It was time for Beau Hanson to lay down his bets.

Like other farmers in western Iowa, in early April Mr. Hanson was preparing for spring planting. The decisions he made then could determine whether he would be in the red or the black come fall harvest.

In farming, there are always uncertainties, and all around Monona County, where Mr. Hanson lives, farmers are weighing them. It has been a tough few years. A wet spring in 2024 meant some farmers had to replant three times. This year, it’s too dry. The price of soybeans has been going down, while the cost of seed and fertilizer has remained high, as have the interest rates on the loans that farmers take out to buy those things. Rates have reached 9 percent, more than double what they were three years ago.

And now, there is an extra variable: a trade war.

The 145 percent tariff that President Trump imposed on Chinese imports in April was met with a retaliatory 125 percent tax on U.S. goods going into China. In practice, that means a hefty tax on Midwestern crops. China is the largest importer of U.S. soybeans, buying some $12.8 billion worth last year. The new tariffs, along with various taxes, bring the effective tariff for the crop to 155 percent, according to the American Soybean Association.

Even before Mr. Trump set off the current tariff war, some farmers in Iowa were looking at the possibility of a third consecutive year of losses. Everything is slowing down. Lenders are becoming more cautious. Machinery and heavy equipment sellers feel the mood shift, too, as farmers eke out another year from aging tractors, planters and other big machinery, rather than buy new ones.

“Every year is uncertain,” Mr. Hanson said. “But this year, it’s especially tough.”

Mr. Hanson grew up in Castana, Iowa, and played football at the local high school. After attending Iowa Central Community College, where he was an offensive lineman, Mr. Hanson, 35, returned home and bought the farm next to the house he grew up in. Unlike many of his peers who left farm life for jobs in bigger cities, he is trying to build his future on the fertile soil tilled by four generations of his family.

He farms 700 acres with some combination of soy and corn, and he hedges his bets with 400 head of cattle. His three children, involved in 4-H, care for a few newborn British White Park calves in the barn.

Like many rural Iowa communities, Monona County voted heavily for Mr. Trump, 72 percent, in the election. Mr. Hanson won’t discuss his vote and notes that he sits on the county fair board and sells seed to customers all around the area.

“I don’t want to be political,” Mr. Hanson said, kicking the dirt with his tan work boots and choosing his words carefully. “But a trade war is not likely to help grain prices here.”

An Echo of the 1980s

Over five days in early April, I crisscrossed rural communities in western Iowa, talking to farmers. The roads were familiar to me. I grew up driving tractors and working the fields on my family’s small corn and soybean farm in Blencoe, about 20 miles southwest of Mr. Hanson’s house.

In my teens in the 1980s, I poured coffee for farmers who sat at long tables at Helen’s Cafe in Onawa. I eavesdropped as they compared rain amounts, crop yields and the size of the fish they caught. I knew we had a good year when Dad bought a new pickup. During a particularly bad year, my birthday present was a clock radio, purchased from the local farm supply store, most likely so my parents could claim it as a farm expense.

The concerns that farmers voice these days are reminiscent of my teenage years. “The ’80s, the ’80s, the ’80s,” said Gary Jensen, who farms land in the Loess Hills, a rugged terrain that juts up abruptly from the Iowa plains. “It comes up all the time.”

The 1980s were a dark time for American farmers. A trade embargo against the Soviet Union led to plummeting grain prices just as the Federal Reserve boosted interest rates to as much as 20 percent in an effort to rein in inflation. Land prices plunged, decreasing the value of the collateral that farmers had used to obtain loans. By some estimates, 300,000 farmers defaulted on loans, resulting in the largest number of bank failures since the Great Depression. The Farm Crisis crushed many a small town.

At 33, Mr. Jensen is too young to have experienced that time, but he has heard enough to know that things can go south fast, and he needs to be careful. When we met, he was preparing his red Case tractor for planting season. When I asked how old the tractor was, he laughed. It was manufactured in 1989, three years before he was born. He’s not planning to replace it. “There’s not going to be any new equipment anytime soon,” he said.

Farmers are tightening their belts, said Barry Benson, a senior vice president of agribusiness banking at FNBO, the First National Bank of Omaha. “They’re going to run the combine one more year or run the tractor another year,” he said.

In the months before spring planting, Mr. Benson and other lenders typically meet with farmers to talk about the size of operating loans they will need for the coming season. Someone with a relatively small farm, around 400 acres, may take out a $250,000 loan to pay for seed, fertilizer and leasing the land, and repay the loan after harvest.

But Mr. Benson estimated that a third of last year’s loans couldn’t be repaid and had to be restructured, which, for some farmers, meant taking out another loan. Others had to sell equipment or land.

Dan Dotzler, the president and chief executive of the United Bank of Iowa in Ida Grove, said his bank had had “some hard and long” conversations with farmers.

