Pod Insights Odd Lots The Scramble Is On for Businesses to Get Their Tariff Refund Checks About this episode Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs were illegal. And now basically every importer who paid those tariffs will be rushing to get their refunds. But will businesses actually get paid? And how do they file a claim? And should consumers get refunded if a business passed the cost of the tariffs on to them? On this episode, we're rejoined by regular Odd Lots guest Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport, a major freight forwarding company. We discuss how the entire refund process works, and the estimated timeline for payoff. We also talk about the booming secondary market in refund claims, where traders are buying up other people's claims for, in some cases, 50 cents on the dollar. Ryan also walks us through how world trade has changed since the tariffs began and the various way companies tried to game the system. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:12 Joe Weisenthal? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
1:16 Tracy Alloway? And I'm Tracy Alloway.
1:17 Joe Weisenthal? Do you think you and I are going to start getting checks because they struck down the tariffs, right? And according to economists, consumers pay the tariff. So if consumers pay the tariff and they strike down the refunds, shouldn't we get the money?
1:30 Tracy Alloway? I have often said, Joe, I buy a lot of stuff.
1:33 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
1:33 Tracy Alloway? Especially from abroad, a lot of weird stuff. Sometimes I feel like I'm running a small logistics company.
1:37 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
1:38 Tracy Alloway? And I will say, so I know it's the importer of record who actually pays the tariffs and is supposedly supposed to get the refund. However, I've had a few instances where like the postal service will deliver something to my house, especially in Connecticut, and while they're there, we'll say you owe us like $50 in cash as a tariff payment. And I'm literally standing on my door.
2:01 Joe Weisenthal? Really?
2:01 Tracy Alloway? Paying out cash and it's going somewhere. So I feel very much like I actually have paid the tariffs pretty much directly to the Trump government. Like there is something very visceral.
2:13 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, I have some bad news to.
2:15 Tracy Alloway? I know, I know.
2:16 Joe Weisenthal? The person who did that was a con artist who showed up.
2:19 Tracy Alloway? No, it wasn't.
2:19 Joe Weisenthal? And they said, and they duped you into thinking that because I have never heard of someone having to pay cash.
2:25 Tracy Alloway? You're not buying enough from abroad. No, it's definitely true. I got the bill online and then you can either pay online or you can pay the postal guy in cash. It's very strange.
2:35 Joe Weisenthal? I've never heard of that. Anyway, everyone wants their money back. How that's going to happen, what the timeframe is, is going to be major court fights. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning and it said that the scale of the suits to recover it is going to be, quote, "the same level as asbestos levels," which famously was, you know, multiple decades of lawsuits.
2:55 Tracy Alloway? Also gave birth to an entire portion of the legal industry. Lots of mesothelioma lawyers out there.
3:02 Joe Weisenthal? Sometime later, I'll tell you, I was briefly part of that industry as a data collector for it.
3:06 Tracy Alloway? Oh, that's interesting.
3:07 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, it's fun. Anyway, we got to figure out how it's all going to happen because we know all these big companies, they want their money back. Of course, you know, there's new tariffs already and the Trump administration, after losing one tariff, they're like putting in a different one. That's probably going to have court fights, et cetera. We also know that there was a popular secondary market in claims that Wall Street banks were facilitating. And so this is going to be a mess. It's probably going to stand for years. We got to figure out how companies are actually in the process of getting their money back and whether they'll ever see it or whether it all go to the lawyers.
3:38 Tracy Alloway? Well, this is the other thing. I know you and I live in perpetual fear of paperwork and bureaucracy. And this in particular just strikes me as like the biggest nightmare of paperwork and bureaucracy.
3:51 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, I hate that.
3:52 Tracy Alloway? You know, for some of the tariffs, you're like calculating them by like the proportion of like the tariffed item in the thing you're buying. So like steel and aluminum, how much of this thing is actually steel? It just seems like a nightmare. The whole thing of customs seems like a nightmare, still very antiquated.
4:07 Joe Weisenthal? We got to learn more about this nightmare, about this chaos. And who do we talk to when we want to learn more about not the theoretical stuff that about trade that, you know, economists talk to, talk about, which I love them too, but the actual nuts and bolts of moving things, of course. Perfect guest, Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport, joins us today. So Ryan, thanks for coming back on Outlaws.
4:30 Speaker 04 It is great to be with you and Tracy, that person may have been an impersonator of a postman, but it is illegal to impersonate a postman. I tried to be one for Halloween and you can't buy a postman's outfit.
4:41 Tracy Alloway? Really?
4:41 Speaker 04 I had to borrow one.
4:41 Tracy Alloway? Well, that's what you say.
4:42 Speaker 04 I made friends with the mailman and he gave me his to borrow, but he was like, I will get fired if anyone finds out.
4:46 Tracy Alloway? Guys, I'm just gonna be very clear. It wasn't a scam. The guy had my package. I had the bill. I've received the package. Customs isn't going after me for unpaid bills. It's just weird. It's weird, but I think it speaks to like, a lot of Americans will feel like they have paid these tariffs extremely directly.
5:05 Joe Weisenthal? All right, Ryan, let's just start big picture. You work with a lot of companies, et cetera. February 26th, what are they all up to right now?
5:12 Speaker 04 Everybody wants to figure out if they're gonna get a refund. That's the big question. And if so, when and how? And my, what we've been telling you, so Flexport is one of the bigger customs brokers in the United States. And I think the most automated one, the best systems for calculating this stuff and all that. That's my, the only sales pitch I'll do here.
