Odd Lots - What Trump's Tariffs Are Already Doing to World Trade

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

It was just last Wednesday that President Trump announced his new tariff schedule with the rest of the world. And it's already having an effect. Companies are scrambling to get goods on planes or boats to beat the first deadline. Companies are already trying to get out of existing contracts. And some previously planned factory endeavors have even been put on hold. On this episode, we speak with Ryan Petersen, the founder and CEO of Flexport, to talk about what he's already seeing from the perspective of his business. We also talk about how tariffs are operationally implemented, and how things might change if the existing tariffs remain in place.Read More: Tariffs Are Dragging Down Even Companies Without US ExportsJeep Maker Stellantis Offers to Help Suppliers Pay Tariff CostsOnly Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Joe Tariffs. One word. One word. I'm just going to start all the episodes by saying tariffs from now on, at least for the foreseeable future. No, there's no other story. There really isn't. It's only tariffs for the foreseeable future. And I think, you know, we talked about it a little bit last week with Brad.

I believe plausibly, I don't know in terms of, quote, damage and all that stuff. But plausibly, this is the biggest story of our lives. The thing I don't want to say like about this story, but one notable thing about this story is it hits both markets, which you and I have been financial journalists for a very long time, as well as the real world economy, right? And we kind of got really into that during the pandemic when we saw all these supply chain disruptions, ports, rerouting ships and things like that. So this is a chance for us to unite two of our major interests. That's right.

This is what every guest that we talk to for years about how supply chains work, it's like, all right, let's just go down the list and call them all back up again and find out what's happening. Run it all back. Let's do it. All right. In the spirit of running it all back, we are going to be speaking to someone we've spoken to quite a bit before.

Actually, this was one of our first ever sort of ports shipping disruption guests back in the early 2020 days. And I remember he came recommended to me back when, do you remember when I was trying to ship a teddy bear? I do. From Hong Kong to the U.S. and I failed miserably. Well, someone said you should talk to Ryan Peterson. He's the guy who knows exactly what's going on. So we're going to be talking to him again today. That's Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport. Welcome back to the show. Great to be back. It seems like whenever there's something really bad happening. We call you up. That's right. That's right. Okay. So first question. Let's see. we are recording this on Monday, April 7th.

The 10% tariffs went into effect on Saturday, I think. And then the higher reciprocal tariffs, like up to 50% are due to take effect on Wednesday, April 9th. How are tariffs actually enacted and communicated? Collected. Yeah, and collected. What exactly happens when tariffs are increased? Like, walk us through the process. Yeah.

So, well, the tariffs are applied. in this case as a blanket based on the country of origin for the products, but typically they're applied based on the category of the product. So these new tariffs get added to those product category tariffs. So it's cumulative. These are additional tariffs. And it happens with an ACH payment to the U.S. Treasury that you make via the CBB Customs and Border Protection most of the time.

You can send a check to. Actually, interestingly enough, if you get a refund on duties, you apply and make some change. and they approve it, they'll actually send you a check in the mail, and those will keep getting lost, but that's a story for another time. I think it's worth noting. I don't want to have to re-record a bunch of intros to episodes because things could theoretically change so fast. So we are recording this literally at 906. If something about this conversation is out of date by the time you listen to this in a few hours, sorry, but we're doing the best that we can.

But given all of that, who pays the tariffs? If something is on the water right now, but it's not going to get it. get here until the 10th do they pay the tariffs? What actually is going to get tariffed and what can avoid the tariffs that hit on April 9th? Yes, this is a really interesting and important point. For normally, under normal circumstances, the duties rates or the duty is due based on when the goods enter into the United States, when they arrive at the port and your cleared customs. For these reciprocal tariffs, they made the rule that it's based on when the vessel departs. And so therefore, there's a mad scramble right now. Here we are.

April 7th, it went on over the weekend to get cargo loaded and ships out of the port or planes taking off before that April 5th deadline. And that's happening again right now before the April 9th deadline. The difference being, you know, if you got out before April 5th, you paid no additional duty, you get it out by the 9th, it's 10%, and then it'll go up to whatever your country's duty rate is. That's new. That's something that's a little different for this time around. Usually it's based on when the goods enter the United States.

So we actually won't see those payments made until the goods arrive, right? Because that's the date that they're using to trigger what duty rate load, but it won't hit the federal government's treasury until, you know, for another month usually. So one of the reasons we like talking to you is because we get a sort of early read on what's actually happening with shipping traffic as well. But, okay, so we had this a little boost, you know, in the first quarter, people trying to build up their inventories, potentially get ahead of the tariffs. What are you seeing now that they've been actually announced?

