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This week on the Capitol Gains podcast, it's all about the "exemption season" for tariffs.

President Trump first scaled back tariffs on auto imports on Wednesday by granting the Big Three automakers a one-month reprieve. Then on Thursday, days after 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada went into effect, Trump issued a one-month pause for goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

“Trump went forward with these tariffs on Tuesday. In the immediate days, the economic cost of them became very evident,” Yahoo Finance Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul said. "The CEOs and business leaders were getting to anyone they could at the White House, and they're clearly getting through in the sense that there certainly has been a walk-back [on tariff policy]. The question is what this looks like in a month when the big tariffs are in place.”

Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman noted that this tariff-then-exempt approach allows the president to exert an extraordinary amount of control over the economy by allowing Trump to make one-off decisions about individual companies or industries.

For context, Trump has "already imposed more tariffs in six weeks than all of 2018 and 2019," Newman explained. "There were 125,000 requests for exemptions from those tariffs [during his first term]. ... The Trump administration approved 41,000 exemptions, or about one-third of the requests."

President Trump said reciprocal tariffs on Canadian lumber and dairy products are coming, perhaps as early as today.

"Canada has been ripping us off for years on lumber and for dairy products," Trump said in the Oval Office Friday afternoon. "They’ll be met with the exact same tariff unless they drop it, and that’s what reciprocal means."

"We may do it as early as today or we’ll wait until Monday or Tuesday, but that's what we're going to do," Trump added.

Watch a live stream of Trump's remarks below:

From Reuters:

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Goldman Sachs updated its economic forecast to account for higher tariffs, according to a new note Friday.

Despite President Trump's pause on tariffs for USMCA-compliant goods Thursday, Goldman sees a larger US effective tariff rate going forward from the combined product-specific duties and reciprocal tariffs. This higher baseline of tariffs, in turn, will raise consumer prices and hit US economic growth, the Goldman team wrote.

"Taking on board this additional 0.5pp drag on growth from our new larger tariff assumptions, we have reduced our 2025 Q4/Q4 GDP growth forecast to 1.7%, from 2.2% previously," the economics team wrote.

Goldman also raised its 12-month recession probability from 15% to 20%, noting that the biggest risk stems from policy changes, though the White House could pull those back if the economic picture becomes bleaker.

Corporate earnings calls have offered insights into how companies are handling the ever-shifting tariff environment.

Reuters offered a round-up of some notable price alerts, supply chain callouts, and new US investments resulting from President Trump's trade policy:

Higher prices

• Best Buy (BBY): CFO Matt Bilunas said how consumers will react to price increases is "the giant wildcard" right now.

• Target (TGT): CEO Brian Cornell said prices on fruits and vegetables will go up if 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada remain in place.

Sourcing shifts

• Target also said it's moving sourcing for store brands to countries in the Western Hemisphere, like Guatemala and Honduras, and away from China.

• Kroger (KR) said it's diversifying its commodity suppliers and will possibly shift to geographies less affected by tariffs.

• Costco (COST) said its treasure-hunt model gives it flexibility and that it will possibly source products from countries not subject to tariffs.

• Alcoa (AA) said it would likely reroute Canada-made aluminum to Europe and send its Australian output to the US.

US sourcing shifts

• Honda (HMC) decided it will produce its next-gen Civic hybrid in Indiana instead of Mexico.

• Pfizer (PFE) said it might move overseas manufacturing to existing plants in the US.

New Investments

• Apple (AAPL) will invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including in a new AI server factory in Texas.

• Eli Lilly (LLY) plans to spend at least $27 billion to build four new manufacturing plants in the next five years.

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Yahoo Finance's Ben Werschkul writes:

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. stock (HPE) dropped 17% in premarket trading Friday after the company warned that tariffs would hurt profits. The company also said it faced weak margins on server sales and that it would cut about 3,000 jobs, putting the stock on track for its worst day since 2020.

"Recent tariff announcements have created uncertainty for our industry, primarily affecting our Server business," CFO Marie Myers said on the earnings calls. "We are working on plans to mitigate these impacts through supply chain measures and pricing actions. Through these efforts, we expect to mitigate, to a significant degree, the impact on the second half of the year and, to a lesser extent, the impact on Q2 as it takes time to implement mitigations."

Myers added that the "hardest part" of the tariff impact would be borne in Q2.

Read more from Bloomberg here.

Trump's tariff overhaul is rattling investors in countries not directly targeted by duties, going by a slide in Nintendo's (NTDOY, 7974.T) Tokyo-listed stock.

The Japanese games giant's shares closed over 9% lower on Friday, having hit a record high last month.

Bloomberg reports:

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Canada responded to Trump's pause on tariffs with a matching delay of its own — but Mexico's response remained unclear. But the southern US neighbor's move late Thursday on duties on China is significant.

Bloomberg reports:

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Canada's Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc declared that the country will postpone a second wave of tariffs until April 2 in a post to X. This was in response to President Donald Trump's signing of an executive order today to pause certain levies against Canada.

It remains unclear what exactly the Canadian tariffs against the US would be, but Trump's pause was on tariffs impacting the auto industry and a 10% duty on potash.

President Trump extended a one-month tariff exemption to some goods and services imported from Canada. The action followed Trump's agreement to pause tariffs on Mexican imports earlier in the day after speaking with the leaders of the US's largest trade partners.

Goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA) trade agreement will not face 25% tariffs, while non-compliant goods will continue to pay the duties. The exemption is scheduled to expire on April 2, when Trump is expected to announce his reciprocal tariff plan.

The action followed comments from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that hinted that Trump was considering carveouts. Trump also granted an exemption to the Big Three US automakers — GM, Ford, and Stellantis.

Read more here.

The Canadian Press reported that starting Monday, Ontario will begin charging 25% more for electricity shipped to 1.5 million Americans.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced the surcharge on Thursday in response to US tariffs on Canadian imports. He warned the governors of the states affected — Minnesota, New York, and Michigan — about the changes earlier in the week.

"You touch the stove once, you get burned, you don't touch that stove again," Ford said. "We're going to make sure that we follow through with what we said we were going to do."

Read more here.

As Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer previously detailed, mentions of tariffs by corporate America have skyrocketed in recent weeks.

For the most part, executives have responded by acknowledging policy uncertainty, reassuring shareholders they are monitoring their supply chains, or anticipating price hikes.

However, one company stands out as being less concerned than others: pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk (NVO).

"For Novo Nordisk, I do not worry a lot about tariffs," CEO Lars Jørgensen said Thursday.

For a look at what other consumer-facing companies are saying about Trump tariffs, see the chart below:

Speaking at the Economic Club of New York Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brushed off concerns that the Trump administration's latest tranche of tariffs could reignite inflation.

Yahoo Finance's Jennifer Schonberger reports:

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The US trade deficit surged to a record $131 billion in January ahead of President Trump's tariffs on the US's top trading partners. One reason for this appears to have been companies importing larger quantities of goods in an effort to front-run the tariffs.

Bloomberg reports:

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