“We really try to work things out, do everything we can, because these are longstanding relationships,” he said. “But we also recommend farmers look for ways to get additional income to supplement living costs. You’ve got to go to town and get a job to support yourself and your family. It’s a different environment now than it was a few years ago.”

Mr. Dotzler remains optimistic, believing that if farmers keep expenses down, they will, for the most part, be fine. But he is also worried about high interest rates, costly machinery repairs and the lack of a Farm Bill in Congress. And, of course, tariffs.

“There’s so much unknown about what’s going to happen with the tariffs and how it’s going to affect everything,” Mr. Dotzler said. “There is just a lot of wait and see on that front, which leads to anxiousness.”

‘Exports, Exports, Exports’

One way the farm economy recovered from the 1980s was through exports, particularly with an emerging market: China.

China was booming and in need of soy and other feed for its own livestock industries. From a starting point of zero in the 1990s, China became a critical market for U.S. agricultural goods, hitting a peak in 2022, when it imported $36.4 billion worth of products, including soybeans, corn, sorghum, poultry and pork, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Export markets like China are essential because American farmers produce way more than U.S. customers can buy. The industrialized farms that cover the Midwestern landscape use modern planters that practically drive themselves using GPS technology and drop seeds at the perfect depth and width, all in a small fraction of the time it takes farmers using older equipment. In addition, the seed itself not only generates more crop per acre, but is better at protecting the young plants against pests and diseases.

The result is ever-increasing yields. Corn, which is used in animal feed and ethanol production, has a larger domestic market, with exports accounting for about 15 percent of the harvest.

Soybeans, however, are much more sensitive to trade wars. Roughly 40 percent of the soybean crop is exported.

“Exports, exports, exports — that’s where the market is,” said Milo Ruffcorn, 66, a farmer from Mondamin, Iowa. “We have to have someone to sell our corn and soybeans to.”

Concerned that a drawn-out trade war between the United States and a major agricultural buyer like China could stifle soybean prices, Mr. Hanson and many other farmers are betting big on corn this year.

Prices for both crops have fallen around 40 percent since May 2022. For farmers, eyeing prices at dismal, potentially money-losing levels, the math is simple: Go for yield. That means corn, which produces more per acre.

Mr. Hanson decided to plant corn on 90 percent of his acres. This year, farmers are expected to plant 95 million acres of corn, the highest amount in five years, according to the U.S.D.A.

On paper, Mr. Hanson calculates that after paying rent on his 700 acres, buying crop insurance, seed and various chemicals and paying back his operating loan, he can make a profit of $60,000, or about $85 an acre, on corn. With soybeans, his calculations come out to a loss.

“It doesn’t make any sense to go into the field and plant a crop, expecting a loss,” Mr. Hanson said, shaking his head.

The Trump Safety Net

Karol King tucked into a pork tenderloin sandwich with a side of macaroni salad at Frannie’s Cafe on Main Street in downtown Onawa. My father worked for Mr. King in the 1990s and 2000s, putting up irrigation systems.

A lifelong Republican who voted for Mr. Trump, Mr. King, 78, gives the president high marks for his tough stance on tariffs, particularly against China, even if it causes some pain for farmers like himself.

“It’s going to be tough, but they are weaker than we think,” he said, “and we are their biggest customer.”

But even if there is a standoff with China on trade and grain prices remain low, Mr. King and other farmers believe Mr. Trump will bail them out.

“For some reason, he likes farmers — and blue-collar workers,” Mr. King said. “We’re not going to be hung out to dry.”

Mr. Trump has not discouraged that belief. In mid-April on his social media platform, Truth Social, he posted that American farmers were on the “front line” of a trade war with China, adding, “The USA will PROTECT OUR FARMERS!!!”

During Mr. Trump’s first term, he imposed tariffs on China that were met with Chinese retaliatory duties on soybeans, corn, wheat and other American products. The U.S. government provided an emergency rescue package of about $23 billion to farmers to ease the pain.

President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Congress continued some of the subsidies, including a $10 billion payout last year to make up for low commodity prices. Mr. Hanson said the money he had received from the government helped him break even on some land and squeeze out a small profit on other fields.

All of the farmers I chatted with in Iowa said they would like to sell their corn, soybeans and other commodities at a good price in the market. And almost all of them said they would take the taxpayer money if it was offered.

“I would prefer to have corn above $5 a bushel and $11 beans,” Mr. Hanson said. “Without that, we’ll need a safety net to protect family farms like mine.”

Still, Mr. Hanson isn’t betting on a handout.

“Are we going to get a government payment to help us out this year?” Mr. Hanson shrugged. Another uncertainty.

Less than a year ago, the Federal Reserve took decisive action to bolster the U.S. economy. With inflation easing and the labor market starting to soften, the central bank opted to go big, lowering interest rates by half a percentage point and signaling further cuts to come.

