Uncharted Tarifftory
Welcome to the dumb kind of volatility.
Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. How are things looking?
Welcome to Q2 — and what a time to be alive! I’m sending this from the plane to New York, where I’ll be launching a new Consumer Trends Special Report with Coefficient Capital. Stay tuned for that later this week; here is a quick note in the meantime.
As you surely know, last week the Trump regime declared a bunch of steep new tariffs on imports from most countries the US trades with, especially Asian markets where a lot of consumer products — and components that go into consumer products — are made.
This was not a surprise. But the tariffs 1) are higher than most had expected, 2) were calculated lazily, and 3) were introduced in a chaotic way that — again — would not be surprising if you’ve been watching Trump for any period of time, but still inspires very little confidence.
The high-level thinking — in the most generous terms — is that the US could reduce its reliance on other countries, especially China, by highly taxing imports, and by incentivizing more manufacturing in the US.
That is unrealistic: Young Americans don’t even want to make complicated drinks working at Starbucks; they definitely don’t want to put down their iPhones and go to work making shoes (or iPhones) in real factories.