Shein Lowers Prices to Lure Back US Shoppers After Tariff Cut
Shein Group Ltd. lowered US retail prices this week after the Trump administration temporarily cut duties on Chinese imports, as the online fashion retailer moves to win back consumers scared away by recent tariff-induced price hikes.
The average cost of 98 products consistently tracked by Bloomberg News on Shein's website was $5.56 on Wednesday, down about 13% from a May 7 peak of $6.38.
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Boston Globe
34 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
This is ground zero in Trump's trade war
The Port of Los Angeles, along with a nearby facility in Long Beach, makes up a shipping complex that stretches across nearly 75 miles of Southern California shoreline. The ports are a bellwether for trade and the U.S. economy. Together, they move an astonishing 40% of the goods that come into the United States via containers. They also account for 30% of what the country exports. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up As Trump's chaotic and aggressive tariff strategy has seesawed this year, activity here has, too. That has threatened the livelihood of the roughly 100,000 workers at the port complex and complicated life for the hundreds of thousands of companies that bring goods through the port each year. The trends at the port hint at the pain that will ripple through the broader economy in the coming months as fewer and higher-priced goods travel from ports and warehouses to U.S. stores and consumers. Advertisement The ports experienced a surge of activity this year when shippers rushed to bring in goods before tariffs that reached their highest levels in a century. That rush has faded, and trade has become more sluggish. With higher tariffs set to snap back within weeks, importers and port workers remain cautious, unsure of what their futures will hold. Advertisement Most arrivals to the Southern California ports come from China. After Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese goods to at least 145% in April, many shipments between the world's two largest economies came to a halt. From March to April, U.S. imports and the trade deficit plummeted by the biggest volume on record. In the roughly four weeks that the 145% tariffs were in effect, future bookings to send shipping containers from China to the United States plunged by half from a year earlier, according to data from Vizion and Dun & Bradstreet, which track global shipping activity. In May, Chinese exports to the United States were down roughly 35% from a year earlier, the biggest drop in decades apart from the pandemic. For the Port of Los Angeles in particular, May was the slowest month in more than two years. Now the port is preparing for another uptick in traffic, a delayed reaction after the president paused some levies in April so he could negotiate new trade deals. Bookings have since rebounded modestly, especially after an agreement in early May between the United States and China to reduce some of the tariffs they specifically targeted against each other. The surges and crashes are lowering the supply of certain goods. They are also pushing up the costs for companies to import goods. The cost of shipping a container to Southern California from China has doubled since the start of March, according to data from Freightos, a shipping marketplace, as importers try to find space on vessels in case tariffs increase. Advertisement For some economists, these compounding forces hold ominous implications. While inflation this year has stayed relatively steady so far, economists say the higher cost for imports could filter more noticeably into prices in stores later this year. Consumer demand could also weaken, a reaction in part to rash purchasing in the early months of 2025 before tariffs took effect. Companies and people rushed to buy machinery and cars, furniture and computers, meaning they could most likely spend less later this year. Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics, said the tariffs posed a 'very significant threat to the economy' that would become visible in the next few months. 'The hit to the economy is dead ahead,' he said. 'We haven't dodged that bullet.' The ports are an illustration of the effects of globalization that Trump criticizes. As factories moved abroad over decades, particularly to China, the ports formed one end of a busy ocean superhighway. Most of that traffic flows in one direction. For every four containers that arrive stuffed with foreign cars, textiles and toys, only one is sent out filled with corn, soybeans and other U.S. exports. The other three containers often return empty -- evidence of the trade deficit that the president rails against. Trump has used tariffs to try to force Americans to buy more domestically made goods instead. The problem, critics say, is that this strategy threatens many jobs that Americans hold now, which are dependent on trade, without much indication that manufacturing could thrive again in the United States. Advertisement Only 8% of Americans work in manufacturing, down from 22% in 1980. Since Trump has returned to office and adopted protectionist policies, the number of manufacturing jobs is still roughly flat, according to the Labor Department. In fact, spending on the construction of new factories has slumped in recent months. 