A chief investment officer told Business Insider there’s one thing about tariffs she’s watching really closely because of its potential impact on consumers: the closure of the so-called de minimis loophole.
The de minimis exemption, which allowed packages worth under $800 to enter the country duty-free and without undergoing the formal customs process, ended in August.
This closure could have major impacts for US consumers, Sinead Colton Grant, chief investment officer at BNY Wealth, told Business Insider in an interview.
“The thing that we are watching really closely … is the elimination of the $800 exemption for imports because that hits a lot of consumers more directly,” Colton Grant said.
“That could and in many cases will lead to a consumer actually seeing exactly what the tariffs will do,” she added.
When you go into a store, there’s a single headline price, and you’re not aware of what’s driving it, she explained. Whereas with online shopping, you’ll notice when the de minimis exemption is not there, Colton Grant said.
This could have a “broader ripple effect,” she said, especially on smaller businesses that are less likely to have operations in the US.
When President Donald Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” levies at the beginning of April, much of the focus was on larger-scale imports and exports, rather than consumer spending.
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However, the Trump administration issued an executive order to close the de minimis loophole in July.
For BNY Wealth, the inflationary impact of tariffs in the US was only expected to be a “one-off,” and then prices would return to an equilibrium-like level, Colton Grant said.
“Our view, even when everything was unveiled on April 2nd, was that this is a negotiating stand,” she said, adding that many of the tariffs are now much lower than when they were first announced. “We were saying that from the start of the year.”
Consumer spending was up 0.6% in August after rising 0.5% in July and previously 0.4% in June, according to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.
