Economy

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, attacked the retail giant over a report that suggested Amazon would highlight tariff-related price increases. Amazon said it was “not going to happen.”President Trump’s 100th day in office started with what seemed to be a fresh and fast-escalating spat between the White House and Amazon.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, came out swinging in her press briefing on Tuesday morning, accusing Amazon of being “hostile and political” after a report — disputed by the company — from Punchbowl News saying that the online retail giant would start displaying the exact cost of tariff-related price increases alongside all its products.Displaying the import fees would have made clear to American consumers that they were shouldering the costs of Mr. Trump’s tariff policies rather than China, as he and his top officials have often claimed would be the case.After the report was published, Mr. Trump spoke about it over the phone with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, according to three people familiar with the exchange. Amazon spokesmen hurriedly issued denials that the policy was going into effect, and by Tuesday afternoon Mr. Trump was back to praising Mr. Bezos.“Jeff Bezos is very nice,” Mr. Trump said to reporters as he embarked on a trip to Michigan for a rally commemorating the first 100 days of his second term. “He solved the problem very quickly. He did the right thing. Good guy.”This arc between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bezos that played out over just a few hours seemed telling. The Amazon mogul is among the billionaires who have gone to ever new lengths to get in good with this White House. Mr. Trump, in turn, has managed to woo such billionaires by promising he’d be better for business. And yet, at the first sign that Mr. Bezos might be prioritizing his businesses interests in a way that would harm Mr. Trump’s political fortunes, the White House didn’t hesitate to lash out publicly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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President Trump has expressed little interest in fighting climate change. One of his key cabinet officials has even sought to evaluate whether humanity benefits from a warming climate, in a bid to undermine environmental rules.Yet even as he works to accelerate oil and gas production, Mr. Trump’s economic approach may inadvertently reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as consumption slows in response to a global trade war.Any reprieve for the planet, however, would be brief. Over the longer term, tanking the economy with tit-for-tat tariffs is likely to impede progress, because of how much clean energy deployment depends on overseas supply chains and because voters are less likely to support climate policy when they’re financially stressed.Carbon emissions, largely a byproduct of going places and making things, have always been tethered to economic growth. Forecasters increasingly anticipate that Mr. Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs could tip the economy into recession as companies and consumers cut spending in the face of higher prices for imported goods.“If we’re talking about a traditional recession, people fly less, they buy less stuff, there’s less investment in capital goods,” said Alex Heil, a senior economist at the Conference Board, who focuses on energy and climate. “And just a slowdown in economic activity is likely to slow down carbon emissions.”That is what happened in the last two recessions. Global carbon emissions dipped slightly, before resuming their upward march. (Emissions in the United States continued to decline after 2008 as cheap natural gas displaced coal, and it’s possible that a similar peak is nearing for the rest of the world.)Carbon Emissions Slow When the Economy Takes a Hit

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Global annual carbon emissions
Source: Global Carbon BudgetBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldThe White House has lashed out at what it called a “hostile and political act by Amazon” after a report alleged the tech giant was planning to display price increases caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs on its products.The story originally reported by Punchbowl News on Tuesday said the ecommerce group would “soon” display the impact of the levies on “the price of each product” it sold.Trump spoke with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to complain about the company’s plans, and the company swiftly walked back the proposal. “Jeff Bezos was very nice,” Trump later said. “He was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly and he did the right thing. He’s a good guy.”The Seattle-based group said such a move had only been considered for goods sold via its low-cost Haul platform.“The team that runs our ultra low-cost Amazon Haul store has considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” Amazon said. “This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”“This was never approved and is not going to happen,” the company added.Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had sharply criticised the company saying it was “not a surprise” that Amazon would take such a step. “Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” she added.Bezos has repaired ties with Trump, whom he had once criticised as a “threat to democracy” but whose second inauguration as US president he attended this year.During his first term, Trump frequently lashed out at Bezos, calling him “Jeff Bozo” and accusing the billionaire of buying The Washington Post to secure “political influence so that Amazon will benefit”.But the relationship between the two men has since warmed, with Bezos meeting Trump multiple times in the past year.Amazon donated $1mn to Trump’s inauguration fund and paid $40mn for a documentary on Melania Trump, the president’s wife. Roughly $28mn of that sum would go directly to the first lady, said multiple people familiar with the matter.Leavitt’s denunciation of Amazon’s “hostile” act comes after Trump said of Bezos in an interview with The Atlantic published this week: “He’s 100 per cent. He’s been great.”Amazon’s Haul platform sells cheap consumer goods directly shipped from Chinese warehouses to take advantage of duty exemptions known as de minimis rules, a loophole that the White House will close from May 2.Trump this month announced steep “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of US trading partners, sending global markets plummeting. However, he has subsequently begun negotiations with many countries with a view to lowering their rates.Additional reporting by Alex Rogers More