5:29 Joe Weisenthal? It's allowed.
5:30 Speaker 04 So that is the giant question. And then they also wanted to, hey, can I sell this now? You know, you mentioned the secondary market. That, the very interesting fact, fun fact there is that that was, those were trading at about 25 cents on the dollar three weeks ago. And it went to 52 cents on the dollar on Friday, the same day of the Supreme Court. Markets move very fast on this stuff. So a lot of the companies I talked to in the last week have said, the CEOs had said, yeah, they would sell at 70 cents on the dollar today. And they're considering it at 52 cents. So I think that market's really gonna heat up. But yeah, those are the big questions to ask. And I do have opinions. I think, I believe, I have a very high degree of certainty, like bordering on certainty, conviction bordering on certainty, that there will be refunds.
6:14 Speaker 04 And I don't think it's gonna take that long. I think you're gonna see refunds this year would be, I'm gonna put my name, I'm gonna put my reputation on the line with that prediction.
6:22 Tracy Alloway? Well, okay, so the Supreme Court struck down-
6:25 Speaker 04 Not for you, Tracy. Sorry. I don't know how many visual parcels are gonna work.
6:27 Tracy Alloway? I've already resigned myself. I need to hire a customs broker, actually, is what I need to do. Someone like Ryan. But okay, so the Supreme Court struck down the majority of the tariffs, but the thing they didn't do is say, like, what happens next? How do refunds actually work?
6:45 Tracy Alloway? Do you get a sense of like, did they have any idea of how it should work that they just didn't say, or like they're just leaving it open to who exactly to decide the process of how this actually happens?
6:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, so a little backgrounds here. So this started in as a case in the Court of International Trade, which the administration lost. It then went to the appellate court, which is the level below the Supreme Court. In the appeal there at the appellate court, the plaintiff, this company called Voss, Voss something, I forget, I should have it there. But the plaintiff is a small business that was suing, and they actually asked for a stay, an administrative injunction, a stay, to say, hey, you have to stop collecting these tariffs while this gets worked through. You lost the case, you need to stop now. And the DOJ in that appellate court filed a motion that said, if we lose this case, if the government loses this case, there will be refunds. Like, that's from the DOJ. They filed the motion, you can read it in the docket. They then lost the case there,
7:42 Speaker 04 it went to the Supreme Court, they lost again. The Supreme Court has sent it back down to the original first court, the Court of International Trade, and said, okay, you decide if there's, you know, how the refunds are going. Well, they didn't say anything about refunds. It just goes back to them. It's just, if you read the thing, and I'm not a lawyer, okay, but I can read it and I make my own opinion, but the more, the reason I really have certainty is I've talked to three different international trade attorneys who all told me 100% certainty that there would be refunds. And I've never heard a lawyer say 100% certainty of anything before in my whole life, so.
8:13 Joe Weisenthal? By the way, the company that filed, I'm looking it up, Voss Selections, it's a wine importer in New York. It looks like, they have a really nice website. Their website's very funny because it has all these beautiful pictures, and it says wines, and then sake, and other spirits, and then there's a big thing called Fighting the Tariffs. It sort of looks ugly on their website.
8:32 Speaker 04 That's epic. I gotta buy some wine from this guy.
8:34 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, they've done everyone a big solid here by taking this on.
8:37 Speaker 04 That's a future Odd Lots guest right there, once this case is over, you can talk about it.
8:42 Joe Weisenthal? This Court of Trade, it's not like some UN court. It's a New York-based US court.
8:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:47 Joe Weisenthal? It sounds like it would be like the WTO or something like that, but this is a local.
8:50 Speaker 04 No, no, it's a US court where they send these types of cases. In fact, there was another case that was brought in the DC Circuit case, Circuit Court, and they bundled them together into the Court of International Trade. Now, currently, there are over 2,000 cases before the courts, before the court challenging AIBA, sorry, requesting refunds, effectively, challenging that they should get a refund, so. I think those will likely all get rolled into one and it'll go to court. Now, the Court of International Trade has only 30 days from February 20th was when the Supreme Court came out and they have 30 days to make a ruling of what happens next. So I think we're going to know pretty quick how the refunds, you know, that there will be refunds.
9:31 Joe Weisenthal? Just to be clear, is part of the reason that there is this confidence, I mean, the law is the law, I guess, but is because of that DOJ comment prior to the Supreme Court, pre indicating that if you guys reverse this, we're going to have to make refunds. Is it, is that part of the reason that the lawyers have such confidence because they've already stated that as part of their arguments against striking this down?
9:54 Speaker 04 Exactly. I mean, just think about, look, I'm not a lawyer and you're always going to find some lawyers that'll show some gray area, but I've talked to three that had just pure certainty and, you know, just imagine that you're going back to the same judge and you're saying, hey, you know, you're trying to fight the refunds and your judge is going to get like, well, you filed this paper, you know, this motion in my court that said you would give a refund if you lost. Like, why are you not honoring that saying? So, but there's, there's complexities here. I'm not a legal expert. I'm more of a customs tariffs expert, so.
10:23 Tracy Alloway? So maybe before we go any further, let's just talk about who actually is paying the tariffs when like, you know, an item gets made abroad and then it gets imported by, I don't know, a shipping company and then it goes through a customs broker and then it actually ends up at a store and then it gets bought by whoever. Who is the entity that is actually paying the tariff? So the importer of record that supposedly is going to get this refund?
10:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's the legal term for it is the importer of record and it's generally a US business. In your case, you did it as an individual. You may or may not have been the importer of record on that transaction.
10:57 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was like the actual shipping company, but whatever.
11:02 Speaker 04 With small parcel, that is, that's what happened. And that's very relevant because FedEx this week sued the government for a refund. And my initial reaction was like, wait, I don't understand, like FedEx doesn't pay the tariffs, their customers do. But it turns out for a small parcel, what I did, I'm not in the small parcel business, small parcel business, I didn't realize this really, but is that if you're getting a parcel delivered, although you are sent a tariff bill by FedEx, FedEx is the importer of record, they pay the tariff. So the refund comes to them. They don't have to give it to you legally until they'll probably get class action lawsuit by a bunch of Tracy's and your friends and everybody else out there. Or it's also just brand damage if they don't, if they get the money from the government and don't do it. I don't know. It seems like a bad look.
11:48 Speaker 04 So that's the case of small parcel. In a, you're importing containers. That's the business that we're in, ship large volume stuff. The importer of record is a US entity, but it doesn't have to be. In actually, United States, UK, Hong Kong are the only countries in the world, if we want to count Hong Kong as a country, the only places in the world that allow non-resident importers. So it's a foreign importer of record. Until April of last year, that was about 9% of US trade. Since April, it went to 20%. It's been an explosion of companies, 11% of trade flipped to where the foreign company imports it. And so actually about 20% of the refunds, I don't know in dollar value, but 20% of the companies getting a refund will be foreign companies and that, nothing is going to piss Trump off worse than that.
12:33 Speaker 04 We're literally going to wire this money overseas.
12:36 Joe Weisenthal? Can you explain what changed since Liberation Day such that it made sense for a lot of foreign companies to establish themselves as importers in the US?
12:48 Speaker 04 Yeah. So what, what changed was a massive incentive to commit fraud. And if you're a US company that was buying goods from overseas, you have to pay the tariffs, right? And you declare your goods, you pay the tariff as a percent of the value of those goods. If instead you say, hey, I'm just going to buy the goods in the United States from my factory and they'll take care of the tariffs. And that foreign company can just undervalue the goods and say, hey, this thing that, you know, it's actually only $10,000, not 100,000, and you just reduced your duties by 90%.
13:22 Joe Weisenthal? Oh.
13:23 Speaker 04 And the US companies are doing this en masse and washing their hands and say, hey, I, you know, I didn't know any better. I didn't know they, I don't see any of that. I'm just buying the goods from this foreign company and it's not my problem. And so we've seen a huge explosion of that. And all those people are not, those US companies, by the way, they don't import anything. So they're not getting any refunds at all and I don't feel bad for them.
13:46 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, you've got to imagine when you have something like these tariffs come into play, you're going to see some creative work around. Creative, you know, with, for listeners, with air quotes around there.
13:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, and where we started, Tracy, was you were talking about an individual case where you actually bought something from abroad. But of course, the massive things is how you just buy it domestically from a company. They did raise their prices for the tariffs in a lot of cases. They're, you're not going to get any refunds. But the really interesting shakedown that's happening is, okay, let's say you actually are a wholesaler and you sell to Walmart, Target, these types. Your tariffs went up, you raised prices. Walmart, I talked to a company last night who's a big seller on Walmart, wholesaler to Walmart. And they said Monday morning Walmart called and said, hey, we need to talk about this tariff refund. And how we're going to get, because they, you know, they don't have a legal obligation to give money to Walmart, but Walmart also doesn't have a legal obligation to keep carrying their product in the stores.
14:40 Tracy Alloway? Right, so there's some influence they could exert. Actually, this reminds me, so one of the things I was wondering, and again, this comes from my personal capacity of bringing strange items into the US. But I bought like, an antique box recently. And antiques, I'm pretty sure are supposed to be exempt from the tariffs. But I still got slapped with a tariff charge because the exporter, the person sending it to me, did not label it as an antique. They labeled it as box, which was very, it was a box within a box. It was very annoying. And so it got a big tariff. How much flexibility do importers in the US have over like, the actual labeling of the items that they're bringing into the US? Is that one way that you could potentially, you know, try to lower your, your tariff burden? Fraud advice from Ryan Peters.
15:24 Speaker 04 It is, it is, it is illegal. So you, each product has one and only one harmonized classification, we call it, harmonized schedule code. It's a classification. That said, it is not always obvious what the right one should be. And there's a whole art of classification. It's a very difficult, and it, but it's illegal to choose your classification based on duty rate. You know, you've got to choose it based on what's correct. Now, if the correct duty rate should happen to be lower than the incorrect one, then you're doing a great job at life. And so that's a whole, that's a whole art and science, is how do you make the case, prove it, that you, that you did in fact get the right HS code classification.
16:16 Joe Weisenthal? There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee. So search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.
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18:05 Joe Weisenthal? I want to talk more, obviously, about the logistics of the next several weeks and months about how this is going to be, but just in terms of maybe not necessarily fraud per se, although that was very interesting. What else have you seen, basically, since last April in terms of companies rerouting any of their, you know, what are the big trends in terms of restructuring the direction of the supply chain? Because part of the question, to my mind, is going to be with ongoing uncertainty about the future of tariffs, and there's already a new tariff, and Trump may try to restore the old tariffs in aggregate through other means and so forth. Have there been changes in trade flows that you expect companies are just going to keep? Because at this point, this is the new normal, and it's not sort of worth going back.
