The price of limiting trade with China

Marketplace

American Public Media

Business, News

4.6 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

China's exports to the U.S. are down a third year over year. That’s a significant drop, reflective of President Trump’s punishing tariff agenda. Although China’s overall export growth has slowed, it still rose 4.5% in August — thanks, in part, to strategic redirection to new markets. In this episode, what the U.S. stands to lose by cutting off China as a trade partner. Plus: Luxury brands remain mostly insulated from economic uncertainty and fintech firm Robinhood prepares to join the S&P 500.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Choose your own adventure on the program today.
0:04.0	Economic data and America's place in the economic world or a trip to a country club and some chocolate.
0:12.1	From American public media.
0:14.5	This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Monday. Today, this one is the 8th of September. Good as always to have you along, everybody.
0:33.7	We're going to get a bunch of economic data this week, about which more in just a minute or two.
0:39.1	But we are going to start globally. America's place in it, economically speaking, and our
0:44.0	reference point is Chinese exports. Beijing released monthly trade data today. Insert here,
0:50.4	my obligatory warning about the reliability of specific Chinese data points, but context
0:55.9	is what we're after. China's exports were up about four and a half percent in August, but,
1:02.4	and this is the context part, shipments to the United States are down fully a third since this time
1:09.0	last year. The why of this is not in question, as we all know,
1:12.3	President Trump's tariffs. But China also reports shipments to other countries have been picking up.
1:18.7	So, Marketplace's Justin Ho spent his day looking at how China is using this moment to strengthen
1:23.9	its economic relationships with other countries and what that is going to mean for us.
1:29.7	China is basically taking a shotgun approach to where it's exporting right now. It's sending more
1:34.2	goods to sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Vietnam, even Europe. I mean, one of the big issues facing
1:39.9	China right now is that it has loads of manufacturing capacity and that needs to go somewhere.
1:44.7	That's Leah Fahey, China economist at Capital Economics. She says that shotgun approach applies to
1:49.9	what China's exporting to, everything from toys and textiles to semiconductors, solar panels, and
1:56.1	EVs. It's in China's best interest to have manufacturers and consumers across the world
2:00.7	reliant on both its finished products, but also its intermediary products to go into
2:05.5	their final goods.
	...

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