Chapter 1: What impact has the end of the 'de minimis' exemption had on businesses?
Traders are sending precious metal prices through the roof. We'll explain why. For Marketplace, I'm Novosafo, in for David Brancaccio. Prices for gold, silver, and other precious metals are hitting records, while the dollar is losing value. Spot prices for silver are up 150% this year. Gold is up more than 70%, and it's on track for its biggest annual gain since 1979.
What's driving these shifts? I posed that question to Diane Swonk, chief economist at the audit tax and advisory firm KPMG. Just about everything you can imagine is behind it. Everything from the uncertainty that we saw spike in the wake of the April announcements about tariffs to uncertainty about where the U.S.
Chapter 2: How are precious metal prices affected by current economic factors?
is and its role in the world. What we've seen is both central banks increase their holdings of gold instead of U.S. treasuries, trading out of U.S. treasuries and metals are on their balance sheet because they want to be less dependent on the US dollar in this precarious time where uncertainty about geopolitical tensions to trade tensions is still very high and escalated.
And yeah, and so we are seeing the dollar also hovering around two-month lows now, you know, kind of in the doldrums. Do you expect that to continue moving forward? You know, it's always hard to predict where a currency will go, but the dollar was really overvalued going into this year. So it's not too surprising that it's coming down a bit.
But also, it really depends on how much policy uncertainty there is going forward.
Chapter 3: What are the reasons behind the recent surge in gold and silver prices?
We've seen that this has been a major factor in the U.S. economy recently. affecting the labor market and prices more than overall growth. It keeps giving us an economy that adds up on paper to look better than it feels to most Americans. And that's going to be hard to decouple until we get more certainty on exactly where the course of policy is.
Diane Swank, Chief Economist at KPMG, thank you very much. Thank you. NVIDIA has agreed to license technology from an AI chip company called Grok, that's spelled G-R-O-Q, not to be confused with Grok with a K, which is Elon Musk's AI company. Leaders at Grok with a Q will go to work for NVIDIA, but this is not a traditional corporate acquisition, as Marketplace's Henry Yap explains.
As Silicon Valley giants race to invest in artificial intelligence technology, deals like this are becoming more common.
Chapter 4: How have small businesses adjusted to the removal of the tax exemption?
Here's how they generally work. But the startup technically remains a separate company. Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have all made deals like this with smaller companies in the last few years. NVIDIA's agreement with Grok is the latest example. In a post on its website, Grok calls this a non-exclusive licensing agreement for its chips designed to power AI inference.
Inference is what AI models do when they pull from data they've been trained on to generate an answer to a user's question. Grok was founded in 2016. It was valued at just under $7 billion earlier this year. I'm Henry Epp for Marketplace. When we think back on the Trump administration's major trade policies of the year, we of course think tariffs.
Chapter 5: What challenges are international businesses facing after the change?
But the White House also ended the tax exemption on packages shipped to the U.S. which are valued under $800. This was the so-called de minimis exemption. It came to an end at the end of August. How are businesses at home and abroad faring four months on? The BBC's William Lee Adams reports.
Until August, anyone could send a parcel to the United States tariff-free, so long as the value of the item was less than $800. Businesses from around the world took advantage of the rule. Almost 1.4 billion packages entered the U.S. duty-free last year.
Chapter 6: How has the logistics industry benefited from the tax exemption ending?
With two of China's largest online retailers, Xi'an and Timu, each sending hundreds of millions of parcels to the states annually, the de minimis rule found itself in the sights of President Trump. It's a big scam going on against our country, against really small businesses. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained why the tax exemption had to go.
Foreign countries were sending in little packages for free and knocking out our mom and pop businesses across America. The most immediate impact was on businesses outside of the U.S. Here's Jess Van Dan, a jewelry maker based in Australia. 30 to 40 percent of my jewelry business was in the U.S. And now I've had to stop that entire part of my business. And I'm not the only one.
Chapter 7: What future implications might arise from these economic shifts?
In removing the tax exemption, the White House said it wanted to level the playing field for U.S. companies, so have they seen a difference since the changes? Madeline Knutson, who runs a mail order business out of Minot in North Dakota, says she's much more careful about where she buys her products from.
I tend to look where they're shipping from because that impact has caused us to raise our prices for things. People are definitely looking at prices more. Since the de minimis exemption was abolished, the number of parcels coming into the U.S. worth less than $800 has fallen by 54%. That's according to the Universal Postal Union, a United Nations agency.
One sector that has done well out of the changes is the logistics business. DHL is one of the world's leading courier companies, and Oscar de Bocq leads its global forwarding division. 2025 has been a super complex year. Every time that something new got announced, then shippers were making sure that their products would be shipped before this new tariff would come.
So we got high seasons, many of them throughout the year. Back to the effect on the consumer, here's Madeline Knutson again. Across the board, prices are just higher. You know, with a bigger business, they're able to like eat the cost a little bit more to keep it less expensive, where we, you know, we're just a little like mom and pop shop. So we can't eat all the extra costs.
As the flow of tax-free goods slows, it seems it may be U.S. producers and customers who are covering the costs. I'm the BBC's William Lee Adams for Marketplace. And I'm Nova Sapo with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM, American Public Media.
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