‘People are very nervous’: Valley experts react to Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’

FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – President Donald Trump announced his plan for reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday, confirming that a 10% baseline tax will be slapped on imports from all countries and higher tariff rates will be enacted on other nations.

Central Valley financial and economic experts are reacting to what the President has dubbed “Liberation Day.”

UC Merced Associate Professor Greg Wright says the latest round of tariffs on U.S. imports is designed to match what other countries charge on American exports. 

“The message coming out of the White House is that other countries have relatively high tariffs on specific products compared to the tariffs that we place on their products. And so, the answer is to reciprocate,” he explained. “We’ve already seen that people are very nervous. Investors aren’t making investments. Consumer sentiment is down. The stock market is down.” 

He believes confusion about the tariffs may potentially bring down how people feel about the economy.

“I think just the initial signs, just in terms of the anticipation of these tariffs, suggest that it’s probably going to be bad for the economy,” he said. “I think that on the one hand, you know, using tariffs as a negotiating tactic can be effective, but on the other hand, it just adds so much uncertainty in the business environment that it just causes businesses to pull back their investments, to just take a ‘wait and see’ perspective. But you don’t know if you’re waiting and seeing for three weeks or three months or a year or what. So I think uncertainty is really the thing that’s driving a lot of like, the decline in consumer sentiment and business sentiment at the moment.”

Wright says one thing Americans can expect is higher prices. 

“Tariffs will directly raise the price that we pay for foreign goods. Obviously, the foreign producers now have to pay, let’s say, 25% more to sell their products in our country. And so, to some extent, those producers will pass that tariff cost on to U.S. consumers,” he explained. 

That’s something Fresno-area financial advisor Brian Ullman agrees with. 

“There’s a very real possibility here that the best-case economic scenario is stagflation, which is painful for consumers. A worst-case scenario would be a pretty wide-scale recession, which I don’t know that we can call just yet, but that something like that is certainly on the table, depending on how severe some of these announced policies are going to be implemented,” he said.

Ullman is a Financial Advisor and Financial Planner with Ford Financial Group and says the tariffs will have widespread effects on everyday lives. 

“It’s going to have an impact on consumers because it’s going to drive prices higher for the things that we buy and use every day, including a lot of the staples that we buy,” he explained. “Take Ford F-150, for example. They’re largely manufactured in the U.S., but they have components that aren’t. And so even cars that are mostly put together here in the U.S. still are going to be affected by these tariffs.”

He says the best way to analyze what’s to come is to look at the past.  

“If we use history as a guide, prices are going to be higher. It’s probably going to create an economy that is growing more slowly, if not receding. And it’s pushing inflation higher,” Ullman explained.