So we, Black Sports, we're one of the largest customs brokers in the United States helping these companies deal with this is like what we do every day. We obviously are very worried about our customer base and how they're going to adapt to this and push through it. So on Thursday, Friday last week, we did a call-down. We called as many customers as we could and just ask them what they're doing, what their plan is, what bookings are coming through, what we should expect. And what we found was that 28% of the companies that we got a hold of hold us that they're

pausing all ocean freight bookings. Now, that's pretty catastrophic, but we don't want to read too much into it because one is what you said, Tracy, is that they have been importing quite a lot. This date was known for a while since the January 20th or so. And so they're well stocked on inventory. They brought as much stuff as they could in before the higher duty rates hit. So that's one thing is that they've got. got a lot of inventory. They planned for this. And then the second is there's a lot of ongoing

negotiations happening. And, you know, a cabinet member told me that they, that liberation day is the beginning and not the end of the process and that they will be negotiating deals. And, you know, over the weekend, we heard over 50 countries have come to try to negotiate something. And so if you think your duty rate might come back down, you're, you know, you kind of pause, pausing is what I would do too. You know, I'm a little unclear. You know, I know that there are those headlines about other leaders having come to negotiate, and some people are talking about negotiating position, et cetera.

At other times, you hear from people in the White House, like, this is not a negotiation, or there were certainly not in a hurry to negotiate, regardless of, like, what the actual truth is or to the extent that truth can be divine. In the meantime, I just can't imagine doing any business. Yeah, I mean, you got to write your business. Okay, okay. But it's very hard to make longer-term decisions. You know, every decision is kind of week to week.

And supply chains need much longer-term planning. Right. You know, if the goal is to get manufactured, the stated goal is to move manufacturing back to the United States. But you can't do that in a world where you don't know what duty rates are going to change next week, next month, or next administration, right? I mean, so it's just a really hard environment to actually operate in. And all this time, you know, people have been moving manufacturing.

out of China into Southeast Asia, India, Mexico. And then they find out, oh, the duties are coming for all those places, too. So it's just like a very tricky to have any kind of long-term view in this market. Speaking of long-term views, I have to ask you a sort of, I guess, personal question. But Flexports business model is basically all about global trade, right, and bringing stuff into and out of America. How much of an issue is this for your own business? Definitely a challenge. I mean, our revenue is the price times the volume. And if the volume goes down and the price goes down, our revenue is going to be under threat. So we don't want to sugarcoat it. It's a challenge for sure. At the same time, we take, I look at two things. One is you can look at the long run, the truly long run. We've had 4% annual growth of global trade since the Mongol invasions. And 4% annual growth over 800 years gets you a hockey stick curve like you, you know, you wouldn't believe. It looks like any, it looked like a straight vertical line, basically. And so the result of that is my, what I intuit from that is I have pretty strong conviction.

You fast forward 10 years, people will want to do more trade than they do now. I don't need that to be true for Flexport to be successful, but that is my conviction. What I know for certain will be true is I don't know for certain there will be growth in trade, but I am certain that people will value lower costs, everything that we're doing to automate transactions and eliminate costs. They'll appreciate more reliable service, higher quality data so they can make plans on how much, how many units to order, when to buy the goods, how to ship them, where to ship them. So they'll value compliance technology. So all the stuff that we're building will be incredibly valuable.

Right now we're saying, okay, we've got to focus really hard on our customers, make sure that we help them and we earn every single shipment that they do. And then we have to go really hard after growth. You know, prices are going to fall. price of freight is going to fall. We have a pretty strong conviction of that that the price of ocean freight is going to be really low, possibly historically low later this year.

And that gives us an opportunity. We should be the ones that are passing that through to customers and making ourselves the best place to get affordable ocean freight in the world. And that should lead to growth. We've seen that in the past when we've had market disruptions. 2016 being the most obvious example, this is probably before odd lots of time. But in 2016, the price of ocean freight was so cheap

that an ocean carrier went bankrupt, Hanjin, the Korean carrier. And that was a year that Flexport grew 16X in volume that year. So we know, you know, we haven't been through something exactly like this, but we've definitely, you know, history rhymes. Hi, I'm PJ Vote. My podcast Search Engine has a new two-part series for you. Of all the new technologies coming out of AI,

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I've always wanted to declare force majeure in my life, but I've never had the opportunity for it to come up. There was a headline that I think hit Friday about how met aerospace, saying it could halt orders, declaring a force majeure. I don't know how whether that could go through legally. Do you anticipate, though, like let's just say, again, the possibility, which I think is very real, that, you know, the tariffs are sort of fixed in place. Do you see, like, we're, you know, companies, even, and that's a U.S.-based manufacturer,

but obviously, presumably it has, you know, intermediate goods that it imports, like serious, various types of players trying to get out of existing contracts or existing relationships? You're going to see a lot of that, yeah, because, you know, let's say you're a vendor to a big box retailer and you signed a contract to sell something at this price. And then all of a sudden, and there was no clause in there about tariff changes. And all of a sudden, you're way underwater on contract and you have to choose.

