YouSaid · the spoken record

Craig Fuller

lines on the record: 61
first: 2025-05-08
most recent: 2025-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so a couple places at Freight Alley on X. So my at, it's just at freight alley. You can go to freightways.com if you're looking for news and information. And then if you're interested in getting to some of the data that we actually produce, we have produced three and a half million time series indices every single day that track global freight demand and movement of cargo. So the global goods economy, that is our sonar product. And you can go to gosonar.com to find out information.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so as an index on US consumer inflation, it's not going to be as big as what some people have been predicting simply because the products that are most likely to drive inflation are the very products that we produce excess of.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is demand destruction This is what we're talking about is losing jobs retailers will lay off. Trucking companies will lay off. We've already seen the price of oil collapse. I mean, WTI, I think, is at $58 a barrel or something. And price of gasoline is going down. So energy prices are dropping because demand globally is dropping substantially because this is sort of attack on the global economy. And then food prices are dropping because U.S. farmers and U.S. food exporters, which we export far more food than we import, have lost their markets. And so when you go to the grocery store, you might find that food is cheaper because of the trade war. And so it's important to sort of sparse what does get impact and what doesn't. And I think it's interesting because the inflation numbers tend to look at food, housing, energy.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continue to see product flow from China. And the longer that this goes on, frankly, the more fraud and the more trans shipping and the more border skipping is just going to continue to happen. And so that's why I think long term, this is a, there is going to be potential issues around the holidays regardless because the bigger companies are certainly not going to expose themselves to the sort of manipulation because they know they've got a giant target on their back and they don't pay the fines. The smaller companies are the ones that are more likely to sort of accept the risk and get on with it. But we do have some substantial concerns about inventory stockouts. But remember the things that consumers, everyone loves to talk about inflation and how tariffs are driving inflation. What no one's really talking about or not substantially.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Capitalistic people I've ever met are Chinese entrepreneurs like they understand capitalism, they may be living in a socialist or communist world. Those people understand capitalism and they will exploit every single loophole. And when they've actually said and been advertising to American consumers, which is that they will deal with the tariff and they've been advertising this to American businesses, we will take care of the tariff. And what they're effectively doing is committing fraud. They are under declaring their products or using the wrong product codes to actually get away from, so they may say it's electronics when it's not actually electronics. They may under-declare. So a product that actually the US consumer is paying $20 for that product or the U.S. business is paying $20 for that product. They may be saying it's $6 or $12. And so there's all this games that are happening. And that's why volume is never going to go to zero.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so a lot. So, a couple of things. One is where there's price elasticity. And so pharmaceuticals come to mind, where you have a pretty substantial margin baked into it. Some raw or some components in manufacturing where the component is such a low relatively low value to the end product where it's mission critical and you have to have it. Those products would continue to flow. I mean, electronics one of the things we've sort of forgotten about is when the tariffs first came out, electronics were sort of subject to these tariffs. The Trump administration quickly provided an exemption to that. So we do have some exempt items that are still coming over. And then we have a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs. And like regardless of what you think of the Chinese government, never underestimate the most.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Protect our own industry. And so that's sort of another part of the story that I think is we all should applaud that, even if you like T-Mo, it's very hard to justify that these businesses somehow help the US economy”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And essentially, these businesses have benefited greatly from this exemption because unlike Walmart who's importing stuff in bulk container and paying tariff a tariff, Timu and Sheen were coming on individual parcel orders and we're sort of using the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. parcel system to basically not pay any tariff and bypass all of these sort of intermediary steps between the consumer and the factory. And that's sort of like it's a pretty remarkable thing. So the administrations come out against it. Actually, Mexico's president came out against it over the holidays because she was very threatened by the fact that these Chinese companies were essentially cutting off her own industry. They were competing against Mexican companies. She also probably recognized that this would become a point of contention with the Trump administration, but she largely did it to”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They weren't US businesses and entrepreneurs were not benefiting because these are Chinese companies. And they were simply just taking substantial amount of market share from American consumers. And look, if you met anybody, I'm sure a number of folks that are listening to this will probably Shean and Timu consumers. My father is like obsessed with it. I don't know why, but he's like, he's like a connoisseur of Timu and I make fun of him. You can afford a lot of really nice stuff. Why do you buy it? But there's like this weird game of people that like to buy really cheap stuff. And some of it's really high quality, frankly. And the idea is that you're buying directly from the factory.