18:48 Speaker 04 For sure, lots of manufacturing has been moving towards Southeast Asia and Latin America, kind of the two big winners, Turkey, a few other locations where you're seeing stuff that can shift, move. I think the most interesting, and not immediately obvious, the most interesting trend has been that it's actually, in many cases, Chinese companies setting up factories in these countries. And so it's like, literally, you're working with the same company you worked with before, and they've cloned the line. In many cases, they've sent Chinese workers to manage the line.
19:20 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
19:20 Speaker 04 And so it's not that, as far as the money flows, like, it's still kind of going straight back to China in a lot of those cases. People are frustrated because the quality is just a lot worse. It's not easy to just pick up, shop, and move the manufacturing. I mean, you're just adding layers of cost here. A lot of what's happening is, in order to change the country of origin, it's not just, you can't just ship it to that country and then ship it to the US. That would be called transshipment. And the US, one of these recent executive orders did this, like, new tariffs on transshipments. But it was just a ridiculous concept that shows that the government doesn't understand their own rules, because if you just ship it to Vietnam and then ship it to the United States, it's still a product of China.
20:04 Speaker 04 So there's no tariff on transshipments. It's just the tariff on the Chinese goods. So that law was nonsensical. That executive order was totally nonsensical. You have to actually create and show that you have It's called substantial transformation. You have to show that like, okay, I've assembled products in this country. I've added enough value, whether it's through labor or other components, to make it a product of Vietnam. But of course, by definition, that's just adding costs and then transit times too, because Vietnam is further away than China. There are less direct ocean sailings, etc. So it's been very difficult for people to navigate. I said that would be my last sales pitch earlier, but we do have a free tool for this as well. It's at atlas.flexsport.com. You can see the transit time between any two ports in the world, like the actual, like how it moves. So this has been quite helpful for people to go navigate.
20:50 Speaker 04 And tariffs.flexsport.com helps you see what the tariff rate is.
20:53 Tracy Alloway? Always be pitching, Ryan. It's fine.
20:56 Speaker 04 They're free tools, so I don't feel like I'm trying to make money off your audience.
20:59 Tracy Alloway? So one of the reasons this story is so interesting is obviously there's a logistical element. There's an economics element, but there's also this political element. I feel like all of economics nowadays is pretty political. But in any case, you know, Trump has said that the American consumer doesn't pay the tariff. And yet, it seems we are very much about to talk a whole lot about how much money American consumers might be owed from tariff refunds. Do you get the sense that any companies are sort of caught between a rock and a hard place where, you know, like maybe they would like to pay out some of their refund to their customers, but at the same time, they also don't want to make huge announcements about returning money
21:43 Tracy Alloway? that Trump says was never taken away in the first place?
21:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, it's definitely the FedEx, UPS, DHLs of the world that are in that condition. USPS will be an interesting one. I'm not sure. You know, it'd be interesting to go look at those parcels he didn't see. Was it actually USPS or was it FedEx? Because if it was USPS, presumably you are the importer of record, but maybe it's USPS. That would be kind of a crazy case, actually. If USPS doesn't give back the money that they charged you, that would be a great class action. Yeah, those are probably the ones. But it's really just like a brand and business question more so than a legal one, I think. Maybe they don't want to piss off the Trump administration.
22:22 Joe Weisenthal? By the way, I might just spend the rest of this conversation only half paying attention because I'm now playing at atlas.flexport.com. It's really cool, like clicking all these ports and seeing all the routes and seeing how long it typically takes from one route to another.
22:37 Speaker 04 I know, it's amazing.
22:38 Joe Weisenthal? I think you've done this, it's very helpful. This is a really fun website you built.
22:43 Speaker 04 Global Trade has been this mysterious black box for centuries and now you can just see how it actually works. Where do the ships go? It's like the bus routes, you know, what ports do they stop at? How long do they take?
22:52 Joe Weisenthal? No, this is a really fun website, so thank you for plugging it. So, okay, tell us actually about, I guess because you're highly automated and digital, et cetera, do all companies have really good records on this stuff? Is it very clear, just from a sort of over the last year? Would you say the vast majority of companies know exactly how much they've paid unambiguously?
23:15 Speaker 04 I would say they do not, but they can very easily. So the US Customs Technology System is called ACE Automated Commercial Environment. And customs brokers love to complain about this. It's like healthcare.gov like times a million in terms of debacle of engineering problem. But it works. It took them like a decade longer than it should have to launch the thing. And you can, every importer that does entries, like commercial customs entries, not the Tracy's of the world shipping a package to themselves, but like real customs entries, a formal entry, all those entries are available to you. So you can see your past history. You have to just go to, and you'll have an ACE account. If you don't, you've got to go create one. And if you want a refund, you must have an ACE account. They've, until about two months ago, no, until February 6th, all refunds were done
24:00 Speaker 04 via paper checks from the Treasury Department from customs. And we, Flexport has gotten over $900 million of the refunds for our customers in the last five years from customs, one of my most proud life achievements. And all of those came via paper checks. Many of them got lost in the mail. Some of them got cashed by scammers, et cetera. So this was, on February 6th, they updated so that now refunds will be electronic, which was actually maybe a sign that they kind of had a sense of what was here to come. But yes, your ACE account does show you your entire past history of all your imports. And if you go to tariffs.flexport.com, at the top, you can upload that and we will just show you exactly how much money you're owed. And we got about 70... Fortune 500 companies signed up in the last week. Wow.
