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Chinese factories halt, restart work to mitigate U.S. tariff disruption

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YIWU, CHINA – NOVEMBER 26: Foreign clients select festive goods at China Yiwu International Trade City on November 26, 2024 in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province of China.

Hu Xiao/VCG via Getty Images

For years, Christmas merchandise has been hitting the U.S. shelves earlier, as retailers try to capitalize on the lucrative holiday season — a retail phenomenon known as “Christmas creep.”

However, tariffs could be the Grinch that disrupts year-end festivities, as Chinese factories and their U.S. buyers navigate tariff uncertainties to ensure that shelves stateside will be well-stocked in time for Christmas.

Shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs on April 2 — including a 34% tariff on imports from China that were later ramped up to 145% — many U.S. retailers’ reaction was to halt their orders from Chinese suppliers, forcing factories to pause production, according to CNBC interviews.

However, industry representatives say that some production has restarted in the last few days, as concerns about business disruptions and missed opportunities outweigh the tariff uncertainties.

“If you don’t start producing in the next couple of weeks, you’re going to start missing Black Friday and Christmas,” Cameron Johnson, Shanghai-based senior partner at consulting firm Tidalwave Solutions, said in a phone interview Tuesday.

“Both sides are trying to be flexible to some degree,” he said. “Retailers are starting to realize if these supply chains stop, it will be much more difficult to get them up and running [again].”

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Johnson described how, for example, a pause in orders for a factory making spoons would impact the company that rolls the steel, as well as the iron ore smelter. “These supply chains themselves, the upstream, are also starting to close down. If they close down, even if we have some kind of a deal, it will take time for things to [restart].”

Despite some rerouting of China-made goods through other countries, replacing existing supply chains and shipping schedules will be difficult to achieve overnight. For 36% of U.S. imports from China, more than 70% can only be sourced from mainland suppliers, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis earlier in April.

For example, electronic products need to be shipped out of China by early September to hit U.S. shelves right after the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of November, taking into account customs clearance and the distribution chain, said Renaud Anjoran, CEO of Agilian Technology, an electronics manufacturer in China. The Guangdong-based company delivers half of its products to the U.S. market.

It takes around six months to manufacture, test, assemble, and package, meaning suppliers ideally should have started preparing for these orders in March, said Anjoran.

Shrinking shipments

Many U.S. buyers had started stockpiling inventories since late last year, anticipating higher tariffs after Trump returned to office. As frontloading continued, China’s exports to the U.S. rose by 9.1% in March from a year ago, according to CNBC’s calculation of official customs data, while imports from fell 9.5% on year. April trade figures are expected to be released on May 9.

But those frontloading efforts have started to dwindle. The number of cargo-carrying container ships departing from China to the U.S. has fallen sharply in recent weeks, according to Morgan Stanley’s tracking of high-frequency shipping indicators. Cancelled shipments have also skyrocketed by 14 times in the four weeks from April 14 to May 5, compared to the period from March 10 to April 7, the investment bank said.

In April, a gauge of new export orders from Chinese factories fell to the lowest level since late 2022, according to the national statistics bureau.

“Currently, we do not have a lot of purchase orders for the next few months from American customers,” Anjoran said. Most of his clients have stockpiled inventory that was shipped to the U.S. before Chinese New Year at the end of January, with some orders trickling in March and April.

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Some U.S. buyers are waiting to see whether tariffs will be reduced to a more acceptable level in May before resuming shipments, Ryan Zhao, a director at Jiangsu Green Willow Textile, told CNBC. For now, the company has production on hold for orders from its U.S. clients.

Recent reports pointed to some tariff reliefs on the ground as both governments sought to blunt the economic impacts of punitive tariffs. China reportedly granted tariff exemptions to certain U.S. goods, including pharmaceuticals, aerospace equipment, semiconductors, and ethane imports.

In the latest relief, Trump signed an executive order exempting foreign car and parts imports from additional levies, following an earlier rollback of tariffs on a range of electronic products, including smartphones, computers and chips.