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very little of the economic value and the de minimis exemption went to American businesses and entrepreneurs. Most of it was, and when I'm talking specifically is there is an exemption of products and it sedates, you know, this is something that was meant for basically immigrants to bring in product from their families and stuff. Essentially, there was a limit, anything over anything under $800 was exempt from U.S. duties and tariffs. And so these companies, Timu and Sheehan, are sort of the poster trials of this, but Alibaba was doing it. Amazon even got into it. Essentially what would happen is they would sell products e-commerce products to American consumers. And then they would ship them in under the de minimis exemption. And so they weren't paying US duties.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oftentimes, these products are produced in China and they're just simply shipped to a warehouse in Vietnam, and then essentially shipped out. That's just the way it goes. And the Vietnamese are the ones that have to sort of regulate it. So, I mean, that's hard to sort of justify. It's interesting because you do see and you have seen Mexico because of the threat of China and really dumping products and sort of Mexican companies losing market share to Chinese companies. You have seen Mexico actually try to put their foot down and stop some of those actions because they”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this because companies will import product from China to Canada and to Mexico trying to ship product ends so that they can either ship it into bonded warehouses there because these are not just US things, but they're global, ship it there and then tranship it to the United States. Or I think most likely is they're just relabeling products. So it looks like a Vietnamese import or a Canadian import when it's actually come from China. Now, the US customs aware of it, but they simply can't manage it. I mean, think about the drug war, even though we clearly want to put a stop to drug trafficking and human trafficking. There just isn't enough resources to sort of find every single instance of this. And it's very difficult. Like, how do you prove that a toy did not come from Vietnam? If it says Vietnam on the box and is stamped in it.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vietnam has been playing a story of this since the first Trump administration. A lot of people have forgotten it. But we had a trade war 1.0, if you will, that happened during the first Trump administration. And at the time was like, oh my God, we're getting 8% tariffs. Like, I can't believe he's doing this. Now we're talking 145. But there was a pretty sharp disruption happening in trade where companies started to think about moving sourcing from China or using transshipping through other countries. Vietnam was the primary recipient of that. I mean, they were the primary winner. And so any of the East Asian countries that are sort of adjacent to China, because the logistics cost of moving that product's pretty low, that is just transhipping period. Mexico and Canada have also been winners.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's an enormous amount of compliance paperwork that's required. You also have to have like US customs can come on site and inspect the goods. And so the cost of doing it, the administrative headaches means that most companies would have never gone through the bonded warehouse process, which means you have a very short supply of bonded warehouses. And so that's why the cost of these has gone up. The demand is much higher. But the cost is also going up because there just isn't enough of them.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Single warehouse that was bonded, they had to do a single. So I remember we had like 40 warehouses, and I remember I had to do all five fingers, I think actually maybe ten. I can't remember. I just remember having to do the ink. And basically it was just like every single one of these locations required it. And so the lead time on that is pretty substantial. So I think the value of those bonded warehouses has gone up precipitously. So if you're an importer, if you're a retailer, an e-commerce company and you are thinking about how do I deal with the tariff issue because I don't want to prepay for the tariff before I have demand, bonded warehouses are a great resource. However, the cost of bonded warehouses because the demand is so high has gone up exponentially. And one of the things to keep in mind is that in a free trade environment, bonded warehouses just aren't valuable because why would I, I mean, what these things effectively do is they're holding places.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is raw materials, and I can assemble that. I don't have to pay the tariff until that product is essentially sent out. And so that creates some opportunities. Bonded warehouses work a little different. Bonded warehouses are basically oftentimes used in retail goods where I bring products in. I don't pay the tariff until after I have a sale. And when that product goes out of the warehouse is when the tariff is essentially assessed. And so that's the way bonded warehouses work. The issue for bonded warehouses is, and I've done this, I used to have a, we used to have a network of like 40 bonded warehouses. And you have to be, I remember when we were setting them up, it takes a while. In my day, it took months. I imagine with probably the demand for the interest level that exists for bonded warehouses, probably just knowing how slow the government is. Because they have to do background checks. They have all these compliance things. They have to do inspections. I had to have fingerprints and every.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The trade duties and essentially the taxes on those products when they're sold. And so the idea is that it better aligns your cost of goods sold tariff and your retail outputs. It also enables companies to build U.S. presence and warehousing and logistics presence to serve other parts of the world. And so you see these things called free trade zones, which are, you know, Texas has these big free trade zones around Dallas, Fort Worth. And essentially what that means is that a part of a city, or typically these are sort of municipality and state and federal driven, they've designated this area of the town or the city that anything that is in that area is sort of not subject to these duties until they're sold. So if I sell it to someone in the US, then, and a lot of it allows for manufacturing. So I can bring in products.