Made in Mexico, Sourced In China

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Tariff walls redrew the trade map faster than they redrew the dependency map, so Chinese content persists and re-routes through Mexico even as China's direct US-import share falls, and the distance between those two maps is the real substance of the July 2026 USMCA review. The reallocation itself is genuine. Mexico's factory boom, its record foreign investment, and its rise to America's top supplier are all real. The claim is narrower and sharper: the content that used to arrive labeled "Made in China" now arrives one step upstream, as components, intermediate goods, and Chinese-owned production inside Mexico, and the measured share of that content is climbing even as the label share drops.

The mechanism is what makes this a testable claim. A tariff raises the price of a Chinese origin label without lowering demand for the underlying goods, so supply chains re-route through the cheapest compliant path: transshipment, final assembly in Mexico, or Chinese factories built inside the North American bloc. Each of those margins moves value across a border while leaving the dependency intact.

Conviction level: High on direction, medium on magnitude. Three separate BCR models confirm the direction of travel; the size of the hidden exposure at the product level still spans a wide range by method and vintage.

Time horizon: Quarters to two years, paced by the tariff succession and the USMCA review calendar.

What would invalidate it: A signed USMCA content-and-transshipment mechanism that bites, followed by a sustained rollover in Mexico's imports from China and a falling Chinese value-added share in the next data vintage. That combination would mean the dependency map is finally catching up to the trade map.

Four dates in 2026 turned a slow structural story into a live one. On February 20, the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs the administration had imposed under emergency economic powers (Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, decided 6 to 3). The administration announced a replacement the same day, a temporary flat 10 percent tariff on nearly all imports under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a rarely used provision that lets a president impose a broad, time-limited duty to address a balance-of-payments problem, a country buying far more from abroad than it sells. It took effect on February 24. That wall is origin-blind: it taxes everyone at the same rate, which collapsed the China-specific penalty that had been driving the rerouting for seven years.

The Section 122 wall ran out its statutory clock on July 24, and the succession resolved the live question in the wedge's favor. Effective that morning, new duties under Section 301, the US trade statute used for country-specific penalties, replaced it across the top 60 US trade partners, tiered by each country's stance on forced-labor imports. Countries that committed to forced-labor import bans, Mexico and Canada among them, pay 10 percent. The rest, including China and Vietnam, pay 12.5 percent, stacked on top of the China-specific duties that never lapsed. Goods that qualify for USMCA preference enter free of the new duty entirely. For subscribers, the practical point is that the origin-blind flat tariff is gone: a China-specific penalty is back, Mexico is again the cheaper door, and proving North American content is again worth real money. (Litigation over the already-collected Section 122 duties continues at the Federal Circuit.)

The third date is July 1, three weeks before the wall came down, when the United States formally declined to renew the USMCA, the North American trade pact, and converted it into an annual review with a 2036 expiry backstop. The review's named agenda includes automotive rules of origin (the content thresholds a car must meet to cross tariff-free) and transshipment (goods routed through a third country to disguise their origin). The first US-Mexico bilateral round concluded in May 2026 with exactly those items on the table. The policy system, in other words, has started chasing the content itself, one layer upstream from the label.

The fourth development is in the data. With the China-specific penalty gone, the natural question was whether China's direct flow would come back. Through April 2026 it had not: China's share of US goods imports fell to a fresh low of 6.59 percent. Then the May figure, released in early July, turned up to 7.54 percent, the first year-over-year increase anywhere in the sample and the earliest tripwire our tariff-response model had named. On China's own customs data the recovery looks further along, with shipments to the US running near 90 percent of 2024 levels; on US-measured data the same trade is only 67 percent of 2024. Those two measures are counting the same goods from opposite ends of the ocean, and they have not reconciled since 2025. The upshot for the thesis: whichever way June resolves, it feeds the argument, because a US-side rebound is the rerouting mechanism running in reverse, and a persistent gap between the two measures is the flow re-entering through conduits.

The headline decoupling is real, and the report concedes it in full before pricing what moved underneath. A product-level study of more than 5,300 import categories by Laura Alfaro and Davin Chor (NBER Working Paper 34490) shows China's share of US imports falling from about 21 percent in 2017 to 9 percent over the first eight months of 2025, "effectively reversing two decades of trade integration." Vietnam and Mexico each gained more than 3 percentage points of US import share, the two largest winners. Real US imports from China fell 28 percent in 2025 while imports from the rest of the world rose 9 percent, according to the Peterson Institute's Chad Bown (March 2026).

