“Trump tariffs blamed as bankruptcies reach 15-year peak,” reports The Independent:
- Corporate bankruptcies in the US soared to a 15-year high in 2025, with 717 companies filing for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 between January and November.
- The figures marked a 14 per cent increase from the previous year.
- This surge, the highest since 2010, is largely attributed to inflation, high interest rates, and President Donald Trump’s trade policies, particularly tariffs that have increased costs and hampered supply chains.
- The increase in filings was most notable among industrials, including construction, manufacturing, and transportation firms, as well as consumer-oriented companies offering discretionary products or services.
- Economists note a contradiction in the US economy, where strong overall growth (4.3 per cent GDP) is not evenly distributed, with many businesses struggling under the strain of tariffs and other expenses.
The fact that bankruptcies rose most among industrial firms shows tariffs are partly to blame. Tariffs increase costs for industrial firms, because they rely on imported raw materials and components. By contrast, the service sector isn’t affected much by tariffs.
Many industrial firms have been harmed by the tariffs. Manufacturing has shrunk for nine straight months. “Tariffs, which have increased costs for sourcing materials, continue to weigh on U.S. producers,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
“According to the Commerce Department’s latest figures, manufacturing has contributed 9.4 percent of total GDP through August 2025, down from 9.8 percent in 2024,” reported Reason Magazine earlier this year:
Rather than being helped, the manufacturing sector is being crushed by tariffs, which are increasing the cost of raw materials and intermediate goods. Monthly surveys by the Institute for Supply Management show that overall manufacturing activity has declined for seven consecutive months through September. A separate survey conducted by the Dallas Federal Reserve in August 2025 found that just 2.1 percent of business owners believed the tariffs had a positive impact. “The effect is most widespread in manufacturing, where more than 70 percent of firms noted negative impacts,” the survey reported.
Pro Publica earlier reported that Trump’s tariffs bankrupted hundreds of small businesses, by raising tariffs so suddenly that companies couldn’t adjust their purchases or prices, and by imposing a bewildering array of tariffs that varied enormously from product to product and country to country: “After 99 years, Michigan clockmaker Howard Miller is shutting down. The culprit: Trump’s tariffs.” “If the federal government had said, ‘Oh, it’s a 10% tariff, constant,’ … they might’ve worked things out,” an employee said. “But no. It’s just chaos.” “Tariffs dialed up the cost of certain imported products” the clockmaker needed to make its clocks. “The family-owned company was put in a difficult position, said Nelson Vandermeer, a product development engineer.”
Tariffs on steel wipe out more jobs than they save, because “steel is produced by a tiny sliver of the economy, but used as an input by a much broader swathe of manufacturers,” notes Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan.
Steel and aluminum tariffs have a history of wiping out more jobs than they save, by increasing the cost of production for American industries that use steel and aluminum as raw materials to make their products. The steel and aluminum tariffs Trump imposed back in 2018 shrank employment by 74,000 jobs, wiping out more jobs than they saved.