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Bonded warehouses have become really popular. Kind of wish that you'd own Bonded Warehouses because it's funny, I've been doing freight my whole life and I haven't heard anyone outside of like the word bonded warehouse. I remember this sort of popped up like a month ago and everybody's talking about bonded warehouses and I couldn't tell you the last time anyone ever mentioned the word bonded warehouse to me even though I do this every single day because it's simply is just sort of this like boring concept that a company can have a warehouse that's basically set up so that US customs so basically Lee bonded warehouses work is I can import products and I don't have to pay the tariff and tell the product is sold. And what this enables companies to do is basically bring product in and hold it in a warehouse and only pay the tariff or the duties.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, companies like Stripe that have probably, you know, it's not a public company, but Mascard Visa will see some impact. Shopify, I think, has an enormous amount of exposure because so many small e-commerce companies actually use Shopify. It's a turnkey product. And so those types of businesses, I think, have a lot to lose in this. And I think the bigger companies actually somewhat benefit from the destruction of small businesses. And so it's just this interesting thing that I don't know that the idea that even if we had this sort of impermanent embargo on China.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're rerouting it. It's happening. And so there are, even though we're talking about tariffs on China, There are a number of things that are taking place right now that will ease some of the tension. So let's say we don't get a dill on tariffs and we don't have a resolution and the administration is so upset because of something that happens and Xi or the Chinese offend Donald Trump and he's like 145% is it. Eventually the economy, the supply chain will deal with that problem. It always does supply chains have a way of resolving. The question is how much pain do you want to deal with short term and at what cost? And so a lot of small businesses will go under. This is a big risk. And so companies that serve a small businesses, I think, are also at risk. So if you think about from a investment standpoint, it's your credit card companies, it's your payment processors.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, these things point of no return is a really difficult thing because eventually Americans get on to get an on. And like eventually and already start to see this, we're starting to see that Chinese manufacturers are is a term called transhipping or border skipping, which is products are not going from China to the US, but they're going through Vietnam and they're being relabeled.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happen head tondo.finance O-N-D-O.f-I-N-A-N-C-E, and see how they're bringing capital markets on chain. Restriction supply. Yeah, so when we look at markets right now, it feels like they're willing to look past this right now up to a certain point on the assumption that there will be some sort of trade deal. So I'm curious, like, what do you think is the date of the point of no return? Is it, you know, you're saying July, August, if we don't have any meaningful progress by July, August, is that the point where it's like the point of no return? you know.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The tariff, I should say. And so you pay it 145% is based on that wholesale product, not on the retail product. So just thinking about retail margins, if you're at 50% and you're got a 35% tariff, then it means that your sort of cost is 17%. And so most companies can absorb that either through small price fluctuations in the products. They may increase some of the products that wholesale or at retail currencies will offset a little bit of this too. Like this isn't 100%. Companies don't eat it 100%. They may eat it in their margins, but they have enough of that to sort of absorb it. So to me, that 35% range, if we see something like that, I think I would expect we would see some resumption in volume. And I think that will be something that the economy could absorb.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The upper end of the sort of averages that we got, or the surveys we got from companies in the supply chain, that feels like about the right sort of upper end point when companies, you know, what they were communicating was that was their expectation of tarots. Therefore, if that's their expectation of tarots, they're communicating they can sort of absorb that margin. You think about it, most retail products are 50% margins in terms of wholesale cost of goods sold, or at least that's sort of the range of them. The tariffs are not sales taxes. This is oftentimes confused. People think it's on the cost that's at retail that there's the tariff 145% on retail prices. Tariffs are paid when products are imported. And so they're based on the cost of goods sold of the actual products that come across at custom. So when that product comes in and is cleared by customs is when you pay the tariff or when you're assessed.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I go back to the survey we did prior to this, and that range of 10 to 35 percent was what most supply chain professionals said. And so I think when people sort of give the survey data, these are people who do this and these are big companies that are doing this. I seriously doubt that anyone would have given data that they couldn't afford. So to me, I take that as the, like nobody knows that the reality is we are living a live experiment. This is an experiment that's being played out, a simulation, if you will, that's being played right in front of our eyes. So someone could say, hey, they would resume shipping at 70%, but we don't know. We don't know what it's actually going. Where are the incentives? So I look at the data. I take that survey we did prior to the liberation day tariffs and prior to the inauguration. And the range was 10 to 35 percent. And so I look at it and say that 35% number feels like.