Hello Alice co-founder and president Elizabeth Gore joins Catalysts to discuss how small businesses will be impacted by President Trump's tariffs on China and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's plans for the US economy.
Be sure to check out Gore's Yahoo Finance podcast, the Big Idea, which launches Thursday, April 24 at 5 p.m. and spotlights top US business owners.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more The Big Idea here.
Talk to me about this commentary from the Treasury Secretary and more likely, more broadly, what's standing out to you about the impact to small businesses?
Yeah, howdy, thanks for having me on. I I think, um, between this speech and the one he gave on April 9th, you know, his whole objective said that the global economic policy is really going to be about incentivizing Main Street, which is what I really care about. And so I I've been thinking a lot about how would that actually work? And he also mentioned though that he wants to incentivize banks to lend locally in a stronger way. So I we're talking global, but it has to filter down to Main Street. And so actually his previous speech gave me more optimism than today.
Well, I wonder how optimistic you are about some of these headlines we got this morning as well. The Wall Street Journal reporting that some of the tariffs on China could be cut by as much as half as what was previously anticipated. Obviously, not confirmed yet. But how big of a deal could that be?
It's a huge deal. I mean, there's a US veteran owned business called Busy Baby, and they finally got their product into Target and into Walmart, US veteran owned. However, a lot of the parts for that are manufactured in China. When it went up, supposedly, 144%, it literally stopped her business. There's there's no business planning that can fix that in four weeks. And so I'm I'm very optimistic that we can pull back on some of this and also delineate between corporate impact and small business impact, because I do think there are ways to bridge what will be some tough times for those small businesses.