Trying to time it right

Despite concerns about profit margins, some businesses are hedging their bets by partially refilling orders from China rather than enduring the sight of empty store shelves, said Tidalwave Solutions’ Johnson.

“A few factories told me some U.S. importers have instructed them to resume production in an attempt to ‘time’ anticipated tariff relief,” Martin Crowley, vice president of product development at Seattle-based wholesale toy seller Toysmith, said in an email Tuesday. The company’s website urges customers to place orders by May 16, for shipping by July 31, “to lock in current, non-tariffed pricing.”

In the last few days, many factories in the manufacturing centers of Yiwu, Shantou, and Dongguan have received clearance from Walmart and Target to resume production, Crowley added. Walmart and Target did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Some Agilian customers are also placing relatively smaller orders, betting that tariff rates will decrease by the time their products arrive at U.S. ports.

However, in the event of a breakthrough in U.S.-China trade negotiations — and a rush to backfill orders ensues — that could drive up factories’ production costs and shipping prices.

“It is possible to rush, arrange production faster if quantities are not large … but if all American customers rush at the same time, the factories are going to be overwhelmed and air shipments will be quite expensive,” said Anjoran.

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Personal finance app Monarch raises $75 million

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Monarch co-founders (left to right) Ozzie Osman, Jon Sutherland, Val Agostino.

Courtesy: Monarch

The personal finance startup Monarch has raised $75 million to accelerate subscriber growth that took off last year when budgeting tool Mint was shut down, CNBC has learned.

The fundraising is among the largest for an American consumer fintech startup this year and values the San Francisco-based company at $850 million, according to co-founder Val Agostino. The Series B round was led by Forerunner Ventures and FPV Ventures.

Monarch aims to provide an all-in-one mobile app for tracking spending, investments and money goals. The field was once dominated by Mint, a pioneer in online personal finance that Intuit acquired in 2009. After the service languished for years, Intuit closed it in early 2024.

“Managing your money is one of the big unsolved problems in consumer technology,” Agostino said in a recent Zoom interview. “How American families manage their money is still basically the same as it was in the late 90s, except today we do it on our phones instead of walking into a bank.”

Monarch, founded in 2018, saw its subscriber base surge by 20 times in the year after Intuit announced it was closing Mint as users sought alternatives, according to Agostino.

Unlike Mint, which was free, Monarch relies on paying subscribers so that the company doesn’t need to focus on advertising from credit-card issuers or sell users’ data, said Agostino, who was an early product manager at Mint.

Personal finance app Monarch, which has raised a $75 million series B investment.

Courtesy: Monarch

The startup aimed to make onboarding accounts and expense tracking easier than rival tools, some of which are free or embedded within banking apps, according to FPV co-founder Wesley Chan.

Chan said that Monarch reminds him of previous bets that he has made, including his stake in graphic design platform Canva, in that Agostino is tackling a difficult market with a fresh approach.

“What Val is doing, it’s the successor to anything that’s been done in financial planning,” Chan said. “It’s frictionless, it’s easy to use and it’s easy to share, which is something that never existed before. That’s why he’s growing so quickly, and why the engagement numbers are so high.”

The company’s round comes amid a period of muted interest for most U.S. fintechs that cater directly to consumers. Monarch is one of the few firms to raise a sizeable Series B; other recent examples include Felix, a money remittance service for Latino immigrants.

Fintech firms raised $1.9 billion in venture funding in the first quarter, a 38% decline from the fourth quarter that “signals deepening investor caution toward B2C models,” according to a recent PitchBook report. Roughly three-quarters of all the venture capital raised in the quarter went to companies in the enterprise fintech space, PitchBook said.

“The sector is still in nuclear winter” as it faces a hangover from 2021-era startups that “raised way too much money and had zero progress and wrecked it for everybody else,” Chan said. “That’s fine with me, I love nuclear-winter sectors.”

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House Republican ‘big beautiful’ tax bill favors the rich

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House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to the media after the House narrowly passed a budget bill forwarding President Donald Trump’s agenda at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, May 22, 2025.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

There’s a stark contrast between high-earners and low-income households in a sprawling legislative package House Republicans passed on Thursday.