But the effects of the levies, which have created uncertainty for businesses, have not yet been fully felt.The labor market remained sound in March, with job openings declining but layoffs remaining near record lows, while rates of new hiring were slow but steady, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday.The numbers from last month are a snapshot of the state of the U.S. economy and labor market before the start of the global trade volatility brought on by President Trump’s tariff campaign.“It reflects a labor market that ‘could have been,’ given the damage tariffs will do,” argued Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, which studies the labor market. “We have the foundations of a labor market stabilization,” he added, “but trade policy has other ideas.”The prevailing environment before April of subdued hiring and few firings was not an easy one for active job seekers, especially in certain sectors like tech and manufacturing. But the stability of the overall job market was undeniable — so much so that some labor economists started to worry that the conditions bordered on stagnant.Now, the economy is facing a radically different set of challenges.Consumer sentiment has plunged since January, when the import taxes were announced by the White House, as fears of both job loss and higher inflation have surged among households and top business leaders.The effects of the tariffs on shipping have not yet been fully felt. But experts in global freight logistics, such as Craig Fuller, the founder of FreightWaves, expect that to change in the coming days and weeks as companies face tariffs ranging from 10 percent to well over 120 percent on many Chinese goods.Federal job openings declined by 36,000 in March, a result of the Trump administration’s steep cutbacks to the federal civil service. And in the overall labor market, job openings fell by 288,000. Some financial analysts are focused on a broader, monthslong pre-tariff slowdown.“The main story is that job openings are down,” said Neil Dutta, the head of economics at the research firm Renaissance Macro. “We are at the point where opening declines push up unemployment.”The jobs report for April will help fill out some of the economic picture. Economists expect unemployment to have been largely unchanged and for moderate job growth to have continued. But forecasters are bracing for surprises because of the uncertainty surrounding the tariffs.The employment picture and consumer spending remain bright for now — a point that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has emphasized in his public remarks.But many analysts, including Daniel Altman, the chief economist at Instawork, a job search and recruitment site, are in wait-and-see mode.“I think the jobs report will be more revealing,” Mr. Altman said. More

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldMexico has reached a deal to deliver more water to the US under a decades-old treaty, calming a dispute that had threatened trade relations between the neighbouring nations.Under a 1940s border accord, the US sends Mexico water from the Colorado River each year, while Mexico sends water north from the Rio Grande, with any shortfalls addressed under a special mechanism. But Mexico had fallen behind on deliveries in the past few years amid a severe drought, angering farmers and businesses in parts of southern Texas that relied on the resource.The US state department said on Monday that Mexico had agreed to an immediate transfer of water and a long-term plan to meet future requirements, hailing it as a victory for US President Donald Trump. The agreement comes as the two countries are locked in talks on tariffs that Trump has imposed on US imports from Mexico.Mexico’s leftwing President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Tuesday that she had co-ordinated with governors in the border states of Coahuila, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas to agree on an unspecified quantity to send north.“We’re delivering what we can,” she said. “It was several weeks of work to find a scheme that can give the US the water we owed without putting us at risk.”Sheinbaum said the details of the agreement would be laid out in a statement. High levels of domestic water stress mean it is a politically sensitive issue.Last month Trump halted water shipments to Tijuana until Mexico complied with the treaty, also threatening tariffs and sanctions.“This is very unfair and is hurting South Texas Farmers very badly,” he wrote on Truth Social.Hikers walk by the Rio Grande, which divides Texas and Mexico, both of which face high levels of water stress More