24:44 Speaker 04 Starting to calculate these tariffs and CFOs are coming to, again, it's a free service. You can just go look up your tariff refunds.
24:50 Tracy Alloway? Do you get any sense from your clients of, you know, I'm pretty sure they're excited about potential refunds, but do you get any sense of what they're going to do with them? Is it just, you know, fill the hole that was left from paying the tariffs in the first place or does this count as like a windfall payment that they could potentially hold on to and use to invest or whatever?
25:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, these are sick and demented people who have an addiction to just buying inventory and they're going to just buy a lot more stuff and try to grow their business. No, I'm joking, but I assume that that's what will happen is you, everyone's an optimist. You get a lot of money. Most lottery winners go broke, although that might not be, it might be an urban legend, but I think they will go reinvest in their business in ways that may not make sense. And I've been advising people, you know, keep, put it in your bank account, buy something, you know.
25:36 Tracy Alloway? Save it for the next round of tariffs presumably.
25:38 Joe Weisenthal? Well, yeah, so this is, so this is actually what I was going to ask, which is, so already there's this new 10% tariff. One of the things I think I saw was that in his latest Truth Social post, he said 15%, but that actually it's 10, like the actual formal thing is 10%. What is the current state of tariffs as you see them?
25:57 Speaker 04 It's currently 10%. The section 122 is 10%. They, it was a legal limit of 15 and that's what he did the next day. First he announced 10 on Friday after the Supreme Court, like an hour or two after. Then the next day on Saturday he went to 15. I thought he was going to wait at least until the hockey gold medal match and just like if Canada won then put the 15% in, but like he jumped the gun on that.
26:20 Joe Weisenthal? But did he put the 15% on? Cause what is the tariff?
26:23 Speaker 04 He did, but he didn't be a, I think Truth Social or some other post, that's not how the laws work. So you have to actually publish it through the code of federal regulations and they haven't done that yet. So we're waiting for like official word, which, you know, usually it's a couple of days lag from when he says something. So it's still 10% as of today, but I would expect, you know, maybe by the time this episode airs, it goes to 15.
26:44 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, did you know, speaking of the gap between announcement and formal thing that technically Kevin Warsh hasn't been nominated yet? Because there's a part, he has to like send it to, it hasn't been sent and his odds on polymarket were at 99% the day after the announcement and they're now like 96%. So people are wondering what's up with, anyway, just throwing that out there.
27:03 Tracy Alloway? I should just say, we're recording this on February 26th because again, all of this stuff seems to change day by day, if not hour by hour. So that's the disclaimer.
27:12 Speaker 04 It's very fluid and the section 122, it's the section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. And that's what gives the, that's one of the several tools. I would say that Trump probably, he lost AIPA in the Supreme Court. He has at least four other acts of Congress that have delegated trade, a tariff authority to the president under certain conditions. AIPA was the one that they'd never been used before for tariffs, always for sanctions and outright bans on trade. The reason they liked it, it was under their interpretation, it gave them blanket authority just to do what they wanted, whenever they wanted, on demand. Like he could just wake up in the morning and just like you get a tariff, you know, you look at them the wrong way and you get a tariff.
27:56 Joe Weisenthal? That seems like it was in Switzerland specifically, right? Didn't he say specifically he was just annoyed?
28:02 Speaker 04 I forgot. Yeah, I wouldn't surprise you. Exactly.
28:04 Joe Weisenthal? What you're describing was not actually a hypothetical.
28:06 Speaker 04 No, I mean, that was basically what he was doing. Canada, a couple of times, et cetera. So the other ones require, they have much more formal mechanisms that will require like the Commerce Department or USTR to do some, you know, do something and go run a report, go demonstrate that in fact, this country and this sector are being anti-competitive and they're doing something and then punish them. Now, 122 is the one that he put in. It has relatively blanket authority, but it has, it has two limits on it. One is that it's a maximum of 15%, which we just talked about. And the other is that it's a maximum of 150 days and that'll go until July 20th of this year. And so then what you should expect is like between now and July 20th, that he was, he'll be using these other mechanisms
28:49 Speaker 04 of which there's section 301, that's the famous China tariffs from his first term was section 301 tariffs. Those have not been challenged. He's been able to maintain those. And then section 232 and 232 is on national. National security grounds, that's what the steel and aluminum tariffs have come in on. That's not getting challenger. If it has, they won the case or will win the case. It's reasonable to say that steel and aluminum are not important national from a national security perspective. However, he also used section 232 to impose furniture tariffs on national security grounds. And I think that's a little bit of a stretch personally.
29:24 Tracy Alloway? Couches, comfy couches are a security issue, I would argue. I imagine on July 20th, what's going to happen is we'll have like a one day tariff jubilee or a 15 minute tariff jubilee, and then they just get reextended for another 120 days, right?
29:38 Speaker 04 That was my prediction. I think I talked to a couple of trade lawyers about that prediction, and they told me that, yes, he might do that, but there's no way that that would hold up in a court.
29:46 Tracy Alloway? Oh, interesting. Okay.
29:48 Speaker 04 It's one thing what Trump does versus what a court finds to be legal.