Rather than a panicky response to a crisis situation, the decision amounted to the Fed taking out some insurance to protect the labor market from weakening too much.

In a barrage of attacks on the central bank recently, President Trump called on Jerome H. Powell, the chair, to lower borrowing costs in a similar fashion to prevent the economy from slowing down. But the Fed no longer has the flexibility to move pre-emptively.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs and the inflation spike they could potentially unleash have left officials much more cautious about restarting interest rate cuts despite rising risks of an economic slowdown. The Fed is widely expected to keep interest rates steady when officials gather this week, extending a pause that began in January after a series of cuts last year.

But forecasts for when the Fed will have the confidence to cut again are in a constant state of flux, injecting yet more volatility into an already tenuous moment for the economy and the global financial system. Officials will need to see tangible evidence that the labor market is starting to weaken and people are struggling to find work before taking action. If it takes time to materialize, the Fed could be on hold for even longer than expected.

That risks keeping tensions simmering with Mr. Trump, who on Sunday again criticized Mr. Powell while saying that he would not replace the chair before his term ends in May 2026.

“It’s too uncertain to be pre-emptive,” said Ellen Meade, who served as a senior adviser to the Fed’s board of governors until 2021 and is now at Duke University. “The date for a cut is the time that the slowing of the economy outweighs, in their view, the overshoot in inflation.”

Policy Backdrop in Flux

Making a big policy pivot is never an easy judgment call, but the current circumstances have made it uniquely fraught. The Fed is having to contend with an ever-changing backdrop amid Mr. Trump’s whipsawing plans for tariffs, tax cuts and other campaign promises.

The White House says trade deals will be worked out ahead of a self-imposed 90-day delay to large levies initially announced in early April. But no one knows for sure how those are progressing, or even if the administration is in communication with one of its biggest trading partners, China. It is not yet clear what will happen after the July deadline lapses if deals are not reached. The administration has also set a July 4 goal to fulfill Mr. Trump’s promise to enact sweeping tax cuts, but the contours of that bill are still being worked out.

The uncertainty alone has already chilled business activity, causing paralysis in many industries as companies put off big investments and hiring until they get clearer direction from the White House. As recession odds have crept up alongside expectations about inflation in the year ahead, consumer sentiment has plummeted. Already, many consumer-oriented brands, from Chipotle to PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, have reported sluggish sales.

When confronted with similar harbingers of an economic slowdown after Mr. Trump started a tit-for-trade war with China during his first term, the Fed opted to take action. It lowered interest rates three times in 2019, keeping a record expansion chugging along as price pressures stayed subdued.

But the Fed does not have the “luxury of 2019,” said Esther George, who retired as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in 2023. In Trump’s first term, the tariffs were much smaller in scale and inflation was consistently below the Fed’s 2 percent target. “In that world, you would probably see the Fed leaning in harder to a more proactive stance. I don’t think they can afford to do that right now.”

More Than Just Temporary?

Consumers are still grappling with the fallout of the worst inflation shock in four decades that hit after the pandemic. Price pressures have eased significantly since peaking in 2022, but have not been snuffed out entirely.

Tariffs, which are a tax on imports, are widely expected to reignite them. The question is by what magnitude and for how long. In theory, tariffs should only lead to a short-term increase that fades over time. But that is by no means assured in an environment in which consumers are already jittery about inflation.

“Inflation is as much a psychology as it is a measurement that you can really pinpoint,” Ms. George said.

The Fed pays closest attention to longer run measures of inflation expectations, especially those based on the U.S. government bond market. For now, they suggest a temporary burst in inflation that ultimately fades.

Proponents of this view argue that tariffs will indeed raise prices, but those increases will not persist because there are few forces to keep it going. Unlike the post-pandemic period, the labor market has significantly less momentum, consumers are in worse shape financially and the government does not appear ready to ride to the rescue again with generous stimulus measures.

Christopher J. Waller, a Fed governor, recently argued that tariff-induced inflation will be temporary. Yet even he has acknowledged that looking past this surge will not be easy. “It’s going to take some courage to stare down these tariff increases in prices with the belief that they are transitory,” he said in an interview last month.

Many economists warn that dismissing tariff-related price increases altogether would not be prudent either.

Jean Boivin, the former deputy governor at the Bank of Canada who is now head of the BlackRock Investment Institute, expects tariffs to induce a supply shock similar to what happened during Covid, when empty shelves led to higher prices and, in turn, persistently higher inflation. Businesses and consumers have already pulled forward purchases in an attempt to get ahead of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, and ports along the coasts are already reporting a sharp drop in traffic.

In what he calls a “supply driven recession,” Mr. Boivin forecasts that consumers will still want to spend but shortages will make that harder to do. When products do become available, consumers will be willing to pay the higher prices, translating to higher inflation that lingers for longer than it otherwise would have even as spending on the whole falls.

