GM reported a 2% dip in sales to $47 billion, as well as $1.9 billion in quarterly profits, compared to $2.9 billion in the same period last year.
The auto companies’ tariff hit reinforced concerns—and emerging evidence—that Americans are the ones footing the bill for Trump’s sweeping tariff policy.
“The top-down macroevidence seems clear: Americans are mostly paying for the tariffs,” Deutsche Bank analyst George Saravelos said in the note.
The phenomenon is exemplified by Stellantis and GM eating billions in tariff costs.
Bernstein senior analyst Daniel Roeska said auto companies have started to exhaust their strategy of absorbing tariff costs into their own margins as car prices are poised to skyrocket later this year.
“There are only two people who can pay for [tariffs]: either the shareholders or the consumer,” Roeska told Fortune. “And in the end, there’s going to be some sharing between those two halves. And so our view has been and continues to be that prices for cars are going to push up in the second half.”
“There’s not much you can do,” Roeska said. “If the policy is to put tariffs on cars, then that will increase the cost of cars, and ultimately, that will likely increase the price of cars.”