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31:32 Tracy Alloway? Going back to the way these tariffs were originally described by the administration, the whole idea was bringing jobs and industry back to America. And like, some of the justification seems to have morphed since then. At the State of the Union address, Trump was talking, I think, about how he used tariffs as like, a tool of political power to influence countries and get them to do other stuff that he wanted. But again, when you look at your customers, do you get the sense that these tariffs have been successful in their original goal in shifting economic activity back to America?
32:06 Speaker 04 It's a little hard to parse out. I mean, like, a lot of our customers are importing goods, so they're not the ones. The exporters, you know, I've met as many companies that export that said that these tariffs actually hurt them because they import components.
32:20 Tracy Alloway? Right.
32:20 Speaker 04 And it makes it uncompetitive. You import a component, you gotta pay a duty on it. And if they were to put that factory in Mexico, they wouldn't pay the same duty. They could import the goods and then if they're, if they're selling in the US, fine. It's like, one way or the other, it's the same. But if you're selling it into Europe or you're shipping it abroad, then it really makes that manufacturing less competitive. It's probably a little hard to parse out, though, because we're going through this incredible AI capex build-out that, you know, there's a lot of industrialization happening, a lot of, a lot of stuff. Like, in general, in theoretical grounds, like tariffs are good for manufacturing in purely economic, theoretical world. But these things are like, I think, much too complex
33:01 Speaker 04 to be centrally managed by the state is like the great lesson of the last century.
33:06 Joe Weisenthal? I do think the point about tariffing imported components for, you know, Because we don't, in theory, we don't want to just build stuff here. We want to build complex, high value add.
33:16 Tracy Alloway? Right, and then sell it to other people.
33:17 Joe Weisenthal? And sell it supposedly. But yeah, if your input costs go up because here's this one piece of metal, or whatever it is, then that does make the cost of doing business higher in the United States. But on the AI, I'm curious, just sitting aside all the tariffs, since you brought up the AI boom, that's creating its new, different trade flows, incredible imports from Korea, right, for memory chips. And those prices are going insane. And I think I saw a stat, just the pure level of importing that we're doing from Taiwan is just staggering all because of chips, etc. But what else are you seeing interesting in terms of trade flows because of all this AI activity that's going on? Or do you see any fingerprints of that?
34:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, you see a lot, and the air freight market especially, because one of the Trump administration crackdowns was the end of de minimis shipping, which was if you ship something less than $800, you didn't have to pay customs duties on it. And that was just this huge boom. It had been 50% of the world's air freight. And so when that ended back in, I think it was in May for China, they stopped, they ended that program. All the experts, including me, went on the record and said, hey, the price of air freight is going to collapse because it's 50% of the world's air freight is de minimis shipments from Asia, from China mostly, and that's all going away. And so the price is going to collapse. Well, it turns out, price of air freight has stayed stable, stayed high because there's so much,
34:42 Speaker 04 so many components for data center build outs getting flown around the world. It's more than made up for the drop from the de minimis shipping.
34:50 Tracy Alloway? That de minimis exception, the 800 exception, that always reminds me of, you know, the charts that you see of men's like self-reported heights, where like no one is 5'8" or 5'9", everyone is either like shorter or 5'10" and above. Like, all the shipments were either, you know, like less than 800 or a lot more than 800, and like, nothing, just around there.
35:13 Joe Weisenthal? What happened though, because I thought they were going to kill like Shein and Timu and some of these things with the de minimis stuff. Did any, what happened with those businesses?
35:21 Speaker 04 Those guys are actually do, they're doing pretty well. It turns out it wasn't just tariff arbitrage. So that's also part of the story on the air freight market that we got wrong. It's like, they're doing okay. And that one thing they've set up fulfillment centers in the US, they've set up some pretty big automated networks that are probably like 20% of the size of Amazon's network now is these fulfillment centers for Chinese econ, run by Chinese ecommerce companies. It is really a massive, kind of an underreported thing there. And they're also, they're still flying it from China. They're paying the duties. One of the most interesting facts I learned this year, actually, is that Shein does, they did 40 billion of sales, 40 billion of revenue last year, and no purchase order that was made
36:02 Speaker 04 from Shein to its factories was more than 200 items. So you're talking like tens of millions of little tiny granular purchases. And that means they never have to discount because they don't keep much stock. You know, they only have 200 of each thing. Whereas if you go to like, a lot of websites, they're like, retail stores are always running a sale because they got, they bought too much stuff and they're dumping it. So the business model actually has some attractive features for it. And I had, we had started to build that service. We were offering it for a lot of, we do still offer a similar service. We can ship from overseas and then we'll just inject it directly to the postal service or other last mile carriers. We stopped investing there because I was like, this is going to die with the end of de minimis, but probably a mistake in hindsight. We're seeing like, actually that model is still working, so.
36:47 Tracy Alloway? Actually, that reminds me, when you look back at, gosh, I can't believe it's only been like a year, basically. But when you look back at the past year and your customers, what was the biggest differentiating factor between those who handled the tariffs well and those who didn't? Was it just like size and their ability to squeeze out concessions from suppliers? Or was it, I don't know, data records and really good lawyers, I guess? What did you see that made a particular company handle this better than others?
37:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, you have to look probably within an industry because there are certain industries that just have sectoral advantages or disadvantages, like it's hard to move electronics out of China. And then some of those industries were exempted from the tariffs. Actually, you know who did the best? It was the guys who went to manage to get a meeting at the White House and shake hands and convince them, you know, like Apple don't tax, don't tariff the iPhone. But that was a very privileged small number of people that had that kind of access. But smaller, all other things being equal, I think that like more entrepreneurial companies that could just move quickly and make good decisions and just like, all right, cool. We're going to set up manufacturing in Mexico or Latin America or some of these places and actually move relatively quickly. But it's not just speed. You got to make good decisions, you know?
37:59 Speaker 04 Like people who moved to India in a hurry and then found out India got hit with a 50% tariff, like not doing that great. So maybe some of it's just luck too. I mean, it's very hard to forecast how the, how this thing would, did play out and what's going to happen next is kind of anybody's guess. So sometimes the best thing to do is nothing and just let things go stable. I met a couple of companies that said that was their plan. And I was like, that's kind of bold and I like it on some level.
38:26 Joe Weisenthal? So, okay, you're fairly optimistic that this is not going to take as long as perhaps some people think. But what is, what are companies doing right now to walk us through the actual nuts and bolts of getting the refunds and what's happening right now and how the timeline works and what they have to do to actually get them and so forth. Walk us through that.
38:44 Speaker 04 It's a bit of a technical thing, but you guys have a nerdy audience. So I think the way that it'll work, it's, there's, first of all, there's some uncertainty of how the timing is going to work. If there are refunds at all, it's still not guaranteed, although I feel pretty high certainty. The way that it's likely to work is you're going to need to pull that ACE report that was, I was talking about earlier. Pull it from customs, calculate how much you're owed. You then are going to need to file, it's unclear if you'll need to file protest. Typically, the way that it works to get a refund is you go, you file a protest. You make your case to the government that, hey, we've got this misclassified. We are protesting and you'll get a refund. That's typically how it works. And that's how we're set up to go do that is go file these protests on your behalf to go.
39:27 Speaker 04 Challenge the IEPa protest and say, hey, you never should have paid me this and I'll get a refund. So we're putting that program in place right now for companies to go just make that easy, take away the paperwork. The piece that's a little bit more sophisticated is where people are selling these things in the secondary market that I mentioned earlier. So there's at least three big banks that are out there. I don't know if they're big, but there are three groups that are out there, at least three. There's probably more that are buying these things. And like I said, the market price went to 52%. So there's a lot of negotiating right now of going, all right, what's this time value of money? What's the, what's your relative certainty of when and how this is going to play out? That's a market that I'm tracking very closely. Thus far, those guys have only transacted
40:08 Speaker 04 where companies refund is at least $10 million. One of the things I would like to be able to do is say, hey, we can pool a bunch of these guys together.
40:15 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, I was gonna ask, do any of the bank, have any of the banks come to you and said, like, rather than trying to get, gather all of these, you know, tens of thousands, however, hundreds of thousands of companies, do they just come to any of the freight brokers and say, like, assemble your crew and we like, do a batch, a batch sale?
40:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, until last Friday, we have, we've talked to all of them. Until last Friday, there was just a little too much uncertainty for us to put in the effort and like to build the thing. We built a calculator. That's why we were able to go live with the calculator, you know, the same day as the refunds went live because we'd been building that. But as far as the processing, we didn't really invest in building that capability until Friday, we kicked off those, you know, like in earnest. So that's what I'm hoping to be able to build in a hurry. I really like to be able to pool these things. And I've talked to so many companies that said, hey, if you could get me 70%, I would, 60% even, I would do it tomorrow. So that would be, I think we could, I think that we could create a lot of value there for everybody. I mean, I think, my estimate is much higher than 60%.
41:16 Speaker 04 So there's, if I value the thing differently than you are, there should be a win-win.
41:21 Tracy Alloway? This is what I was going to ask. So just to be clear, like, those claims on tariff refunds are trading at 50 or 60% at the moment, but we are expecting the full refund amount to actually come back, right? There's not, plus legal fees, I think.
41:39 Speaker 04 Well, I know my legal fees, but plus interest, you're supposed to get 6%, I think 6% is the current rate on that, 6% annualized. So yeah, now we say we are expecting, that's me and my team and some lawyers I've talked to, but the brands probably aren't expecting it that high or else they wouldn't sell it for 60% or they need the money right now.
41:56 Tracy Alloway? Why not? What would be the justification for not getting the full refund? If they're illegal, like the totality is illegal, right?
42:03 Speaker 04 Well, this, the full refund would come, but in that case, they would go to the person who bought it from you, not you. So it's just a time value of money and an uncertainty question that someone's willing to take a lower rate. But yeah, I think, personally, I think if you sell it for 60%, you're probably leaving money on the table. Just wait a year. I mean, 40% for a year is a pretty good return.
42:21 Joe Weisenthal? Should set up a little side hedge fund, a little side pocket.
42:25 Tracy Alloway? Joe, I'll sell you my tariff refund claims.
42:27 Joe Weisenthal? All right. Maybe we'll do a little, a little trade here and write about it. Ryan Peterson, thank you so much. Great to catch up with you. I'm sure there will be more opportunities in the coming months and years ahead of all this, but thanks for coming back on Odd Lots.
42:41 Speaker 04 That was great to be here, guys. Thank you.
42:43 Tracy Alloway? Thanks, Ryan.
42:56 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, we should do an episode on the, the new delivery network that's actually built, being built by the Chinese companies inside the United States. I didn't know that existed at all.
43:04 Tracy Alloway? I think that'd be fascinating.
43:05 Joe Weisenthal? And 20% is already as big as Amazon's logistical network? That's pretty wild.
