Anna Wong: Empty Shelves Are Coming Soon

Odd Lots

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🗓️ 25 April 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

If you look at most of the official hard data right now, there still isn't much evidence of a sharp downturn. Sure, all the surveys are abysmal, but the actual measures of economic activity are ok. But there is already data showing something severe is happening, and that can be seen in the volume of cargo flowing from China to the US. Of course, this is intentional. This is the whole point of tariffs. But the fear is that this is going to be acute and dramatic to consumer companies, and that it will happen very soon. On this episode of the podcast we speak with Anna Wong, Chief US Economist at Bloomberg Economics, who walks us through the real life and macro-economic impact of what we've already seen. She says that the tariffs hit right at the moment that major retailers are planning for their holiday merchandise, and that before too long we'll start seeing fewer goods and fewer varieties of all kinds of things. We also discuss the inflation dynamics, and how tariffs may not show up in terms of higher CPI, but instead through higher layoffs, compressed profit margins, and falling real wages.

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1:09.9	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall.
1:15.6	And I'm Tracy Allaway.
1:16.8	Tracy, the number, one of the main things I'm watching right now are those container
1:22.2	shipping numbers that at least looking out at the next few weeks, it looks like lots of actual orders are being
1:29.7	canceled and there is the risk of material shortage of things from China emerging in a fairly
1:36.7	short period of time. Yeah, I think we're kind of getting to the rubber meets the road portion
1:41.7	of the tariffs, right? So everyone was talking about the potential
1:45.6	of some sort of trade restrictions going into this year because we knew that Trump had won the
1:50.2	election and he wanted to do some of this stuff. And so what we saw broadly for the first quarter
1:55.4	was people trying to get ahead of that. So building up their inventories, ordering a bunch of
2:00.6	stuff before some of those
2:02.4	restrictions were expected to get in. But of course, that can only last so long. And on Liberation
	...

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