Mexico is now the centerpiece of that shift. It overtook China as the largest source of US goods imports in 2023 for the first time since 2002, and it holds the top spot at 16.9 percent of US goods imports year-to-date through April 2026, while China has slipped to fourth at 7.2 percent, on Census data. Mexico's share of US finished-vehicle imports is up 12 percentage points since 2017, and US imports of AI computing products from Mexico alone accounted for more than a quarter of the entire increase in US imports in 2025. For a subscriber, the takeaway is that the surface data genuinely shows a historic move away from China, which is exactly why the number gets quoted as proof the decoupling is finished.

Figure 1 · China's share of US goods imports, 2005-2025

The measurement that matters most runs against the headline. Computed from the OECD's Trade in Value Added database, the 2025 edition covering 2016 through 2022, the share of Mexican gross exports that originates as Chinese value added rose from 5.1 percent in 2016 to 6.7 percent in 2022. The trend, about a third of a percentage point per year, holds across every window, denominator, and sector tested (the measured range runs from 0.22 to 0.42 points per year). Over the same six years, China's direct share of US imports fell about 0.86 points per year. The gap between the two, the divergence, runs at 1.18 percentage points per year, and the probability that it is actually zero or negative is below one in ten thousand.

That divergence is the whole thesis in one number. As tariffs pushed Chinese origin labels out of the US import mix, the Chinese content embedded inside Mexican exports climbed. The rise is broad: Chinese value added in Mexican motor-vehicle output grew about 0.55 points per year, in electronics about 0.39 points, in manufacturing overall about 0.44 points, every sector moving the same direction.

Figure 2 · The two maps diverge, 2016-2022

One widely quoted figure needs correcting, because it circulates in a form the data does not support. A Brookings analysis (Meltzer and Barron Esper, September 2025) is often summarized as "about a third of Mexico's exports are Chinese value added." On the gross-exports basis that phrasing implies, the true figure is about 6.7 percent. The one-third lives one measure over: China supplies roughly 32 percent of the foreign content of Mexico's electronics exports specifically (33.2 percent in 2020, 31.6 percent in 2022), and about a fifth of the foreign content of Mexican exports overall. The distinction matters because the precise version is defensible and the loose version collapses the moment a skeptic checks it against the source, taking the whole argument down with it.

The conduit's intake pipe is the second piece of hard evidence. Mexico's imports from China rose from $74 billion in 2017 to a record of about $133 billion in 2025, making China Mexico's second-largest supplier at about 21 percent of its imports, while Mexico sells China only about $10 billion a year. The composition is telling: Mexican imports of Chinese motor-vehicle parts are up 93.5 percent since 2018, transformers and related electrical goods up 65 percent, and Mexican use of Chinese intermediate products roughly doubled between 2018 and 2022. For the portfolio, this is the mechanism made concrete: the goods that leave Mexico as North American exports are increasingly assembled from inputs bought in China.

Figure 3 · Mexico's one-way trade with China

The clearest quantitative estimate of pure rerouting comes from a Harvard Business School working paper (Iyoha, Malesky, Wen and Wu, 24-072). Studying the Vietnam leg, the authors measure 18.2 percent of Vietnam's US-bound exports in 2021 as rerouted Chinese products at the country and product level, against just 1.8 percent at the firm level. That gap is where the economics live. Most of the rerouting is Chinese inputs assembled into goods transformed just enough to earn a new origin, well short of a container simply relabeled at the dock. Rerouting accounted for 8.8 percent of the $52.8 billion increase in Vietnam's US exports from 2018 to 2021, and province-level rerouting rose 1.74 percentage points for the average tariff increase, driven by new establishments and Chinese-owned firms.

The same conduit signature shows up in BCR's own testing of the bilateral flows. Vietnam's imports from China were uncorrelated with its exports to the US before 2018 and moved together afterward, the signature of a conduit switching on. Mexico's pipes were already coupled before the trade war, so instead of a correlation flip it shows sequencing: growth in China-to-Mexico shipments now leads growth in Mexico-to-US shipments by about three months. The plumbing was already in place; the tariffs just increased the flow.

