partly to geopolitical tensions, and Hispanic customers in the US bought less as the White House threatens mass deportations of immigrants.Carlsberg, which bottles Coca-Cola in Denmark, on Tuesday said volumes of the American soft drink were “slightly down” in the country.“There is a level of consumer boycott around the US brands . . . and it’s the only market where we’re seeing that to a large extent,” chief executive Jacob Aarup-Andersen said on Tuesday. US vice-president JD Vance has accused Denmark of not being “a good ally” despite Danish forces having fought alongside American troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere.“Danes are pissed off. They remember those Danish soldiers’ bodies coming home, and now they feel disrespected. You can see why calls for a boycott [of US goods] would be popular,” one Danish official told the Financial Times last month.The US vice-president has caused upset after he said Denmark was not a good ally, despite Danish soldiers having died while fighting alongside US troops in Afghanistan More

.css-13hw3ep{margin-bottom:var(–o3-spacing-s);}.css-eh7lb7{margin:0;}Join FT EditOnly .css-79fz17{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}$4.99 per month.css-1h69zf4{margin:0;white-space:pre-wrap;font-family:var(–o3-type-body-base-font-family);font-weight:var(–o3-type-body-base-font-weight);font-size:var(–o3-type-body-base-font-size);line-height:var(–o3-type-body-base-line-height);color:var(–o3-color-use-case-support-inverse-text);}Access to eight surprising articles a day, hand-picked by FT editors. For seamless reading, access content via the FT Edit page on FT.com and receive the FT Edit newsletter. More

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell to 86 on the month, down 7.9 points from its prior reading and below the Dow Jones estimate for 87.7.
The board’s expectations index, which measures how respondents look at the next six months, tumbled to 54.4, a decline of 12.5 points and the lowest reading since October 2011.
Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment postings in March fell to their lowest level since September 2024.

Consumer attitudes about both the present and near future dimmed again in April, as tariffs dented sentiment and confidence in employment hit levels last seen around the global financial crisis.
The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell to 86 on the month, down 7.9 points from its prior reading and below the Dow Jones estimate for 87.7. It was the lowest reading in nearly five years.

However, the view of conditions further out deteriorated even more.
The board’s expectations index, which measures how respondents look at the next six months, tumbled to 54.4, a decline of 12.5 points and the lowest reading since October 2011. Board officials said the reading is consistent with a recession.
“The three expectation components—business conditions, employment prospects, and future income—all deteriorated sharply, reflecting pervasive pessimism about the future,” said Stephanie Guichard, the board’s senior economist for global indicator.
Guichard added that the confidence surveys overall were at “levels not seen since the onset of the Covid pandemic.”
Indeed, the level of respondents expecting employment to fall over the next six months hit 32.1%, “nearly as high as in April 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession,” Guichard added. That contraction lasted from December 2007 until June 2009. The level of respondents seeing jobs as “hard to get” rose to 16.6%, up half a percentage point from March, while those seeing jobs as “plentiful” fell to 31.7%, down from 33.6%.

Future income prospects also turned negative for the first time in five years.
The downbeat views extended to the stock market, with 48.5% expecting lower prices in the next 12 months, the worst reading since October 2011. Inflation expectations also surged, at 7% for the next year, the highest since November 2022.
Driving the pessimism was fear over tariffs, which reached an all-time high for the survey. Recession expectations hit a two-year high as well.
In related data Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment postings in March fell to their lowest level since September 2024. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed 7.19 million positions, down from 7.48 million in February and below the Wall Street expectation of 7.5 million.
Government postings fell by 59,000 amid President Donald Trump’s efforts to pare down the federal workforce. Transportation, warehousing and utilities also saw a drop of 59,000.
The JOLTS survey showed hiring was little changed while layoffs fell by 222,000.