You're going to either go bankrupt or hurt your reputation. Almost everyone's going to choose to hurt their reputation rather than die. So I think you'll see a lot of those types of things. There may be some. We do a lot of air freight out of China, and a lot of it is for e-commerce companies. Yeah. And so we're looking hard.

It's not a force-mature situation. I don't think, but like we're looking at hard at do we redeploy those aircraft to fly from other places? Maybe Taiwan to take advantage of all the chip growth in chips. Maybe Vietnam. We're going to study the tariffs and see what makes the most sense. I mean, it's possible we stay in China and just continue to do what we're doing. But I suspect there just won't be enough volume. On this note, you touched on the earlier round of tariffs.

Back toering Trump's first presidency, what are the big differences, between now versus then. Because my impression is, okay, obviously the tariffs, the first time around, you know, around 2018, those weren't as high as the ones being talked about right now. But also, and I think you mentioned this earlier as well, we had a lot of companies who adjusted to the China tariffs just by rerouting some manufacturing into places like Vietnam or Mexico.

That doesn't seem to be an option this time around. Yeah, I mean, so that's the most obvious. You hit on it. first thing is these tariffs are much higher. So China, you know, 25% eight years ago seemed like a really big deal on China. Like that, people did reorient their whole supply chain. And now for those same products that got hit with 25%, this stacks 54% on top of that. So, you know, as SOFA from China has a 79% duty. And if you're importing that from Vietnam, it's now a 46% duty. It's still worth going to Vietnam. I don't know yet. I haven't run the math. If it's worth,

coming back to North Carolina. I think that's a, the furniture industry is one to watch because those, we used to manufacture all this furniture down in North Carolina. Maybe odd lots to do an episode from the North Carolina. They have that. We did. We actually, funny you said that last year, Tracy and I were not only in North Carolina, but we went to multiple textile operations there. So thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for the opportunity to let us plug our own work. But actually, that makes me, I was going to ask you, you know, one region that seems relatively, relatively spared is Latam. Could you see just sort of like a more hemispheric supply chain for a lot of stuff?

Yeah. And Trinzzi was getting at that is like, well, companies move their supply chain, some to Mexico, some to Vietnam. I think before I said the Latv thing, I think it's possible that's part of why they put high tariffs on these other countries is that a lot of what was happening with Chinese companies. Chinese companies were shipping components to, in many cases, subsidiaries, companies that they owned in those other countries in doing assembly there. and maybe the U.S. looked at that and said, hey, we've got a kind of like leaky boat here. We've got to plug all these holes and put tariffs on everybody. But they did go pretty light on Latam, 10% tariff across Latin America, except for, I look at the map, I think that's Guyana, which is like an oil producer.

And so I guess we buy too much oil from them and we want them to buy stuff from us or something. But it was basically 10% across all of Latin America. on the first read, when I first saw that, that's what I thought, is like, oh, I guess they're trying to send a signal. This is going to be like our strategic backyard. You should manufacture in Latin America. But then you look at actually how they calculated the formula. And I think it might just be an accident of like the value. Right, right, right.

That they just don't sell that much to us. And so, yeah. Yeah. Got it. I don't know if that was strategic. It looks not strategic. I was hoping I was like, hey, there's some forethought to how this is all going to work. But I don't think so.

No, the penguins would suggest otherwise. So actually, Joe, do you remember one of the companies we spoke to in North Carolina, like a relatively small textile producer, they had moved a bunch of production out of the U.S. into Mexico. And when we talked to them, they were in the process of moving from Mexico to, I think it was El Salvador. And now, I mean, I don't know what they're planning now. But on that note, Ryan, is there any scenario where, like, shifting some capacity to the U.S. to prepare for a. boom in exports, you know, ostensibly that's what Trump is aiming for here, the return of manufacturing to America. Is there any scenario that you plan for where you're sort of reorienting some of your capacity to the U.S. to prepare for that export boom?

I don't really believe in it. Firstly, I mean, I've talked to two different people who had to really pause their factory buildouts because of the tariffs because the machines that they were going to buy too expensive now. You know, like factories require machines. and components from other countries. So if you make it really expensive, you're going to have less manufacturing, not more. So I think this is just like very unlikely to yield the results that they want.

It's darkly funny, but that's really grim, right? There's this wide bipartisan, strongly held view that reindustrialization should be some sort of priority. And the first thing you're... I mean, that's very dark that already you're hearing about companies putting pause on their factory efforts.