The academic spine of the argument is that trade statistics systematically understate reliance on China. Richard Baldwin, Rebecca Freeman and Angelos Theodorakopoulos (NBER Working Paper 31820) find that US exposure to foreign suppliers, particularly China, is "much larger than what conventional trade data suggest," on the order of four times the face-value figure once indirect content is traced through. The same authors set the limit on that claim, and this report carries it in full: more than 80 percent of US industrial inputs are still sourced domestically, so the hidden exposure clusters in a handful of goods categories while the broad economy stays domestically supplied. The World Bank's Caroline Freund and co-authors state the mechanism in a single line worth quoting exactly: "Put differently, to displace China on the export side, countries must embrace China's supply chains." The countries that replaced China in US imports are the ones importing from China fastest.

The final piece of evidence is made of concrete and steel. Chinese manufacturers are building inside the North American wall. Hofusan Industrial Park near Monterrey reportedly houses at least 40 Chinese companies about 200 kilometers from the Laredo border crossing, according to the Dallas Fed, and Rhodium Group's transaction-level tracking shows roughly $1.1 billion of realized Chinese investment in Mexico in the first half of 2025, mostly in autos. Official statistics captured only about $159 million of Chinese foreign investment in 2024, an order of magnitude below the transaction estimates, because much of the money arrives through offshore affiliates and never registers as Chinese in origin; private estimates of the accumulated stock run from $15 billion to $22.5 billion.

Compliance behavior reveals the same gap from another angle. The share of US auto-sector imports paying the standard tariff instead of claiming USMCA's tariff-free preference rose from 0.5 percent before the pact to 8.2 percent in 2023. Importers are choosing to pay a small duty instead of documenting North American content, a revealed signal that the content is harder to certify than the finished-goods flow suggests. For a subscriber, the pattern across all five exhibits is consistent: the label decoupled while the bill of materials held.

Stage 1: A tariff changes relative prices while demand for the underlying goods stays put. US tariffs on Chinese goods, first in 2018 and 2019 and again in the 2025 escalation, made Chinese origin labels expensive. The Alfaro-Chor data shows that products facing an average 20-point tariff saw roughly 5-point declines in China's import share, with about 71 percent of the tariff passing through into the duty-inclusive price a US buyer paid. Demand for the actual goods, the auto parts and the transformers and the laptops, did not fall with the label.

Stage 2: Supply chains re-route through the cheapest compliant path. Three margins do the work, in ascending order of investment. The lightest is transshipment, where goods pass through a third country with minimal transformation. The middle margin is final assembly, where Chinese components are built into a finished good that legally earns a new origin. The heaviest is Chinese-owned production inside the destination bloc, the Hofusan model. All three move value across a border while leaving the underlying Chinese content on the bill of materials.

Stage 3: The trade map improves faster than the dependency map. This is the stage where the two measurements split. China's US-import share falls a mean of 2.5 percentage points within six months of each tariff escalation (measured against the share's own seasonal pattern, with a probability below one in a thousand that the effect is chance), while Mexico and Vietnam's combined share rises 2.3 points over the same window, a near-exact handoff. At the same time the content map moves the other way, with Chinese value added in Mexican exports rising about a third of a point per year. The label leaves; the dependency stays and moves upstream.

Figure 4 · The tariff handoff: China out, conduits in

Stage 4: When the wedge narrows, the snap-back appears first on the China side. The February 2026 collapse of the China-specific penalty into a flat 10 percent tariff removed the reason to reroute. China's own customs data show US-bound shipments back near 90 percent of 2024 levels by May, up from about 70 percent a year earlier, with importers front-running the July 24 expiry. The US-measured confirmation began with the May print: China's share rose 0.95 points off its April low, and the year-over-year change turned positive for the first time, exactly the earliest signal the model had flagged. The post-reset average share, 7.13 percent across four months, still sits below the 8.32 percent that prevailed before the reset, so this is a turn in progress, and a completed recovery would require the rebound to hold. Translated into calendar risk: the June figure in early August decides whether the rebound leg is real, and it reads on the flat-tariff era. July 24 restored a China-specific penalty, so prints from August onward test whether the reopened wedge pushes the flow back through the conduits.

