00:00 Speaker A
Let’s check on a couple specific sectors. Now we start with automakers who are continuing their downward slide as the fallout from tariffs weigh on the sector. Yahoo finance’s Pras Subramanian joins us now with more. Pras, um, you know, there’s been a lot of ink spilled about what’s going on and what all of this means for the automakers and investors are still selling.
00:22 Pras Subramanian
Yeah, we saw some of those names just there, uh, lower today. GM kind of popped back just a little bit, down only one and a half percent. But, you know, they’re heavily exposed to tariffs unfortunately, because of auto parts, because of where the cars are made. It’s just a lot going on there from a severe financial penalty point of view from the tariffs. And we had some news today on some companies like VW’s Audi holding cars at port until they get more clarity. Uh, Jaguar Land Rover halting all shipments from the UK to the US for now until they figure out what’s going on. Uh, research firm named telemetry came out some data saying that 1.8 million lost sales in the US this year from tariffs alone. Uh, we had about 15.8 million sales last year, so you can do the math. That’s over 10% easily lost sales in the entire US auto industry. And finally, so Bernsting downgraded GM today, uh, talking about, uh, hits to consumer confidence and also, um, the tariffs also hitting sales and that’s a big whammy to their profits, but also, you know, shareholder returns, right? Buybacks a big part of the GM story that may not happen if they’re going to be using that money to play in other areas and kind of shore up their sales.