Bloomberg Walmart Inc. has asked its cosmetics suppliers to consider sourcing their goods in countries outside of China, one of the first signs that the world’s largest retailer hopes to dilute the impact of the Trump administration’s looming tariffs. A “large amount” of items in the cosmetics category fall under the most-recent proposed levies on Chinese goods, according to an ...

Inflation is back. What do we do about it? For starters: Don’t ignore it. The latest consumer price index (CPI) — the government’s best-known inflation indicator — reported a 2.9 percent increase from July 2017. The last time the year-over-year gain was higher was in December 2011. Though hardly a cause for panic, it suggests intensifying price and wage pressures ...

Analysts are trying urgently to evaluate the potential impact of a full-fledged trade war on the Chinese economy. This typically involves estimating how much various tariff scenarios will reduce China’s GDP growth, with current estimates ranging from the minimal, 0.1 or 0.2 percentage points, to the substantial — 2 percentage points. This is probably the right way to evaluate the ...