For obvious reason, and it's the same reason I mentioned with that aircraft supplier. But that's pretty dark. Yeah, I mean, these machines, like Germany makes the best machine. One of our customers makes the machines that you put, that fill beer bottles and water cans and stuff. And this company, I got to see one of these machines in person because I was asking the guy, I'm like,

how many bottles can it fill? He's 140,000 per hour. He's like a billion, you know, doing a billion bottles a year per machine. I'm like, we don't make a machine like that. And if you want a site that does it beer bottling, you've got to have that machine. Like, you know, and we want these plants. You can't just manufacture every aspect of it all overnight. It reminds me a little bit of like, you know, you're a guy who hasn't been to the gym in 30 years.

Yeah. And like, you see go to the gym, but like don't try to deadlift your town in the marathon. No, no, he could do it. He's totally fit. He could do it. I went to an exercise class. last summer and I was like a little too vigorous. And the teacher of it, I was like swinging some kettlebellies like, bro, I know what you're trying to do. But seriously, like, he's off a little

bit. He was like, he's like, he's like, I know you're psych to get in shape for the summer, but like, trust me, you want to slow down a little bit. So yeah, I can relate. Ryan, what are you watching out for next in terms of the sequence of events here? So I guess obviously all of this could turn around very quickly if, you know, some phone calls are made. And and either, you know, a big trading partner announces some new amazing deal for the U.S. or if Trump starts to, you know, back away from the tariffs, maybe water things down. But what are you watching for specifically in the sort of shipping and transportation and logistics world for the next stage of how this unfolds?

Yeah, I mean, apart from watching everything the White House is doing, everything that comes out and, you know, watching interviews with the administration and stuff, it's really just about our customers and what are they doing? What are their plans to adapt to this? How are they booking? Their booking volumes, but also, yeah, are they changing sourcing strategies? Are they raising prices? We've seen thus far just kind of monitoring the e-com websites of our customers

about a 5 to 10% increase in price. So monitoring that, trying to figure out, is that enough to cover the duties of these products? We have quite a lot of data to go off of because we know that, as they're kind of, Customs broker. We know how much they're paying for the goods and how much duty they're paying so that we can monitor. Is that flowing through to the consumer? So there's a lot of that type of analysis that we want to understand. And yeah, just trying to really just talk to every single customer out there and see where we can help them. It's like pretty grim, as you've said already. But I'm pretty hopeful. I did, you know, someone in the administration told me that there were

going to be negotiations. So I think you're going to see some deals get cut. Well, fingers crossed. Ryan, thank you so much for coming back on Oddlots. in classic all-thoughts fashion when something bad is happening. We talk to Ryan. Thanks for happening. Take care, Ryan. Good luck. Joe, there's a lot to pull out of that conversation. I thought Ryan's last point about prices already starting to go up was pretty interesting.

And this is where a lot of the macroeconomic implication kind of lies. It's what part of the manufacturing process do the tariffs, the extra expense of the tariffs, actually lie because there are a bunch of companies that could absorb the cost. It's not just the manufacturer or the retailer. There is also this layer of basically middlemen, right? Yeah. They have margins too, but ostensibly they could also absorb some of this. Well, the way I think about it is, you know, yeah, like how much flows through to consumer prices as measured in the traditional inflation indices, I don't think we know. The only thing we do know for sure is that it's going to make running businesses in the U.S.

a less profitable and less profitable businesses hire and invest less. And on top of the fact that you have the sort of lower profit impulse, so a less inclination to invest and build things, then per Ryan, you already have entities putting the pause button on their actual manufacturing, which is the ostensible thing that we want to build out here. And so then you have their second layer of deindustrialization. I really think there is a chance, you know, I mean, I don't want to like get too dramatic, but really accomplishes literally the exact opposite of what the stated aims are here. Well, also, this is the thing.

Like it accomplishes the exact opposite. We're seeing that already. But it can reverberate for years and years and years, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know that it takes an enormous amount of time, money and energy to do these types. of industrial investments in the U.S. And if you're uncertain at any point in time, like, memories are long in this particular sector.

And so you could have lower investment for years. And the example that we've used frequently on this podcast is home building after 2008, right? It's going to take a long time for investors, companies, businesses to actually regain confidence. Here's a question. Let's see there was a deal. And Ryan says, oh, maybe there's talking. I'll believe that somewhere someone is having a conversation with someone. Yeah, sure.

Can Trump credibly commit to never using the tariff threat again for the rest of his administration? That's exactly it. I don't think so. The uncertainty will never be off the table now. It's always there hovering in the background. On that note, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. Okay.

This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Ryan Peterson. he's at Types Fast. Follow our producers,

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