Anna Wong: Empty Shelves Are Coming Soon
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, the number The n one of the main things I'm watching right now are those container shipping numbers that at least looking out at the next few weeks, it looks like lots of actual orders are being canceled and there is the risk of material shortage of things from China emerging in a fairly short period of time.
Yeah, I think we're kind of getting to the rubber meets the road portion of the tariffs, right? So Everyone was talking about the potential of some sort of trade restrictions going into this year because we knew that Trump had won the election and he wanted to do some of this stuff. And so what we saw broadly for the first quarter was people trying to get ahead of that. So building up their inventories, ordering a bunch of stuff before some of those restrictions were expected to get in. But of course, that can only last so long. And on Liberation Day, April 2nd. second Trump unveiled these really quite sweeping, quite dramatic tariffs as we all know by now. Yes. Yes. And so I think people are starting to get concerned that like now is when we're really going to begin to see some of that impact.
That's right. So by the way, we are recording this April twenty-third. It's two thirty-six PM. Yesterday we got a little bit of softening and Trump saying, oh, it's not gonna be 145. But then today we got stuff that's like there's not gonna be any unilateral concessions. We don't really know. There has been this little softening of the tone, but look, one Point of tariffs is to reduce a hurt reliance on China to partially decouple, et cetera. But then when you look at the reality of, okay, well, that's what we're doing. We're decoupling, we're buying less, um, it looks like it's coming very sharp and fast, and perhaps to a degree that's not even really about inflation per se, right? Because a lot, you know, a year ago people were talking about this in the abstract.
What is the Fed gonna do inflation? People are talking about empty shelves of a lot of things.
Well, I think this is still a big question. Like I I think there is some of this that could be attenuated by companies just choosing to raise their prices and maybe not order as many different types of things. But yeah, we are seeing some analysts start to talk about the possibility of empty shelves. And in fact, we're gonna speak to one now.
That's right. We uh have the perfect guest. We are going to be speaking with Anna Wong. She is our chief U.S. economist at Bloomberg Economics. Thank you for joining us, Anna. You tweeted about empty shelves in the sort of imminent term. What is the data you're looking at and when would you expect to see start people really start noticing it?
Yeah, Joe um and Tracy, happy to be here again. So so so y you know, uh many people have been talking about how the um based on the cancellation of shipments And right now we have, as you mentioned, we have seen um um plummeting container bookings. Um and already in April, uh the first two weeks of April, we have seen weekly imports data. Um uh from China to US, even from South Korea to US, dropping uh very quickly.
What early shipping data signals a looming shortage of goods from China?
Um and and typically when we think about um holiday season retail, which is which starts real really with Halloween uh in October. The US companies should be planning right now, right? Usually they plan uh in the spring and they and then they start putting in the orders uh now, especially for uh items like toys and apparels and and electronics for long lead time. And so in in uh in the summer, basically throughout J June, July, August is when
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:00
2
What early shipping data signals a looming shortage of goods from China?
4:00–17:26
3
How are the new tariffs expected to hit holiday retail planning?
17:26–19:18
4
What specific import‑volume trends will show the drop in inventory for the holiday season?
19:18–25:47
Speakers
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