This past April has been one of the most volatile months in stock market history, thanks to the Trump administration’s botched rollout of its so-called reciprocal tariff rates. However, this tariff threat has at least succeeded in bringing other nations to the negotiating table—and now, the best way to restore calm is by letting Trump do what he does best: negotiate.
That’s a difficult pill to swallow for businesses like Amazon, which is addicted to artificially cheap imports from nations like China. Instead of pressuring Chinese vendors to cut costs or force the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to the negotiating table, Amazon has been flirting with pressuring the Trump administration to drop the whole tariff fight altogether.
Recently, for example, officials in the company were debating whether to display a so-called “tariff cost” along with the price of items for sale. Amazon called this transparency—but nothing could be further from the truth.
For one thing, where was this “transparency” when former president Joe Biden’s four-decade-high inflation caused consumer prices to explode?
Anecdotally, some products that I used to buy on the site doubled in price during Biden’s tenure. Yet Amazon never dared tell consumers what portion of these price increases was caused by Biden’s overspending.
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Similarly, when Biden exploded regulatory compliance costs (which also directly impacted consumer prices), Amazon never told consumers how much of their bill at checkout was from overregulation. Folks never saw an “inflation cost” or “regulation cost” while Biden was president.
Not only that, but where would Amazon even get the data needed to display the effect of tariffs on the cost of individual items?
This information certainly can’t come from Chinese vendors. Anyone attached to the CCP is consistently pressured to lie and publish falsified data.
Instead, finding information about (for example) the amount China exports requires finding how much every other nation is importing from China and adding those figures. Only then can one gain a better sense of whether the “official” CCP data is accurate.
Unfortunately, even such a painstaking method is imperfect because the CCP can pressure other totalitarian states to either falsify or neglect to publish relevant data. China itself simply stopped publishing unemployment data when the figures got too ugly for the CCP’s liking.
Amazon has since backed away from the idea of displaying estimated “tariff costs” on its site. But even the discussion of such an idea speaks to how spooked markets are about potential tariffs.
If President Donald Trump is not able to make any deals before the end of the 90-day pause, the ensuing tariffs will amount to a massive tax increase on American consumers and foreign producers alike, grinding economic growth to a halt.
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But Trump failing to negotiate isn’t at all a foregone conclusion. In fact, we’ve recently seen extremely positive developments with key trading partners like India and Japan.
In other words, there’s plenty of economic runway left (as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it recently), and Trump can still safely land this plane.
What exactly does that look like? In short, it means signing bilateral trade deals with key trading partners to both guarantee American consumers can still access a wide variety of affordable products from abroad and ensure that American exporters can finally access to foreign consumer markets.
Ironically, it’s more important that we make these trade deals with China’s key trading partners than with our own. By peeling nations like India, Japan, and Australia out of China’s sphere of influence, Trump can isolate the CCP and force them to their knees. Despite what China’s government reports may say, the country’s economy is already vulnerable and hurting—it cannot afford a drawn-out trade war.
Trump and Bessent still have economic runway to get this done and alleviate all the tariff turmoil in the coming weeks and months.
If they succeed in doing so—at the same time as they seek to shepherd a massive tax cut through Congress and deregulate at breakneck speed—America will be headed to the promised Golden Age, meaning more American jobs and a lower cost of living.
If the Trump administration pulls this off, will Amazon show consumers how much their prices have decreased thanks to Trump’s success?
Let’s not hold our breath.