Stage 5: Policy escalates from origin labels to content rules. Because the first four stages defeat tariffs written against origin, enforcement migrates to where the value is actually added. That is what the USMCA automotive rules of origin, the transshipment mechanism under negotiation, and the forced-labor tariff action are reaching for. The Section 301 investigations opened in March 2026, whose targets included Vietnam, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan and the EU alongside China, produced the July 24 two-tier duty. Its USMCA carve-out makes documented North American content the cheapest path into the US market. This is the July 2026 negotiating table, and it is the point at which Mexico is pushed to choose between its largest customer and its second-largest supplier.

The weak link sits at Stage 3. The value-added series is measured only through 2022, because the input-output tables that trace which industry supplies which lag three to four years, so the 2025 and 2026 escalation post-dates every content number. The trend is firmly measured through 2022; whether it bent afterward is the thesis's main data vulnerability, and the counter-thesis carries it.

The closest tested analog is Japan after China's 2010 rare-earth embargo, and it sets the clock for this entire story. When China cut off rare-earth exports, Japan mounted a full national effort to diversify, and in BCR's own testing of that episode, dependence fell from about 90 percent to roughly 58 percent over seven years, then plateaued and never approached zero. The parallel is exact in shape: a policy shock triggers loud diversification whose measured pace runs on a decade clock while headlines declare victory in quarters.

The differences all point the same way, toward a slower adjustment this time:

There is a second, older rhyme. In the 1980s, Japanese automakers answered US import quotas by building transplant factories in North America and routing production through them, and Washington answered with domestic-content politics. The playbook of building inside the wall is 40 years old. China is running it now at Hofusan, and the domestic-content fight it provokes is the USMCA review.

The precedent's implication is sobering for the decoupling narrative: even under full national mobilization, dependence fell by a third and then stopped. A reallocation this much larger, fought against a supplier that is building inside the wall, should be expected to run slower still.

Everything in this section describes how asset classes have historically behaved in comparable environments. None of it is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, and the framing is educational throughout.

Equities. The nearshoring theme has historically rewarded companies for their flag while overlooking their bill of materials, the exact mismatch that content-based enforcement would correct. In past shifts from origin-based to content-based trade rules, firms with genuinely high domestic value added have tended to hold up, while assembly-heavy businesses with thin local content have carried the risk that gets repriced when the rules change. US importers of Mexican and Vietnamese finished goods have historically faced margin pressure from either direction: tighter content rules raise input costs, and a tariff snap-back raises landed costs. The historical pattern favors reading companies through their value-added mix; the country stamped on the box has carried less information than it appears to.

Rates and fixed income. The inflation channel here runs through the tariff duties themselves and through composition effects the price indexes cannot see; the conduit goods' own prices do not carry it. In BCR's own testing, Mexican and Vietnamese goods carry no measurable rerouting price premium: Mexico's import prices rose 20.0 percent since late 2017 against the EU's 20.9 percent, statistically indistinguishable. Chinese exporters held their prices near pre-tariff levels, so US buyers paid the duties themselves, and over the whole period Chinese export prices drifted lower against peers on China's own factory-price deflation. What supports the sticky-inflation backdrop is the average effective US tariff itself, about 11 percent in early 2026 and the highest since 1943, according to the Yale Budget Lab, feeding core goods prices (goods excluding food and energy) through roughly 71 percent pass-through. In similar tariff regimes, institutional allocators have historically stayed cautious on longer-term bonds, the ones most sensitive to interest rate moves, while trade frictions kept upward pressure on goods prices.

Credit. Trade-policy risk of this kind has historically concentrated in import-dependent retail and consumer-durables issuers, whose cost of goods is heaviest in China-linked content, while manufacturers that can document compliant supply chains have tended to keep a borrowing-cost advantage. There is no systemic credit channel from this thesis on its own; the exposure is issuer-specific and keyed to the new two-tier tariff structure and the review rounds.

FX and emerging markets. The peso's trade risk has historically not priced as event risk, which is the counter-intuitive part. Across 14 USMCA and tariff events since 2017, in BCR's own testing, peso moves around the events were calmer than random stretches of trading, and even the sharp May 2019 tariff threat round-tripped within a month. The durable exposure is the slow regime repricing between events: Mexican equities lost 58 log points against the US market over the decade after adjusting for market sensitivity, roughly a 44 percent shortfall in plain terms, with essentially all of it accruing outside the event windows. The educational point is that positioning around review-round headlines has historically been noise, while the between-rounds arithmetic is where the value moved. This report takes no view on the direction of the dollar or the peso.

