Anna Wong: Empty Shelves Are Coming Soon
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal. And
I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, the number the 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 second, Trump unveiled these really quit
right. So by the way, we are recording this April 23. It's 02:36PM. Yesterday, we got a little bit of softening and Trump saying, oh, it's not gonna be a hundred and 45. 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, etcetera. But then when you look at the reality of, okay. Well, that's what we're doing. We're decoupling. We're buying less. It looks like it's coming very sharp and fast an
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, have the perfect guest. We are gonna be speaking with Anna Wong. She is our chief US 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. So, and Tracy, happy to be here again. So so, you you know, many people have been talking about how, based on the cancellation shipment. And right now, we have as you mentioned, we have seen, plummeting container bookings. And already in April, the first two weeks of April, we have seen weekly imports data, from China to US, even from South Korea to US dropping, very quickly. And and, typically, when we think about, holiday season retail, which is which starts really with Halloween, in October, The US company should be planning right now. Right? Usually, they plan, in the spring, and the
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