Donald Trump Tariff Effect: Prices of China-made items sold in US outpaced core inflation since May, says report

Mint

11 hours ago

A recent analysis conducted by 1,400 products has shown that China-made goods that are sold in the United States are seeing a hike that's faster than the overall inflation in the country.
According to a report by Reuters, citing an exclusive analysis by DataWeave, the rise in the prices of the Chinese products show a sign that tariffs are starting to hit American consumers.
As per the analysis, the prices of China-made products in the US on Amazon.com started to rise in May, a month after Donald Trump announced his sweeping tariffs, indicating that they have begun trickling down to the consumer.
The median price of a basket of more than 1,400 items made in China and sold on Amazon.com to US buyers has gone up by 2.6 per cent between January and mid-June, outpacing the latest US inflation rate for core goods, which runs only through May.
The price increases vary from item to item, and in some cases they have also declined, the report noted.
For the six months through May, core goods CPI - which excludes services - rose by 1 per cent, implying a 2 per cent annualised rate. Both the federal data and DataWeave's study show that goods costs have trended upward in the last couple of months as tariffs begin to exert pressure on prices.
The analysis was done on 25,000 items, focusing on 1,407 products sold on Amazon whose country of origin was China, and took into account the median prices of these items.
As per the Reuters report, goods that saw the sharpest price hikes include — school and office supplies, electronic items such as printers and shredders, blank media items like CDs and DVDs, and home goods such as furnishings and cookware.
China is a big global supplier of all these items.
Of the 1,407 items tracked in the DataWeave study between January and June 17, 475 showed price increases, 633 remained unchanged, and 299 saw price declines. For example, a Hamilton Beach electric kettle climbed to a median $73.21 from $49.99, while the price of a GreenPan frying pan more than doubled to $31.99.
Through April, inflation across that product group remained modest. Prices increased more sharply in May and accelerated into June, particularly in the Home & Furniture and Electronics categories, which showed a median increase of 3.5 per cent and 3.1 per cent, respectively, over the time frame of the study.