'Maybe it's a worthwhile goal to incentivize manufacturing jobs, but the way that we're going about it is putting a lot of other jobs at risk,' said Mario Cordero, the CEO of the Port of Long Beach. The days of U.S. manufacturing dominance, he added, are 'long gone.' Today, the ports are an economic engine in their own right, supporting the communities that blanket the rolling coastal hills leading down to San Pedro Bay. Across Southern California, port officials estimate, 1 million jobs are tied to the port, including truckers, warehouse workers, manufacturers and freight forwarders. Their jobs now hinge on the terms of trade set by the president. On the recent Thursday, the effects of the tariffs were evident in the union hiring hall across the channel from the Port of Los Angeles where dockworkers go each morning to claim new assignments. The screens displaying jobs for daily workers showed about 40% fewer positions than normal. Some truckers say tariffs have already hammered their business. Erick Gordon, the vice president of Redefined Transportation, a trucking business based in Long Beach, said he was moving roughly half the number of containers that he did last year. In response, his company had lowered its rates, pushed harder to get new business and let half its drivers go. He has had to sink money into his business just to hang on for now. Advertisement 'They're almost killing the industry,' he said. 'It's survival mode.' The last time the United States raised tariffs so high was nearly a century ago, when Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930. The move was meant to protect U.S. businesses during the Great Depression. It instead instigated a global trade war and deepened the economic crisis. Within two years, imports fell 40%. It took years for trade to recover. The Port of Los Angeles was founded two decades before, in 1907, and it blossomed because of its connection to major railroads. In the 1960s, the advent of the shipping container and the growth of factories in Asia began to transform the port. By the end of the 1980s, the Port of Los Angeles had eclipsed the ports of New York and New Jersey as the country's largest. After China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, Chinese factories and the port grew in tandem. Now 45% of the port's business is connected to China, followed by Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and Taiwan. It receives some of the world's largest container ships, stretching the length of four football fields and holding tens of thousands of steel containers. Over the last decade, the ports have undergone a crash course in dealing with disruption. They say it has helped them in the current moment. Trump's trade war against China during his first term hit the ports hard. Shipments from China dropped sharply, though traffic from some other countries, like Vietnam, grew double digits. Advertisement With the onset of the pandemic, factories shuttered in China, and imports plunged again. Then the ports experienced an uptick as Americans stuck at home began mass ordering exercise equipment, office furniture, toys and video games. Jon Poelma, the managing director of APM Terminals, which is part of the Port of Los Angeles, said the pandemic had taught the port lessons about handling the shortages and surges it was seeing now, including how to maximize space when the port is overcrowded and better share information to speed up the flow of cargo. 'We got used to it,' he said. 'We tested our ability to handle pain.' Last month, dozens of semi trucks and self-driving straddle carriers were buzzing around the terminal, stacking pink, white, blue and gray containers. Hulking blue container ships stained with rust rose up behind the stacks. The part of the port that Poelma runs -- the biggest container terminal in the Western Hemisphere -- was emptier than in previous weeks. But it was still performing well compared with last year, in part because of its partnership with a major shipping alliance used by big retailers that have continued to bring in shipments when smaller companies have not. Poelma admitted that most importers were having trouble trying to figure out how to forecast demand. And he did not see those challenges abating anytime soon. 'The one thing that is certain is that it continues to be very uncertain,' he said. This article originally appeared in
CNBC
35 minutes ago
- CNBC
GOP's food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It's the latest setback for Trump's big bill
In another blow to the Republicans' tax and spending cut bill, the Senate parliamentarian has advised that a proposal to shift some food stamps costs from the federal government to states — a centerpiece of GOP savings efforts — would violate the chamber's rules. While the parliamentarian's rulings are advisory, they are rarely, if ever, ignored. The Republican leadership scrambled on Saturday, days before voting is expected to begin on President Donald Trump's package that he wants to be passed into law by the Fourth of July. The loss is expected to be costly to Republicans. They have been counting on some tens of billions of potential savings from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, to help offset the costs of the $4.5 trillion tax breaks plan. The parliamentarian let stand for now a provision that would impose new work requirements for older Americans, up to age 65, to receive food stamp aid. "We will keep fighting to protect families in need," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, which handles the SNAP program. "The Parliamentarian has made clear that Senate Republicans cannot use their partisan budget to shift major nutrition assistance costs to the states that would have inevitably led to major cuts," she said. The parliamentarian's ruling is the latest in a series of setbacks as staff works through the weekend, often toward midnight, to assess the 1,000-page proposal. It all points to serious trouble ahead for the bill, which was approved by the House on a party-line vote last month over unified opposition from Democrats and is now undergoing revisions in the Senate. At its core, the goal of the multitrillion-dollar package is to extend tax cuts from Trump's first term that would otherwise expire if Congress fails