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The US trade deficit in goods surged to a record high in March as companies rushed to stockpile imports ahead of Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, prompting Wall Street economists to forecast that GDP shrank in the first quarter.After the publication of official data showing a $162bn gap between imports and exports last month, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan predicted a contraction in output in the first three months of the year. The balance between imports and exports is an important factor in calculating GDP.The US Census Bureau figure was the highest goods deficit on records stretching back to the early 1990s and compared with $92.8bn for March 2024. The data reflected stockpiling by businesses in anticipation of Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, and came out a day before Wednesday’s first-quarter GDP figures.“The import surge ahead of tariffs was even larger than we expected, and inventories did not offset it,” economists at Morgan Stanley said. They added that as a result they slashed their first-quarter GDP forecast from zero to an annualised rate of -1.4 per cent.Goldman Sachs cut its forecast from -0.2 per cent to -0.8 per cent, with economists at JPMorgan reducing their prediction from 0 per cent to -1.75 per cent. Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.The rise in the trade deficit was almost entirely down to a surge in imports — especially those with a long shelf life, such as cars, industrial materials and consumer goods. “The picture for [the first quarter of 2025] overall remains that President Trump’s tariff threats set off a rush to buy goods now rather than face higher prices later, prompting a startling surge in imports,” said Oliver Allen, senior US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.Analysts had already anticipated a slump in growth, even ahead of the Tuesday’s trade figures, with a Reuters survey predicting an annualised quarterly rate of 0.3 per cent — down from 2.4 per cent for the last three months of last year. However, many analysts say Wednesday’s growth figures will be skewed by the extraordinary period before the tariffs took effect, when many businesses focused on stockpiling, and are likely to overstate the damage to the US economy.“The GDP number will tell us very little,” Isabelle Mateos y Lago, chief economist at BNP Paribas, said. “It’s going to be full of noise, and reflecting to a very large extent, the sum of imports.” She added: “You’re going to need to look really under the hood to see what’s really happening.” “The data will be extremely noisy, both because reality is noisy and how we measure reality is noisy,” said Jason Furman, economist at Harvard University, adding he thought the data would still show “a pretty positive story” for US consumption, which has driven growth in recent years. GDP can be calculated as the sum of the trade balance, plus consumption, investment and government spending.Trump unveiled a series of so-called reciprocal tariffs on April 2, sparking a sharp sell-off in equities markets and an increase in the government’s financing costs as investors priced in the risk that high levies would drive the US economy into recession and stunt global growth. In recent weeks, concerns have mounted that high tariffs on Chinese imports will trigger goods shortages in important sectors such as construction and industrial production. Scott Bessent, US Treasury secretary, on Tuesday rejected fears of supply chain shocks, claiming in a media briefing that American retailers had “planned accordingly”. He said the “aperture of uncertainty” would soon be “narrowing”, with Washington closing in on a trade deal with India.The US also had the “contours” of an agreement with South Korea and was making good progress in talks with Japan, Bessent added. While the introduction of many “reciprocal” tariffs was paused by Trump for 90 days on April 4, a 10 per cent baseline tariff remains in place, as does a levy of 145 per cent on most Chinese imports.Economists say that, even without the April 2 tariffs in place, the current scenario leaves US trade levies at their highest effective rate for more than a century. Bessent said on Tuesday the trade war was unsustainable for China and the “onus” was on Beijing to lower trade barriers. Economists expect a partial turnaround in the second quarter as imports fall and push up GDP. West coast ports such as Los Angeles have reported a sharp drop in cargo volumes in recent weeks, amid signs vessels carrying products from China’s east coast are turning back. “Today’s [trade] numbers do really highlight the risk that it may well be a negative GDP print and that is obviously setting us up for a very weak 2025,” James Knightley, chief international economist at ING Bank, said.“This is a big stockpiling effort to get ahead of tariffs . . . but we expect this to unwind pretty soon: ports data is already slowing.”Additional reporting by George Steer in New York More