A Recipe For Economic Implosion

It looks inevitable

70% of the products sold on Amazon.com are made in China. Currently there are no container ships on their way to the US from China and U.S. ports are nearly at a standstill. There is typically a five to seven week lag for orders to reach us, but nothing right now is typical.

The de minimus import provision that exempted shipments worth less than $800 that are shipped direct to consumers from tariffs is over. That means tariffs now apply to everything coming into the country.

After Donald Trump’s Liberation Day announcement we knew there would be a kind of grace period as products already here filled our needs but that is now over and those products are largely gone.

All of this is more than a bunch of factoids about imports. This is reality. If 70% of all goods Amazon sells are Chinese, we can assume 70% of almost everything is likely made in China. Some e-commerce sites are already displaying the added charges due to tariffs despite Amazon being slapped down by Trump when it was rumored they would do the same.

That would have been a bit too much reality for Donald Trump to bear because it would have graphically showed Americans just how much his schemes are costing us, and it’s a lot. The Trump plan, if you can call it that, is to threaten anyone speaking truth to power and to blatantly lie when that does not work. But, eventually he cannot control the story anymore and the blowback will be severe.