Commodities. Content-based enforcement has historically been constructive for North American steel and aluminum pricing, both of which are named in the first bilateral USMCA round. Transshipped Chinese steel was one of the earliest measured circumvention channels, with Mexican imports of Chinese steel growing more than 80 percent a year after 2018, so closing it tends to re-anchor regional pricing while the demand is redistributed across suppliers and total industrial-metals demand holds.

The strongest rebuttal is that China remains a modest player in US-Mexico trade once the numbers are disaggregated, and it is partly correct. The Dallas Fed shows Mexican domestic value added above 50 percent in autos, Mexico's largest export sector, US content inside Mexican exports running 17 to 20 percent, and firm-level rerouting in Vietnam at just 1.8 percent against the 18.2 percent product-level figure. The level checks out in BCR's own testing: Chinese content is about 7 percent of Mexican gross exports, far below a third, and Mexican domestic value added in autos is 53.7 percent, confirming the Dallas Fed. A report that leans on the biggest available numbers without this sector nuance is genuinely attackable, and the defensible version of the thesis narrows to electronics, machinery and steel, with autos becoming the counter-example at the center of the USMCA fight. The reason the thesis still holds is direction: that 7 percent is rising in every sector including autos, so "modest" and "moving the wrong way for decoupling" are both true at once.

Estimated probability counter-argument is correct: 35%

If the USMCA review produces real content-based enforcement, tighter auto rules of origin, a working transshipment mechanism, and Chinese-investment screening, measured Chinese content falls and the forward-looking part of this thesis weakens. Mexico has its own incentive to protect its US access and is already moving: President Sheinbaum's Plan Mexico, announced in early 2025, is a partial return to import-substitution policy that explicitly seeks to reduce Chinese inputs and raise local value added. The reason the thesis largely survives is timing and base rates. Major trade-agreement renegotiations rarely conclude inside a year (the original USMCA took about 14 months under easier politics), the annual-review structure and 2036 backstop reduce the urgency, and the backward-looking receipts stand regardless. Enforcement that does bite would confirm the rerouting mechanism even as it breaks the factory-boom frame.

Estimated probability counter-argument is correct: 30%

The content series is measured only through 2022, so the 2025 and 2026 tariff escalation and Plan Mexico's restrictions post-date every value-added figure in this report, and the Harvard rerouting estimates are anchored on 2021 and have already shifted across paper revisions (from 16.5 to 18.2 percent between vintages). It is possible the rising-content trend measured through 2022 bent afterward in ways the data cannot yet show. This is a real minority case, weightier than a tail risk. The mitigant is that input-output revisions rarely move headline value-added shares by more than a few points over two to three years absent a shock, and the direction held across every window and sector tested. The counter-argument resolves when the next data vintage lands, expected around 2027, and the content trend can be re-measured.

Estimated probability counter-argument is correct: 20%

The July 1 decision converts Mexico's guaranteed US access into an annually reviewed arrangement, and the intuitive read is that this freezes investment across the board. The historical record, tested in BCR's own work, refutes that intuition at the aggregate level. Through the entire 2017-2018 NAFTA renegotiation, new-investment foreign inflows into Mexico ran at or above their prior norm, and the measured relationship between trade-policy uncertainty and investment is statistically null at every horizon. In the current episode, uncertainty peaked at more than four times the 2018 level while new-investment inflows in early 2026 ran about 36 percent above their post-COVID trend. What survives is the China-specific channel, which public data cannot test and the model does not contradict: Chinese investment announcements fell to $57 million in the second quarter of 2025 from $272 million in the first, and BYD shelved its Mexico plant in July 2025 citing geopolitical concerns. The freeze is real for Chinese capital specifically and unproven for nearshoring capital at large.

Estimated probability counter-argument is correct: 10%

If Mexico's imports from China roll over while a USMCA transshipment mechanism is signed, the backdoor is genuinely closing and the forward leg weakens. If China's US-import share climbs back above 10 percent while the value-added share keeps rising in the next data vintage, the content is re-entering the chain and the thesis accelerates.

Alfaro, Laura and Davin Chor, "An Anatomy of the Great Reallocation in US Supply Chain Trade," NBER Working Paper 34490, 2025; NBER Digest, February 2026.

Alfaro, Laura and Davin Chor, "Global Supply Chains: The Looming Great Reallocation," NBER Working Paper 31661, September 2023 (Jackson Hole Symposium).