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you mention a trade deal, just to give some color to that, are you saying something like basically going to just 10% tariffs on China or is it just having the current tariff rate down to 50-60%?”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put the economy back in line and those products that were ordered to come back and flow over. It's probably a month. We can be back in order. And it would be, I wouldn't call it a non-event, but be pretty uneventful for the most part. I think in two years, we would have forgotten that it's even happened. But if we get into a situation where we don't have a deal by July or August, it sort of resumes the flow of cargo and resumes the order flow. Then you're dealing with a situation of having some enormous amount of inventory stockouts come the holiday season.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not showing up in inventory. Gets more interesting. So that's sort of phase one. I think phase two is actually more interesting because phase two is the fact that new contract orders. We've talked about, and phase one can be corrected really, frankly, pretty quickly. So let's say we get a trade deal in a couple of weeks. Those orders that would have come over for back this goal can easily be sent over. And inventory stockouts just probably aren't a major concern. But if we get into later into the calendar and we're starting to look in July and certainly August, this is where would-be orders are a problem because what's happening is US companies are not placing orders to Chinese contract manufacturers because they're not placing orders to contract manufacturers. The lead time if we were to get a deal would be measured in months, not it would take about a month to sort of”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're simply not an inventory. And that's going to be the first season where I think broadly consumers start to notice that there are is a shortage of selection and inventory stockouts in that sort of back to school timeframe. So that's early August. And what's happening is companies had ordered these products from the contract manufacturers in China. And then they didn't want to pay the 145% tariff or couldn't pay the 145% tariff. So they put all those orders on hold. They just basically contacted their suppliers and said, don't ship the products to me. So all the products that these contract manufacturers had produced basically stating either in the warehouse or the factory and are piling up in China with nowhere to be sent and those products are what you're going to start to see in coming months that are”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a workforce is in the logistic sector that's going to show up. As we shift into the calendar and we move into, so that's all in the logistics sector. They're sort of on the front lines, they're going to fill it. They're already filling it. In the coming weeks, and perhaps a couple months out, this is where those orders that would have been sent over start to show up in inventories. And it'll be so at first in June. You'll go to the store. Maybe your favorite product preferences in there, the color that you're buying isn't there. Maybe intermittently, maybe you've got an e-commerce website that used to buying something and they just don't have your products or your selection or your size. That will happen, but you're not going to really fill it. I think the first time consumers really notice it is back to school because that is the first season, those products would have come over in April and May.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20% of the trucking volume. And trucking is an industry where demand, labor is directly correlated to demand. There are very few economies of scale in trucking. So it's an industry that the throughput of volume does drive the employment picture. So if I reduce 20% or I reduce 35% of my 20%, I'm off about 7%. And so that means I'm likely to see an equivalent reduction in jobs in logistics. There's 9 million jobs across the United States that work in logistics. And so I think it's fair to say that a minimum of 400 to 450,000 jobs will likely be lost in coming weeks that work in the logistics industry. It could be bigger than that depends on how pervasive this goes to this economy. But in coming weeks, you're going to see some sharp reductions.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would have been here is not here. And so let's talk about what happens. So container volumes don't show up. Half a million people in Southern California that work in logistics, they're simply not going to have as much work. So the ports, union contracts have a little bit more sort of staying power. They can do maintenance around the port. But then you've got this sort of dependency of the truckers that are in and out of the ports. They're going to see a sharp drop. So the number of orders, the number of loads, the number of container boxes that they would be shifting from the port to the distribution centers in Southern California just aren't going to be there. So you're going to see just reduced order count and reduced some layoffs. We've already seen it in logistics. UPS has announced $20,000 layoffs. Pinsky's announced layoffs. And so we're starting to see layoffs start. We're in the very early innings of it. Containerized imports into the United States represent.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at it. But I think what you really want to do is sort of get a baseline from where we were a year ago and sort of understand it. When I look at what is happening right now is the container volume that would have come over from China. And again, this is a China story. I think we've talked about this, is like everything else is secondary. The 10% tariffs are going to be absorbed in the economy. Most businesses can afford that. Those are just secondary actors. The whole world is on China and the United States. So let's talk specifically about that. The volume that would have come over from China is not coming. And that is showing up right now. This is the week last week, late last week was sort of the first time where that volume that would have come over has not come over. And now we're sort of in the thick of it where we are seeing a lot of volume drops, sharp volume drops. And this is going to play out in the next coming weeks.