“It does raise a question about what the right medicine is,” said Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, of the potential unintended consequences if the Fed lowers interest rates as shortages hit.

“Having demand pick up once again while supply is hugely constrained by these high tariffs may not be the best answer,” he said.

Layoffs Looming

The health of the labor market has taken on new significance against this backdrop.

So far it appears to be holding up, according to the latest jobs report released on Friday, which showed the unemployment rate steady at 4.2 percent. But economists do not expect that resilience to last. Layoffs are still low, but employers are posting fewer vacancies, hiring has slowed and wage growth has stalled, undeniable signs of softening.

Because the Fed sees little urgency to lower interest rates until there are clearer signs that the labor market is in jeopardy, a June cut looks increasingly improbable. Traders in federal funds futures markets now wager the Fed will reduce rates in July and deliver around four quarter-point cuts this year. But it is easy to see how the timing could be pushed back even further given expectations that the economic data will not deteriorate in a more noticeable way until July at the earliest.

James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING, now sees even odds that the Fed will restart rate cuts in July with a quarter-point reduction or move aggressively by half a percentage point in September. The longer the Fed waits, the higher the chances that it will need to provide more relief faster to contain the economic fallout.

“The Fed is equally at the mercy of the administration’s policies as everybody else. And with volatile policies, it is hard to anticipate what they will be and then react accordingly,” said Mr. Rajan, who is now at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

“It may well be that both the Fed and the administration move in the same direction if and when they see tremendous damage done, but evidence of the damage is needed for them to move.”

Warren Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, said he would step down from that position by the end of the year.

Mr. Buffett, 94, transformed Berkshire Hathaway, once a textile company, into a powerful business investor, making billions along the way.

Here’s a look back at some of the defining moments in his life.

Aug. 30, 1930

The ‘Oracle of Omaha’

In August 1930, Mr. Buffett was born in Omaha to Leila and Howard Buffett, an investment banker and future Republican congressman.

At 9 years old, he started studying the stock market.

“I used to chart all kinds of stock, the more numbers the better,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1990.

He studied at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Nebraska and Columbia Business School before returning to Omaha.

1959

Meeting Charlie T. Munger

In 1959, Mr. Buffett met Charles T. Munger after a doctor in Omaha introduced them to each other. They went into business together soon after and worked together for more than 50 years.

In 2015, Mr. Buffett credited Mr. Munger, who became vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway in 1978, with creating the structure of the business.

“The blueprint he gave me was simple: Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices,” Mr. Buffett wrote in a letter looking back at the company’s first 50 years.

Mr. Munger died in 2023.

1963

Seeing Past a Salad Oil Swindle

The stock for American Express Company cratered in 1963 after the public learned the company had provided tens of millions of dollars in warehouse receipts for salad oil that did not exist through a warehousing subsidiary. Inspectors had been fooled by tubs of water topped with salad oil, and receipts were forged.

Mr. Buffett, who was not well known at the time, spotted an opportunity and put $13 million into American Express because it had strong assets besides the entities involved with the salad oil scandal.

The purchase is considered one of his earliest investment successes. Berkshire Hathaway is now the biggest shareholder in American Express.

1965

Trading Textiles for Corporations

Mr. Buffett first bought shares in Berkshire Hathaway, then a textile company, in December 1962. He continued to buy shares over the years and in May 1965 formally took control of the business, transforming it into a conglomerate holding company.

In the letter commemorating the company’s 50th anniversary, Mr. Buffett said he regretted spending so much money on the Berkshire stock he had acquired in the early 1960s. He closed the textile business in 1985.

1993

A ‘Gruesome’ Blunder

Mr. Buffett has been open about his investment mistakes, and in his 50th anniversary letter he called Berkshire Hathaway’s purchase of the company Dexter Shoe in 1993 “the most gruesome” error.

Berkshire Hathaway bought Dexter Shoe, a shoe manufacturer based in Maine, for $433 million, and its value quickly dropped to zero.

“As a financial disaster, this one deserves a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records,” he wrote.

Mr. Buffett was one of the world’s wealthiest people when he said in 2006 that he planned to donate the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation and four other philanthropies.

Four years later, Mr. Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates enlisted other wealthy Americans to make similar commitments.

Mr. Buffett told The Wall Street Journal in 2024 that the foundation would not receive any more of his money after his death. The money will instead go to a charitable trust overseen by his daughter and two sons.

May 3, 2025

Buffett Exits

At Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, Mr. Buffett announced that he was stepping down.

Mr. Buffett said that he wanted Gregory E. Abel, the vice chairman of Berkshire’s non-insurance companies, to take over as chief executive by the end of the year.

Mr. Buffett, Berkshire’s single biggest shareholder with a roughly 14 percent stake that is worth about $164 billion, will remain chairman of the company.