The Federal Reserve just published the data that confirms the crack-up boom. Mainstream economists will pretend they didn’t see it.
The New York Federal Reserve published a study this week that should have sent shockwaves through every trading floor, pension fund, and household in America. Researchers at the NY Fed—including Mary Amiti, who heads their Labor and Product Markets division—found that the average tariff rate on U.S. imports surged from 2.6 to 13 percent in 2025, and that nearly 90 percent of the tariff cost collapse fell directly on American firms and consumers. Not foreign exporters. Americans.
I have been warning about exactly this kind of cascading cost transfer since 2007. My subscribers know this. My wife has heard me say it approximately four hundred times.
The Numbers They Published (And What They Actually Mean)
The Fed researchers found that between January and August 2025, U.S. importers absorbed 94 percent of tariff costs. Ninety-four percent. The mainstream financial press treated this as a finding about trade policy. They are missing the forest for the trees, as usual.
What the NY Fed actually revealed—whether they intended to or not—is that the entire structure of American consumption is a house of cards built on artificially cheap imports. A 2.6 percent tariff rate was a subsidy. Remove the subsidy, and the real cost of the American standard of living becomes visible. And it is unsustainable.
China’s Exit Is the First Domino
The study also found that China’s share of U.S. imports fell below 10 percent, down from 25 percent in 2017. Mainstream analysts are celebrating this as “successful decoupling.” They do not understand what they are looking at.
When your largest supplier begins withdrawing from your market, mainstream analysts call it “successful decoupling.” I call it a warning. The supply chains are fracturing. When—not if—the next demand shock hits, there will be no buffer. I have written about this before. The signs are everywhere if you are willing to see them.
Mexico and Vietnam absorbed some redirected trade, but at higher prices. The NY Fed’s own data shows import prices for tariffed goods rose 11 percent above non-tariffed goods. That is an 11 percent tax on the American consumer that no one voted for and no one can repeal through the ballot box. Sound familiar? Fiat currency works the same way.
The Tariff Cost Collapse Is a Symptom, Not the Disease
The tariffs are not the problem. The tariffs are a symptom of a system that has been running on borrowed time and printed money since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Every distortion since then—the credit expansion, the asset bubbles, the quantitative easing, and now the tariff regime—is the same disease expressing itself in different ways.
The NY Fed researchers, to their credit, published honest data. But they framed it as a question of “tariff incidence”—who pays the tax. They are asking the wrong question. The right question is: what happens when a $28 trillion economy built on 2.6 percent import costs suddenly absorbs 13 percent, and the consumer is already carrying record household debt?
I will tell you what happens. The same thing that always happens. The same thing I have been predicting for eighteen years. The timeline has accelerated.
What You Should Do
Gold. Physical gold. Not ETFs, not paper gold, not gold-adjacent financial instruments that will evaporate when the counterparty defaults. I have been saying this since gold was $800 an ounce. My critics said I was early. Being early and being wrong are not the same thing.
Linda—my wife—asked me last night if this was “the one.” The study that finally proves it. I told her they all prove it. Every single data point for the last eighteen years has confirmed the thesis. The only variable is timing, and timing is the one thing the Fed can manipulate. But not forever.
The NY Fed just told you that Americans are paying 90 cents of every tariff dollar. The crack-up boom is not coming. It is here. It has been here. The only question is whether you prepared.
My subscribers are prepared. The rest of you: call me. Initial consultations are complimentary. The collapse is not.
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