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the weekly data can get very noisy. It's the challenge. And so what I like to look at is year-over-year patterns and just look at how we're trending in a 12-month period compared to where we've been. And so that's typically how I look at freight data is looking at on a year-over-year basis, adjusting for any of the seasonal calendars. So you get these events, particularly in China where you have Chinese New Year, Golden Week that does ship around on the calendar. And so when it does shift, it does alter the sort of year-over-year activity. The problem week over week is there's so many things that can impact imports week over week. And that is largely related to ship schedulings, these supply chain networks, what we call blank settings, which are just canceled voyages. And so it's hard to sort of get a true sense of where the world is by looking at weekly data directionally.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. So, okay, with the baseline set that this is a permanent shift. Macro practitioners like myself and my audience who were humble tourists in this world and trying to just figure out how to develop a framework for how to think about where we are today and where we're going to head into the future now. Obviously, we have these clumps of port volumes going down 35% year over year. But what's the right way to think about the sequence? Is it correct to look at week over week comps as we start to look at port volumes? What is that sequence of how that gets impacted into trucker volumes, et cetera, and then distribution centers and all of that? What's the right way to think about the sequence of events from here on out?”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is sort of the problem with a lot of small businesses they're stuck and they haven't sort of accepted the bigger businesses have accepted reality and they are in the acceptance phase and they're moving on and they're making plans and they're realizing and some of these organizations have been doing this for years realizing that bilateral free trade is just a thing of the past”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've used that before. It's not just the world is there, it's my own businesses are still stuck at denial. Like we got to get to acceptance. I always tell founders and entrepreneurs like, get to acceptance as fast as possible. And the objections to that is, well, this is, I mean, in some ways, they're the bargaining phase, right? They're in denial and they're moving to bargaining and they're like bargaining with the Trump administration or bargaining. Like, please, please, please, please just declare victory and everything will be okay.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hopefully never goes kinetic, but trade is always front and center to any type of strategic rivalry. And it's hard to have stable trade relations with someone who is actually plotting to kill you. Like at the end of the day, military planners are plotting to kill one another. The US military, you talk to the people at the defense department, they will say their job is to kill the adversary. People in China are plotting to kill the American military. In order to do that, you have to sort of accept that it's hard to have friendly trade relations with people who want to kill you.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always operated in a world where trade just happens. And like if you can, you know, you can open up a website on Shopify and then you can find a supplier on the web that's out of China and you can order product and boom you're off. That's a pretty unusual time in history. And now the rules are changing and a lot of small businesses and even big businesses simply have not realized that this shift is permanent. I mean, I truly believe that this is a permanent shift. And I believe we have been telling companies for years that we're in the second Cold War. And it's almost impossible to have friendly trade relations with an adversary. And the United States and China view themselves as adversaries. There are strategic rivals.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Versus the folks that we typically deal with are much larger, robust supply chain operations, which have war rooms and have developed contingency plans. Small businesses just didn't. They couldn't either, they didn't have the resources to do something about it. And I think this is probably more likely simply weren't accepting that the world is changing and didn't even know how to operate in that type of world. I mean, what we forget about is that free trade is an exception to the global rule. Like we have lived in this world for the last, you could even say since World War II, but certainly since China in 1978 sort of opened up its markets, free trade has been, we've been moving toward this movement of the world as flat and free trade. That is an exception to history. That's not a norm. And I think most entrepreneurs and most businesses have”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think positive things. So they didn't take precaution. Even if they could have. And the majority of small businesses, they simply couldn't. They don't have the capital. They don't have the infrastructure. They don't have the global sourcing. Maybe they have only one supplier that's out of China to sourcing their products. And so for them, they just sort of like take it. And I remember talking to folks months ago that are in the hobby industry. This is an industry that is like model railroading and people that build these scale models. And I talked to a number of the companies and the vast majority of these products come from China. And I said, are you guys looking at alternatives? And the answer was no, we can't. And they gave me a bunch of reasons why they couldn't. But their supply chain is very dependent upon these sort of regions in China. And it was interesting because it was a very different conversation talking to that group of folks.