Baldwin, Richard, Rebecca Freeman and Angelos Theodorakopoulos, "Hidden Exposure: Measuring US Supply Chain Reliance," NBER Working Paper 31820 / Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2023.

Freund, Caroline, Aaditya Mattoo, Alen Mulabdic and Michele Ruta, "Is US Trade Policy Reshaping Global Supply Chains?," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10593 (October 2023) / Journal of International Economics, 2024. China's share of US imports 21.6 to 16.3 percent, 2017-2022.

Iyoha, Ebehi, Edmund Malesky, Jaya Wen and Sung-Ju Wu, "Exports in Disguise? Trade Rerouting During the US-China Trade War," Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-072, current revision (18.2 percent product-level, 1.8 percent firm-level, 2021).

Meltzer, Joshua P. and Maricarmen Barron Esper, "Is China circumventing US tariffs via Mexico and Canada?," Brookings, September 23, 2025.

Bown, Chad P., "The Trump-China trade wars: Five takeaways from US imports in 2025," Peterson Institute for International Economics, March 16, 2026.

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "Breaking China: Reopening global trade and the evolving US-Mexico relationship," 2025 (China as a modest player in US-Mexico trade; Chinese investment lags G7 economies).

Office of the US Trade Representative, "The United States and Mexico Conclude First Bilateral Round Related to the Joint Review of the USMCA," May 2026.

Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, "Trump Administration Decides Against Renewing USMCA, Opts for Annual Review Process," July 2026.

Skadden, "US Trade Court Strikes Down Section 122 Tariffs, but Ruling's Fate Is Uncertain and Practical Impact Is Limited," May 2026.

US Census Bureau, "Top Trading Partners," year-to-date April 2026 (Mexico 16.9 percent of US goods imports, China 7.2 percent), and monthly country trade balances (FT-900), through May 2026.

Rhodium Group, "Full Circle: Mexico's Resurgence Amid US-China Trade Frictions"; Chinese investment announcements via the Dallas Fed.

Braumiller Law Group, "Chinese Industrial Parks in Mexico, a Growing Hub for Chinese FDI (and BYD)," February 2025 (official $159 million 2024 figure).

Mexico News Daily, "Mexico's trade deficit with China reached nearly US $120B in 2024" ($9.94 billion exports, $129.8 billion imports), and Hofusan Industrial Park expansion coverage.

UN COMTRADE via Trading Economics, "Mexico Imports from China" ($133 billion, 2025).

OECD, "Trade in Value Added (TiVA) 2025 edition" and "Inter-Country Input-Output Database 2025 edition," coverage 1995-2022.

CNBC, "China's economy picks up in June on rebounding US exports," June 29, 2026 (shipments near 90 percent of 2024 levels, official data).

Yale Budget Lab, "State of US Tariffs," April 2026 (average effective tariff about 11 percent, highest since 1943).

Office of the US Trade Representative, "Fact Sheet: USTR Section 301 Action in Response to the Failure of 60 Economies to Ban Imports Produced with Forced Labor," July 2026 (two-tier 10 and 12.5 percent structure, effective July 24, 2026).

Honigman, "Section 122 Tariffs Expire for Many Imports, But New Section 301 Forced-Labor Tariffs on 60 Economies Replace Them, Effective July 24, 2026," July 2026 (country tiers; USMCA exemption; stacking with existing China duties; Federal Circuit litigation).

Methodology note. Two China-import measures appear throughout and are never interchangeable: the US Census share of US goods imports (7.54 percent in May 2026, 9 percent for full-year 2025) counts imports as the US measures them, while China's customs data (shipments near 90 percent of 2024 levels) counts the same trade as China measures its exports. The two have diverged materially since 2025 and are labeled separately at every use. Value-added figures use the OECD TiVA 2025 edition, which covers 1995 through 2022; the Chinese value-added share of Mexican gross exports is computed as Chinese-origin value added divided by Mexican gross exports. Tariff-response and value-added findings attributed to "a BCR model" are internal event-study and trend analyses run against Census FT-900 and OECD TiVA data; the tariff-response model was last re-run against the May 2026 FT-900 on July 9, 2026. Tariff-succession facts (the Section 122 expiry and the July 24 Section 301 action) are current as of July 29, 2026.

This report is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. All asset class commentary reflects historical patterns and educational analysis, not personal investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Readers should consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Benjamin Capital Research | July 29, 2026