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It’s been two long weeks since we last wrote about the Office for National Statistics.Luckily, the stats gang have done some posting of their own in the meantime, offering an update on efforts to integrate groceries scanner data into Britain’s inflation figures.If you’ve been living under a rock and missed out on this major news, the ONS has been trying — for some time — to impute prices gathered from scanners in order to observe a lot of prices, rather than their traditional system of observing less of a lot of prices. The other benefit of such a system is that it helps statisticians better understand the different quantities of similar products being bought, allowing them to weight items more appropriately within the overall index calculation.The other, other benefit is this: scanner data would take into account prices actually paid, rather than the current system of tracking listed.To understand why this matters, consider the Tesco Clubcard. As we recently noted, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain is a big deal when it comes to national statistics. And as any regular Tesco shopper knows, having its loyalty card — the Clubcard — is more or less obligatory to unlock its best offers (caveats).According to Kantar, Tesco currently has a 27.8 per cent share of the UK’s grocery market. According to Tesco, Clubcard sales penetration in the UK is 84 per cent. Ergo, just under a quarter of all UK grocery spending is done at Clubcard prices, and those prices are hugely important if you want to measure the real rate of inflation. But the ONS ignores Clubcard prices. Here’s an extract from its Consumer Prices Indices Technical manual, the inflation bible:Discounted and subsidised prices are only recorded if available to anyone with no conditions of sale, otherwise the non-discounted or unsubsidised price is recorded. Money-off coupons and loyalty cards are excluded.The logic here makes some sense. As the ONS puts its elsewhere, “our basic collection practice is to only consider discounts if they are available to all”. And of course Clubcard prices are only available to the great many people who join that club (basically trading their data for discounts).But in terms of capturing inflation in terms of the change in how much people are actually paying for goods, it’s a mess.The ONS was asked about this in a freedom of information request summer before last. In response, they said:[At] the end of 2022 we started collecting loyalty card prices alongside the prices used for live production of our consumer price statistics. We recently used this data to conduct an informal (internal) analysis to judge the effect loyalty card discounts would have on our inflation measures if they were included. This exercise did not produce evidence that a hypothetical index created by using the discount prices would be materially different to published CPI at the headline or divisional level.In short, they found Clubcard prices don’t matter.The scanner data was supposed to be introduced in March this year, but this is the ONS we’re talking about, so because reasons they’re now scheduled to land in March next year.The ONS offered some initial indications of the change’s impact in January (written up by Chris Giles here). And this morning, it offered a little more.We have produced indicative estimates of the impact of introducing groceries scanner data into UK consumer price statistics; estimates are subject to change following further quality assurance.So says “Transformation of UK consumer price statistics, groceries scanner data analysis: April 2025”. It adds:The average indicative change to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) annual rate from the introduction of groceries scanner data between January 2019 and June 2024 was negative 0.04 percentage points; this already adjusts for the changes we introduced in February 2025.Now, 0.04 percentage points doesn’t seem like much. And, sure, often the difference seems to have been quite small overall across that period.But we have to take issue with this.Firstly, showing an absolute change over a long period of time seems bound to produce a fairly small number, given you might expect adjustments to occur in both directions. Also, a 2019–2024 window slightly dilutes the whole intense inflation wave (with its weird dynamics) we had in the middle of the period studied.Secondly — as the ONS data shows but doesn’t really dwell upon — even if the overall average change is small, some of the changes have been pretty big. Here’s a chart from the ONS release:The version in their article is responsive, so it’s not hard to see the precise data on-site, but to us this still qualifies as a certified Axis of Evil™. By showing the two compounded 12-month rates (the lines) on the same axis as the spread between them (the columns), you make those columns look small. And as another chart further down the article shows, those columns ought to feel big:Headline CPI would have been a quarter of a percentage point lower in March 2024 using this data. Let’s cast our minds back to how mainFT covered that month’s CPI figure at the time:Consumer prices rose at an annual rate of 3.2 per cent in March, down from 3.4 per cent in February, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. The figure was slightly higher than the 3.1 per cent forecast by economists polled by Reuters and the Bank of England and above the BoE’s 2 per cent target. Traders in swaps markets are now betting that the BoE will begin reducing its benchmark rate from a 16-year high of 5.25 per cent in either September or November, having fully priced in a cut for September before the ONS release.With its “improved methods”, the ONS now thinks the year-on-year change in CPI that March was 3.1 per cent. Adjust for the scanners, and that becomes 2.8 per cent — 0.4pp below the originally-reported figure.That is a big swing! This is a big deal! It’s clearly materially different*, and — assuming it is actually truer to the reality of inflation — it remains materially significant that the ONS is taking so long to get this improved methodology in place.As FTAV Friday charts quiz T-shirt owner Gregory Boggis points out on X:£2.8tr national debt, a quarter inflation linked, overstating inflation by 20bps costs £1.4bn (not taking into account public pay settlements) or about the savings from the winter fuel allowance.https://t.co/kHrFbAWTDI— Gregory Boggis (@Gregoryboggis) April 29, 2025

Let’s just be glad the UK never makes major spending decisions based on a few billion pounds of fiscal swing.* OK, OK, obviously it wouldn’t have mattered because markets are perfectly efficient and therefore have already priced in any and all errors that might occur in the ONS’s CPI calculations. More

“It’s a precipitous drop in volume with a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles.
Shipments from China make up about 45% of the business for the port, though some transport companies will be looking to pick up goods at other points in Southeast Asia to try to fill up their ships, Seroka said.
Data on shipments out of China had already started to signal slowing trade volume to the U.S., alarming some economists.

