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I'm surprised how resilient / inflation resistant the market has been to both tariffs and the uncertainty around them ... but I wonder how much as been companies willing to eat costs or just avoid them with on and off tariff threats and etc.

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I suspect (but cannot prove) that companies were willing to eat the costs in the short term. They can't in the long term (nobody has profit margins to eat 50% higher cost of materials). But in the short term, nobody wanted to take the customer relations hit from raising prices and then find out that the tariffs were cancelled, postponed, or dramatically reduced, and their competitors who didn't raise prices had taken all the customers.

[Does anyone else get tired of stuff like "the highest rate since February"? Dudes, that was four months ago (because it's data for June). You'd expect a "highest rate in four months" about every four months or so. That in itself does not make this the kind of outlier that you are trying to make it sound like it is.]

Further, the tariffs have not be implemented across the board. There were only the threats. If and when they are implemented, we will see how all of this falls out.

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