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody that handles logistics, a small business owner is doing the perhaps they or someone in their back office is doing the shipping and receiving, the ordering, the placement. These are the folks that were not paying attention to the broader world. And oftentimes I've heard entrepreneurs have a tendency, particularly small business entrepreneurs, that are successful, have a tendency to sort of like, we have enough grit and I mean being an entrepreneur myself, we'll figure it out. Like whatever gets thrown at us, we'll figure it out. I think a lot of people sort of thought, hey, this trade thing is going to blow over. There's no way that Trump will end up doing this massive trade issue. It's eventually going to come. It's going to be a deal. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs either weren't paying attention or could not accept that something bad would happen instead of our naturally optimistic.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they also have a lot of ways to sort of, I wouldn't say manipulate customer behavior, but marketing ultimately and advertising is manipulation of customer behavior. That's fundamentally what an advertiser does is gets you to buy something that maybe you didn't realize you wanted. And so they will change the way that they market certain products to sort of focus on where they do have sourcing, where they do have inventory, and they can change the product selection to reflect that. And so where there isn't a lot of stresses in the big companies, the problem is small businesses are really at an enormous disadvantage. They don't have the capital to, first of all, they didn't stock. I mean, most small businesses don't have supply chains. If you go a business less than $100 million typically doesn't even have a supply chain manager, they may not even have what we would call a traffic manager, which”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, even Walmart has been public about this. I mean, Walmart has come out and talked about, you know, I wouldn't say bullish on the trade war, but they have talked about the fact that they expect to gain market share. And they've been very transparent about that. I mean, the thing that most people are surprised by is the majority of Walmart, they're very proud of this fact, by the way. The majority of the products inside of Walmart's stores are actually domestically produced. Now, what people don't understand about that is Walmart's the largest single category is grocery. And we talked about the fact that the vast majority of food and grocery specifically is produced in the United States. And so when we think about larger companies are just in a much better position to sort of win share and to be able to source product. Look, so much of inventory, we think about bigger companies, they do a lot of, I mean, these brands are not only global.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I'm curious about the right framework for discerning the impact of that. Is it, you know, I've heard that it's going to impact small businesses more than the huge businesses that probably have more sophisticated trading relationships in terms of grabbing from different countries in terms of their supply chains, et cetera. So is it the right way of thinking to focus in on the biggest impact is going to be on smaller businesses than large?”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inventory inventory levels were much higher relative to demand in 22 than they are today. And so I think part of the story is a drop in pre-build, but the majority of the story is there is a substantial embargo on.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Year over year in imports is really comparing this year to last year. And at this time, it didn't feel obvious that Trump was going to be the nominee. And it didn't feel obvious that we were going to have massive trade disputes. When I look at the year-over-year volumes, there's a 35% drop. That is a real drop. And that is not an inventory stock out sort of the 60% drop people have talked about, that is more credible for some of that being inventory. But when you look at inventories, while there is some buffer in the economy, broadly, it's not that substantial. We had far more buffer inventory in 2022. At the end of COVID, where companies overreacted and over, they sort of ran out of product in 2000 and 2021 and they just as a reaction ended up bringing a lot of buffer.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's true that bigger companies did front run inventory, and they have, you know, 90 days of inventory, but the inventory data does suggest that while there is some buffer, it's not in excess. It's not, I mean, if you think about this, and let's take the first debate as sort of the moment of truth for so many companies, companies had been pre-loading a lot of inventory due to strikes, the port strikes, and other things that were sort of in the background. We've all forgotten about that, unless you work in my business, is there was a threat of an East Postcard, East Post, East Coast port strike, sorry, early on or last year that ended up getting resolved actually interested up by the Trump administration in January of this past this year. So there was a lot of preloading, but I look at it and say, the 35% drop off that we're seeing.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is port of LA talking about just like volumes dropping off a cliff. I do want to better contextualize the run up into this point now because obviously as we've just mentioned, it's been pretty well telegraphed. So I would imagine there was quite a bit of front writing like we just discussed, there's a lot of front-running in terms of imports and pharmaceuticals. The people that are fading the idea that okay, there's a bunch of volumes dropping off a cliff, it's because these companies actually front-loaded their orders a ton. So, you know, their warehouses are filled up to the brim. How much validity is there to that fact that the reason they're dropping off right now is because they're so well stocked leading up to this point.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supply chains where you have manufacturers that have raw materials or components that go into their products or small businesses that maybe are in specific niches where they simply aren't taking any orders or any possession of any products that they pre-ordered and are no longer placing orders for Chinese made goods. And that's where you're going to see the shock to the system.”
2025-05-08 · Forward Guidance · Supply Chain Expert Breaks Down The Fallout From Trump’s Trade War | Craig Fuller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT