The News
The roughly eight million sellers on Etsy’s platform could be hampered by the Trump administration’s shifting trade policy plans, making them “collateral damage if we’re not careful” the e-commerce company’s CEO Josh Silverman said Thursday.
Silverman said the administration’s trade policies are focused on large companies, and could hurt small businesses.
“If we’re prepared to make exemptions for Apple, shouldn’t we be prepared to look after a single mother working from her home, making something and selling it to someone else?” Silverman said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington.
Even though there are corporations that abuse the duty-free de minimis exemption rule, which President Donald Trump earlier this month tried to curb with a new executive order, there’s room for “common-sense reform” of that policy, said Silverman.
He said he “had a constructive meeting” on Thursday with the National Economic Council regarding the exemption, among other issues.
Silverman’s ideal situation is “to maintain the de minimis exemptions for the honest small sellers working with trusted trading partners like Europe, like Canada, to make sure that … we can still allow people to start a business without causing too much friction,” he said.
Silverman’s comments echo the concerns raised earlier Thursday by PayPal CEO Alex Chriss at the summit, who said he’s worried about the impact of tariffs on the “incredibly thin” margins of small businesses.
“Disruption… and uncertainty can really put a strain on the small business economy, and that is something we have got to watch,” Chriss said.
In this article:
Know More
One key issue that Etsy’s millions of sellers want to see action on is caregiving support at the state and federal levels for single-member businesses. Most of the company’s sellers are women — one in four have a child at home — and say the biggest constraint on their success is time.
“We need it to be affordable and we need it to be more accessible, meaning more trained caregiving specialists,” Silverman said. He noted there’s bipartisan interest in Congress and that it’s “just a matter of finding the right vehicle to get it through.” One way to do so could be including it in the budget reconciliation package, he said, where “there might be an opportunity.”
The Semafor View
CEOS need to be fluent in emerging technologies, but artificial intelligence will become as ubiquitous as did mobile and digital. But as AI becomes embedded in organizations, CEOs will need a more nimble approach to project management.