The bulk of the financial benefits in the legislation — called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — would flow to the wealthiest Americans, courtesy of tax-cutting measures like those for business owners, investors and homeowners in high-tax areas, experts said.

However, low earners would be worse off, they said. That’s largely because Republicans partially offset those tax cuts — estimated to cost about $4 trillion or more — with reductions to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The tax and spending package now heads to the Senate, where it may face further changes.

‘It skews pretty heavily toward the wealthy’

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal scorekeeper, estimates income for the bottom tenth of households would fall by 2% in 2027 and by 4% in 2033 as a result of the bill’s changes.

By contrast, those in the top 10% would get an income boost from the legislation: 4% in 2027 and 2% in 2033, CBO found.

House advances President Trump's tax & spending bill

A Yale Budget Lab analysis found a similar dynamic.

The bottom fifth of households — who make less than $14,000 a year — would see their annual incomes fall about $800 in 2027, on average, Yale estimates.

The top 20% — who earn over $128,000 a year — would see theirs grow by $9,700, on average. The top 1% would gain $63,000.

The Yale and CBO analyses don’t account for last-minute changes to the House legislation, including stricter work requirements for Medicaid.

“It skews pretty heavily toward the wealthy,” said Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab and former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Biden administration.

The legislation compounds the regressive nature of the Trump administration’s recent tariff policies, economists said.

“If you incorporated the [Trump administration’s] hike in tariffs, this would be even more skewed against lower- and working-class families,” Tedeschi said.

Most bill tax cuts go to top-earning households

There are several reasons the House bill skews toward the wealthiest Americans, experts said.

Among them are more valuable tax breaks tied to business income, state and local taxes and the estate tax, experts said.

These tax breaks disproportionately flow to high earners, experts said. For example, the bottom 80% of earners would see no benefit from the House proposal to raise the SALT cap to $40,000 from the current $10,000, according to the Tax Foundation.

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The bill also preserves a lower top tax rate, at 37%, set by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which would have expired at the end of the year.

It kept a tax break intact that allows investors to shield their capital gains from tax by funneling money into “opportunity zones.”

Trump’s 2017 tax law created that tax break, aiming to incentivize investment in lower-income areas designated by state governors. Taxpayers with capital gains are “highly concentrated” among the wealthy, according to the Tax Policy Center.

All told, 60% of the bill’s tax cuts would go to the top 20% of households and more than a third would go to those making $460,000 or more, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“The variation among income groups is striking,” the analysis said.

Why many low earners are worse off

That said, more than eight in 10 households overall would get a tax cut in 2026 if the bill is enacted, the Tax Policy Center found.

Lower earners get various tax benefits from a higher standard deduction and temporarily enhanced child tax credit, and tax breaks tied to tip income and car loan interest, for example, experts said.

However, some of those benefits may not be as valuable as at first glance, experts said. For example, roughly one-third of tipped workers don’t pay federal income tax, Tedeschi said. They wouldn’t benefit from the proposed tax break on tips — it’s structured as a tax deduction, which doesn’t benefit households without tax liability, he said.

Rep. Chip Roy on House tax bill: Hope the Senate addresses issues around deficit and Medicaid

Meanwhile, lower-income households, which rely more on federal safety net programs, would see cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), and benefits linked to student loans and Affordable Care Act premiums, said Kent Smetters, an economist and faculty director at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

The House bill would, for example, impose work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP beneficiaries. Total federal spending on those programs would fall by about $700 billion and $267 billion, respectively, through 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office analysis.

That said, “if you are low income and don’t get SNAP, Medicaid or ACA premium support, you will be slightly better off,” Smetters said.

Some high earners would pay more in tax

A subset of high earners — 17% of the top 1% of households, who earn at least $1.1 million a year — would actually pay more in tax, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“In part this is due to limits on the ability of some pass-through businesses to fully deduct their state and local taxes and a limit on all deductions for top-bracket households,” wrote Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

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