to act. It also adds new ones, including no taxes on tips and or overtime pay. To help offset the costs of lost tax revenue, the Republicans are proposing cutbacks to federal Medicaid, health care and food programs — some $1 trillion. Additionally, the package boosts national security spending by about $350 billion, including to pay for Trump's mass deportations, which are running into protests nationwide. Trump has implored Republicans, who have the majority in Congress, to deliver on his top domestic priority, but the details of the package, with its hodge-podge of priorities, are drawing deeper scrutiny. All told, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the package, as approved by the House, would add at least $2.4 trillion to the nation's red ink over the decade and leave 10.9 million more people without health care coverage. Additionally, it would reduce or eliminate food stamps for more than 3 million people. The parliamentarian's office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. Late Friday, the parliamentarian issued its latest findings. It determined that Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee's proposal to have the states pick up more of the tab for covering food stamps — what Republicans call a new cost-sharing arrangement — would violate the Byrd Rule. Many lawmakers said the states would not be able to absorb the new requirement on food aid, which the federal government has long provided. They warned many would lose access to SNAP benefits used by more than 40 million people. Initially, the CBO estimated savings of about $128 billion under the House's proposal to shift SNAP food aid costs to the states. Cost estimates for the Senate's version, which made changes to the House approach, have not been publicly available. The parliamentarian's office rulings leave GOP leaders with several options. They can revise the proposals to try to comply with Senate rules or strip them from the package altogether. They can also risk a challenge during floor voting, which would require the 60-vote threshold to overcome. That would be unlikely in the split chamber with Democrats opposing the overall package. The parliamentarian's latest advice also said the committee's provision to make certain immigrants ineligible for food stamps would violate the rule. It found several provisions from the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which is led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to be in violation. They include one to provide $250 million to Coast Guard stations damaged by fire in 2025, namely one on South Padre Island in Texas. Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP's approach that relies on "current policy" rather than "current law" as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation's deficits. Already, the parliamentarian delivered a serious setback Thursday, finding that the GOP plan to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was a core proposal coming from the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, would violate the Byrd Rule. The parliamentarian has also advised of violations over provisions from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that would roll back Environmental Protection Agency emissions standards on certain vehicles and from the Senate Armed Services Committee to require the Defense secretary to provide a plan on how the Pentagon intends to spend the tens of billions of new funds. The new work requirements in the package would require many of those receiving SNAP or Medicaid benefits to work 80 hours a month or engage in other community or educational services.
Politico
36 minutes ago
- Politico
Republicans' loan plan presents new obstacles for low-income students
A series of changes to long-running federal student loan programs tucked into the Republican tax plan has doctors panicked and struggling to find GOP allies. The Senate education committee's portion of President Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful' bill includes a new cap on how much people can borrow for medical school and other professional programs that is well below the sticker price most students are facing. Lawmakers are also proposing to nix a class of federal loans graduate students use to cover housing and other non-tuition expenses. For low-income and first-generation college students with aspirations of becoming physicians, these plans, if enacted, could squash their dreams, according to medical college leaders. As the full Senate irons out the bill and Trump rattles school finances with funding freezes, doctors' groups are asking Congress to preserve the more generous loan options or risk a sharp drop in who's studying medicine — a profession that's already facing a shortage. While part of the stress on poorer students comes from the ever-increasing cost of higher education, the bill would likely push more of them toward private loans that require a co-signer, which are out of reach for many, and come with steeper interest rates. 'A lot of our medical schools, mine included, have a lot of first-generation college students. When they come into medical education, more times than not, they don't have co-signers,' said John L. Hummer, president of Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine, a school with campuses in New Mexico and Florida for which 81 percent of students depend on the federal Grad PLUS program Republicans are looking to eliminate. The Senate education tax bill establishes a $200,000 ceiling on federal student loans for professional degrees, like medicine. But the median cost of attending four years of medical school for the class of 2025 is $286,454 for public institutions and $390,848 for private schools, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. It's a range that exceeds the costs many doctors now serving in Congress paid when they earned their degrees. Many did not respond to inquiries from POLITICO about how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would affect medical school enrollment — and those that did were not sympathetic about student debt. 