Trump insists foreigners pay his tariffs. They Do Not.
Tariffs costs the consumer.
On February 12, 2026, four economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a paper. They had tracked U.S. import prices through November 2025, month by month, as tariff rates climbed from 2.6 percent to 13 percent. Their finding: 90 percent of the cost landed on U.S. firms and consumers, not on foreign exporters.
Kevin Hassett, the White House's top economic adviser, went on CNBC the next morning. "The paper is an embarrassment," he said. "The worst paper I've ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system. The people associated with this paper should presumably be disciplined."
The Kiel Institute in Germany had already run its own numbers in January, using shipment-level freight data — individual bills of lading, tracked day by day. They put the figure at 96 percent. Americans pay. Not foreigners.
Then this morning, February 19, the JPMorganChase Institute published a third report. The bank had watched its own midsize business clients — firms employing 48 million U.S. workers — pay tariffs in real time throughout 2025. By October, those payments were three times what they had been at the start of the year.
Three institutions. A Wall Street bank. The U.S. central bank. A German research institute. Three separate data sets. Three separate methods. The numbers are 90, 96, and triple.
Trump says foreigners pay his tariffs.
The White House's response to the researchers who checked: discipline them.