A container ship is shown at the Port of Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California, U.S. November 22, 2021.
Mike Blake | Reuters

Shipments from China to the West Coast of the U.S. will plummet next week as the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs leads companies to cut their import orders.
Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he expects incoming cargo volume to slide by more than a third next week compared with the same period in 2024.

“According to our own port optimizer, which measures the loadings in Asia, we’ll be down just a little bit over 35% next week compared to last year. And it’s a precipitous drop in volume with a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs,” Seroka said.

Shipments from China make up about 45% of the business for the Port of LA, though some transport companies will be looking to pick up goods at other points in Southeast Asia to try to fill up their ships, Seroka said.
“Realistically speaking, until some accord or framework can be reached with China, the volume coming out of there — save a couple of different commodities — will be very light at best,” Seroka said.
Along with the lower volume of goods, Seroka said he expects roughly a quarter of the usual number of arriving ships to the port to be canceled in May.
Trump announced a sharp increase in tariffs on Chinese goods on April 2, which led to escalation on both sides, eventually resulting in both the U.S. and China imposing levies of more than 100% on many goods from each other. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described the situation as “unsustainable” but there has been no sign of substantial negotiations between the two countries.

Data on shipments out of China had already started to signal slowing trade volume to the U.S., alarming some economists. Apollo Global Management’s chief economist, Torsten Slok, recently laid out a timeline where lower imports from China leads to layoffs in transportation and retail industries in the U.S., empty shelves and a recession this summer.
Seroka said he thinks U.S. retailers have about five to seven weeks before the impact of the curtailed shipments begins to bite, partly because companies stocked up ahead of Trump’s tariff announcements.
“I don’t see a complete emptiness on store shelves or online when we’re buying. But if you’re out looking for a blue shirt, you might find 11 purple ones and one blue in a size that’s not yours. So we’ll start seeing less choice on those shelves simply because we’re not getting the variety of goods coming in here based on the additional costs in place. And for that one blue shirt that’s still left, you’ll see a price hike,” Seroka said.

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Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldThe Bank of England’s top financial supervisor has said it is monitoring the impact on lenders of Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, with an expected economic slowdown likely to lead to higher provisions for loan defaults. Sam Woods, chief executive of the BoE’s Prudential Regulation Authority, said the regulator had stepped up monitoring of banks during the market volatility triggered by the US president’s “liberation day” tariffs, without yet moving to the “highest level” of requiring daily liquidity reports from lenders.“We are watching it [the effect of tariffs] very closely,” Woods told the House of Commons Treasury select committee on Tuesday. “The thing we are watching for next is also what will be the macro impact of all this.”“I think it will be interesting to see whether our banks in the next period choose to provide more for a different economic environment because they do forward-looking provisions now,” said Woods, who is also a BoE deputy governor. “So that is where our focus is at the moment.”HSBC on Tuesday took a $150mn hit to reflect increased economic uncertainty, as part of the overall $876mn charge for bad loans that the bank recorded in the first quarter of this year, slightly higher than analysts’ forecasts. The IMF last week cut its UK growth forecasts from 1.6 per cent to 1.1 per cent for this year, as it warned of widespread economic disruption from a US-driven surge in trade barriers around the world.Shares in some British banks dropped as much as 20 per cent in response to Trump’s tariff announcements, and Woods said it was “unusual for us to have that much value wiped off the value of our banks”. But he added that those share prices had mostly recovered since Trump delayed the tariffs, and that the PRA had seen few signs of the sell-off causing investors or consumers to lose confidence in lenders.“What we really watch for is the risk of contagion into funding,” he said. “That is what we really care about and we didn’t really see any sign of that.”Trump’s tariff announcements had “created quite a dent in the way the US is seen by both regulators and investors”, said Woods, who was in Washington last week for the IMF and World Bank Spring meetings.He highlighted a “quite concerning” sell-off in both the US dollar and in US government bonds that followed Trump’s tariff announcement, along with a drop in share prices. “Normally we see the opposite in these risk-off types of conditions,” Woods said. “Normally we see a flight into these assets.”He added: “We are asking ourselves the question: what would happen if there was a more fundamental drop in appetite for either dollar-denominated assets, or US assets, or Treasuries, or some version of that?”The PRA chief said he had also been concerned that the US could ditch the bank capital rules agreed with other regulators at the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision after a speech by US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on April 9.Bessent said: “We should not outsource decision making for the United States to international bodies.” He added that where the Basel standards “can provide inspiration” the US could “borrow selectively from them”. However, Woods said he had since been “very roundly reassured” by figures in both the US private and public sectors that “that was not the right way to read that speech”.The UK has postponed implementation of the Basel rules while it waits for clarity on the US position under Trump. The EU has delayed part of the Basel rules for the financial market trading activities of banks and is expected to postpone these again this year.Woods said it was “a benefit of Brexit” that the UK could “move much faster than the EU”. But he added that the UK was in “regular dialogue” with the EU on implementing the reforms and “one byproduct” of Trump’s tariffs was that the warmth of these relations “is increasing quite considerably”. More