'You're looking at a person, a first-generation college student, who went to medical school, and didn't borrow money,' Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who sits on the Senate HELP Committee, said. 'I worked my tail off. Anyone who is paying more than $100,000 to go to school is making a huge mistake.' Marshall graduated from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 1987, when the average in-state tuition for a public medical school nationally was around $4,696. That sum in today's dollars is about $13,300 — far less than what the Kansas program costs in 2025. Members of the medical community believe limits on federal loans or steering students to borrow from private lenders will exacerbate a long-running national physician shortage the Association of American Medical Colleges projects could be as high as 86,000 doctors by 2036. David Bergman, senior vice president of government relations and health affairs at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, said students at medical schools his group represents have said it's been difficult to access private loans. Some lenders, like PNC Bank, hold student debt for which about 90 percent of private loans have a co-signer, while others had interest rates as high as 16 percent — nearly twice that of a Grad PLUS loan. 'The consequence of all this, of course, is that it's the low-income students who are going to suffer the most,' Bergman said. 'They may not have great credit, so then they may not be able to get the loans. Or they may get higher rate loans that put them further in debt.' One former Trump administration official shares this concern. 'I do worry about the assumption that the private sector is going to step in,' said Diane Jones, a former Education Department official from Trump's first term. 'Maybe they would, but I'm not sure they would step in to make loans available to low-income students.' Even some people in the lending business are skeptical the industry's bigger players will change their rules around co-signers. 'It just takes a lot more energy because it's riskier. Period. Banks aren't in the business of doing riskier products,' said Ken Ruggiero, co-founder and CEO of Ascent, a private loan company that will lend to applicants without a co-signer. 'They are in the business of talking to a person who has a very good income and credit score and letting the student sign the agreement.' The House version of the bill would also shut down Grad PLUS and put a cap on lending to graduate students for professional programs, putting pressure on the Senate to change course. But HELP Committee Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said there needs to be more accountability for the high tuition prices writ large that aren't exclusive to medical schools. 'There should be some ratio between earning potential and what it costs,' Cassidy said. 'I met with neurosurgeons and cosmetologists and they had the same discussion about the cost of education.' Jason Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians, which represents internal medicine doctors, related specialists and medical students, is skeptical that capping loan amounts would force medical schools to immediately lower tuition. Over the span of 21 years, medical school tuition has gone up 81 percent, outpacing inflation, according to AAMC. 'The reality is it's very expensive to train a physician — the amount of hours that go into lectures, labs, professors and housing and everything it takes to graduate is expensive,' Goldman said. He fears that some students may be dissuaded from becoming primary care doctors, a specialty where shortages are profound, especially in rural areas. Some in Congress have pushed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to address proposed limits to federal lending for student borrowers pursuing health care-related degrees. During a House Appropriations Committee hearing in May, Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.) asked McMahon to take a look at aid programs that help students complete their degrees. 'We do know we have a shortage of nurses and doctors,' McMahon said. 'I think there are a lot of programs we can look at to train nurse technicians to get them into the marketplace faster.' Other Congress members have proposed student loan changes outside of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to address health care shortages. Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Jackie Rosen (D-Nev.) introduced legislation in April that would create a student loan repayment program for specialists within medical professions who practice in rural areas. They also introduced the Specialty Physicians Advancing Rural Care Act in previous legislative sessions citing a dearth of providers in rural communities. 'The entire nation is dealing with a physician shortage, and rural communities in Mississippi have been particularly affected,' Wicker said in a statement. 'Congress can help provide a solution.' Jones, the official from Trump's first term, also worries that some students may have to forgo medical school because they won't be able to secure financial assistance. She attended medical school in the 1980s when the loan program she was using was suspended, ultimately leading her to drop out because she could no longer afford the program. 'I didn't have a parent who could co-sign for a private loan, and I didn't have access to any other resources,' she said. 'I personally lost the opportunity to pursue the career that I wanted, that I had earned the right to pursue.'
