Over at Carpe Diem, Mark Perry points us to an article detailing a potential move by Wal-Mart:
Target and Walmart will now face a tough choice: They can absorb the higher costs from tariffs by taking a hit to their profit margins, or they can pass some of the price increases on to their customers.
“Either consumers will pay more, suppliers will receive less, retail margins will be lower, or consumers will buy fewer products or forego purchases altogether,” Walmart warned in its letter.
…
The Trump administration is using tariffs to push companies to manufacture more goods in the United States. But the National Retail Federation says the administration’s thinking is flawed and carefully planned supply chain plans can’t be redrawn overnight. Retailers order their products six months to a year in advance, and they are left scrambling to find new options for 2019. “The [administration] continues to overestimate the ability of US companies to shift supply chains out of China,” the trade group said in its own letter to Lighthizer. “Global supply chains are extremely complex. It can take years to find the right partners who can meet the proper criteria and produce products at the scale and cost that is needed.”
Implicit in this conversation is the costs to retailers (and manufacturers and anyone else who uses imported goods) to search and find new suppliers. These costs are very real and necessarily contribute to fewer economic gains in the country.
Trump’s tariff schemes, to use tariffs to force companies to relocate supply chains or operations to the US relies on something of a Nirvana fallacy: that these relocations/readjustments can be done costlessly. As a former business executive, he should know better. Firms cannot just adjust their operations costlessly. Contracts are in place. New ones would need to be written. New relationships need to be formed. Adjustments need to be made to product specifications. Etc etc. These are not costless processes.
Even if we were to assume, contrary to ex-ante evidence, that Wal-Mart suppliers relocating back to the US is 1) possible and 2) would be beneficial for the economy as a whole, when you figure in all the costs associated with such a move (that is, all the transaction costs), it is highly improbable that, on net, the move would be positive.
A Force for Good 