Market chaos and economic uncertainty has been a feature of the president’s first few months back in office. DealBook breaks down the milestones, and what to expect next.Trump’s tumultuous start When President Trump took office in January for his second term, business leaders anticipated an administration that would lower taxes, loosen regulations and open up deal-making.Instead, Wall Street got chaos. The president has taken a cudgel to global trade with enormous tariffs, threatened the independence of the Fed and made the landscape for M.&A. more uncertain.Under Trump, the S&P 500 has fallen about 8 percent, the worst performance for the first 100 days of a presidency since President Gerald Ford in 1974.Back then, the Watergate scandal prompted political instability and the economy was facing a recession and an oil crisis. The markets this year have been socked by the president’s protectionist trade policy.Here are the themes that have defined Trump’s first 100 days in office. Trump will commemorate the occasion with a rally in Michigan this evening, and the White House is expected to announce relief on auto tariffs.On that note: General Motors on Tuesday pulled its full-year forecast as it reported first-quarter results. “The prior guidance cannot be relied upon” amid tariffs uncertainty, said Paul Jacobson, the company’s C.F.O.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Sportswear giant Adidas said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s tariffs would eventually cause it to raise prices on all its U.S. products.
The German company added that it was unable to confirm how much prices would rise by due to uncertainty about tariff rates, with key suppliers in China, Vietnam and Cambodia.
In results that were largely pre-released, Adidas net income from continuing operations leapt 155% in the first quarter to 436 million euros ($496.5 million), above the 383 million euros forecast in an LSEG-compiled consensus.

Sportswear giant Adidas on Tuesday said that U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs would result in price hikes for all its U.S. products.
The company said it did not yet know by how much it would boost prices, also noting that the global trade dispute was preventing it from raising its full-year outlook despite a bumper increase in first-quarter profits.

“Higher tariffs will eventually cause higher costs for all our products for the US market,” Adidas said in a statement.
The company said it was “somewhat exposed” to White House tariffs on Beijing — currently at an effective rate of 145% — but that it had already reduced exports of its China-made products to the U.S. to a minimum. However, it said the biggest impact was coming from the general increase in U.S. tariffs on all other countries, which are largely held at 10% while trade negotiations take place.
“Given the uncertainty around the negotiations between the US and the different exporting countries, we do not know what the final tariffs will be,” the Adidas statement continued.
“Therefore, we cannot make any ‘final’ decisions on what to do. Cost increases due to higher tariffs will eventually cause price increases, not only in our sector, but it is currently impossible to quantify these or to conclude what impact this could have on the consumer demand for our products.”
Adidas said it was currently unable to produce almost any of its products in the U.S.

The company, best-known for sneakers including Superstar, Sambas, Stan Smiths and Gazelles as well as sportswear, uses factories in countries including Vietnam and Cambodia — which are facing U.S. tariffs upwards of 40% in the absence of a trade deal.
A similar dilemma regarding price hikes and demand impact is facing almost all retail businesses which serve the U.S., from ultra-low-cost e-retailers like Temu to luxury giants such as Hermès.

Earnings improve

Without the cloud of U.S. tariffs, Adidas would have raised its full-year outlook for revenues and operating profit due to a strong order book and positive brand sentiment, the company said. It instead reaffirmed its existing outlook, but said the “range of possible outcomes has increased.”
In results that were largely pre-released, net income from continuing operations leapt 155% in the first quarter to 436 million euros ($496.5 million), above the 383 million euros forecast in an LSEG-compiled consensus. Net sales climbed 12.7% to 6.15 billion euros as its operating margin rose 3.8 percentage points to 9.9%.
The firm has finally shaken off a years-long headache from its collaboration with controversial musician Ye, with whom it cut ties in 2022 over antisemitic comments. It announced last month it had sold the last of its Yeezy stock.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a Tuesday note that Adidas delivered a “good print with the company making progress across all areas,” despite higher uncertainty.
“So far this year, Adidas has been seeing double digit sales growth across all regions and channels, with wholesale outperforming the direct-to-consumer offering,” Mamta Valechha, consumer discretionary analyst at Quilter Cheviot, said in a note.
“Footwear continues to be a strong performer, with consumers also opting for lifestyle clothing, while the performance category also continues to do well. Adidas will hope these trends continue in the face of the economic uncertainty created by tariffs in the US, but unfortunately we very much have to wait and see before the full impact comes through.” More