The Era of Thrash
The American economy has been in chaos longer than you think.
“It almost feels like we’re trying to rebuild everything from scratch,” Michael Wieder told me.
The company he co-founded, Lalo, sells sleekly designed baby gear, much of it made in China. In his first weeks in office, Donald Trump increased the tariff rate on most of the company’s imported goods by 20 percentage points. In April, he jacked the rate up to 145 percent. Lalo had to stop bringing in products from overseas: Paying the tariff could have bankrupted the company. Trump dropped the rate down to 30 percent this month, but Wieder anticipates falling sales and a year of disruption.