43:10 Tracy Alloway? Well, this is why, you know, I was asking a few questions about like how you actually classify items and things. Whenever you see this kind of sweeping rule change, I feel like you get a very immediate reaction from the people who are paying it. And some of them get extremely creative, if not illegal, right? And it's fascinating to look at some of those solutions.
43:30 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, no, I like the, it's, I mean, it makes obvious sense. It's, oh, I sell this thing for a hundred dollars. I'm going to set up a company in the US that I sell it to for a dollar.
43:39 Tracy Alloway? Right.
43:39 Joe Weisenthal? And then that company sells it for a hundred dollars to, you know, or tries to.
43:43 Tracy Alloway? That's business.
43:44 Joe Weisenthal? It's also illegal. It's business. But the fact that you see it's like that it shows up in the data, right? That there's like all, that a foreign company can theoretically apply for the refund and et cetera, or can establish, what was the importer of?
43:57 Tracy Alloway? Record.
43:58 Joe Weisenthal? Then a foreign company can establish itself as the importer of record. And then it shows up in the data like that shows how much creativity was underway since liberation day.
44:07 Tracy Alloway? I mean, just from a broader macro perspective, and I know that wasn't the focus of this episode, but maybe we'll do one at some point. It is going to be really fascinating to see what refund recipients actually do with that money.
44:20 Joe Weisenthal? Right? Yeah.
44:20 Tracy Alloway? I feel like if you're a corporate analyst at the moment, or if you're an investor, like it's going to tell you a lot about the direction of that particular company, what they do with that money.
44:29 Joe Weisenthal? I think a big question is just going to be how many announced sales or something. Cause like, there's going to be some pressure to refund money to consumers, right? And it'll be interesting to see if any do some sort of nominal rebate of some sort. I mean, obviously they're not legally obliged to, but you know, I think a lot of people, it's going to really annoy people if, especially if there are categories where it's obvious that consumer prices went up.
44:59 Tracy Alloway? Yeah.
44:59 Joe Weisenthal? Because of the tariffs. Or if companies in some cases may have, oh, we're putting a tariff surcharge on you.
45:06 Tracy Alloway? Mm hmm.
45:06 Joe Weisenthal? Right? And they might've spelled it out on some sort of bill.
45:09 Tracy Alloway? Well, they probably did because they don't want to be seen to be raising prices.
45:12 Joe Weisenthal? So if you were the type of company that's like, look, we weren't raising, we didn't want to raise prices. We just have to, so we're telling you that part of this $50 that you paid, X amount is a tariff surcharge that we're applying. They better give you a refund, otherwise that's going to be really annoying.
45:25 Tracy Alloway? I guess we will find out.
45:27 Joe Weisenthal? That other, it's like a defective windfall for them.
45:29 Tracy Alloway? Well, you know, who handled it pretty well?
45:31 Joe Weisenthal? Go on.
45:32 Tracy Alloway? All things considered, at this moment in time, it seems like they handled it pretty well at Costco. Cause I think they didn't, they explicitly said they weren't going to pass on the tariff charges to customers. They were just going to like eat the loss, but also file suit against the Trump administration.
45:48 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
45:48 Tracy Alloway? Saying the tariffs are illegal. And so now, you know, they get the refunds. They don't have to like actually pay them back to customers, but they don't take the brand hit from not doing that because they never charged them anyway.
46:00 Joe Weisenthal? They say they never charged them, but you know, in theory, they could have held a price steady and maybe in the alternate universe, the prices would have come down, right? So.
46:10 Tracy Alloway? Sure, we'll see. At least from, I'm saying from a PR perspective, it was a good play.
46:16 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, yeah, totally.
46:17 Tracy Alloway? I'm only saying that because I'm a big fan of the giant Spanish hams that you can get at Costco.
46:22 Joe Weisenthal? Which were presumably tariffed.
46:23 Tracy Alloway? I guess, but this is the first year I ever bought a Costco ham, so I can't tell you.
46:29 Joe Weisenthal? Was it good?
46:30 Tracy Alloway? It was so good. I can't tell you what it was the year before, if it actually went up, but.
46:35 Joe Weisenthal? Can I tell you if, a little life hack for the people that are still listening to the very end of the conversation? If you ever like show up at a party and you bring a Spanish ham, people will just love you. And like, you know, they're a couple of hundred dollars or whatever, but there's a lot of food in the Spanish ham. And if you're the guy who shows up at a party with a big Spanish ham on the whole, on the spit or whatever it is, like that, you're be the life of the party. It is a very strong move. A friend of mine did that and everyone loved him.
47:03 Tracy Alloway? I think that's an excellent idea. I bought my husband one for Christmas and I will say, I think it lasted us like a good three weeks and we ate a lot of ham.
47:10 Joe Weisenthal? And you just leave it out there, right?
47:11 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, no, it's great.
47:12 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, they preserve very well.
47:14 Tracy Alloway? Some cheese and ham for dinner for like three weeks.
47:16 Joe Weisenthal? You just keep carving at it.
47:17 Tracy Alloway? It's value for money.
47:18 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, it actually is.
47:19 Tracy Alloway? All right, shall we leave it there?
47:20 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
47:21 Tracy Alloway? Okay, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
47:27 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, Ryan Peterson. He's at Types Fast. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashell Bennett at Dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these things 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
47:51 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about Spanish hams and the tariffs, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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