The trade deficit fell 16% in June to a low $60.2 billion, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Tuesday, but despite a 3.7% reduction in imports, the goods deficit for the month was surprisingly resilient compared to recent years without tariffs.
The United States has become incredibly dependent on imports to meet its daily pharmaceutical needs. This heavy reliance on imports is now creating serious drug shortages and has led to a flurry of safety concerns.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), enacted in 2000, was designed to promote economic development and democratic reform in Sub-Saharan Africa by granting duty-free access to the U.S. market for thousands of products.
America’s generic drug supply is at a crisis point. As detailed in previous reports, the United States is dangerously reliant on a high-risk imported drug supply, and today’s widespread drug shortages stem not from shipping delays or unexpected demand—but from a collapse in domestic production.
On July 17, at an event at New York University, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Christopher Waller, said that tariffs are not inflationary. “Tariffs are one-off increases in the price level and do not cause inflation beyond a temporary surge,” he said.
An economist with the San Francisco Federal Reserve wrote in their “Economic Letter” from July 14 that tariffs are going to lead to much higher inflation in the weeks ahead. There’s just one caveat, and senior economist Mauricio Ulate admits it up front.
With President Donald Trump’s recent announcement of 50% tariffs on copper imports under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, the United States has correctly identified copper as a material of strategic national importance.
For decades, U.S. politicians have sold free trade agreements as a beacon of prosperity for the American economy. The logic was tidy: “Most of the world’s consumers live outside the U.S.—so if we open foreign markets, prosperity will follow.” On paper, it sounded plausible. But in practice, it became one of the most costly economic miscalculations in our modern history.
Tariffs on Southeast Asia will go up at least two-fold by August 1 from the current rate of 10%, based on screen-shot letters President Trump shared on his Truth Social account on Monday.
If America fails to defend its copper industry today, it will lose the industrial backbone for tomorrow’s economy. The combination of speculative arbitrage, Chinese overproduction, and predatory pricing is decimating American copper mills.
