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U.S. imports surged in March, breaking records and setting the stage for a drop-off in the coming months.
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Businesses likely stockpiled goods while they could still be purchased without paying President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs that took effect in April.
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The uptick in imports will likely drag on GDP, possibly sending the widely watched measure of economic growth into negative territory for the first quarter.
The U.S. imported more from abroad than ever before in March, as businesses and individuals snapped up products from overseas ahead of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The U.S. imported $342.7 billion worth of goods in March, an increase of 5% from February and a record high, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. The trade deficit, the difference between imports and exports, also jumped to a fresh record of $162 billion.
Future import data will likely reflect the impact of President Donald Trump’s massive “Liberation Day” tariffs against U.S. trading partners, which were announced on April 2. That announcement included a 10% import tax on almost all products from abroad and a 145% tariff against most Chinese products. That round of tariffs was announced on April 2 and later modified, with some of the increases being delayed by 90 days.
“The March trade data is backward-looking and will not have included the impact of ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs and subsequent tariff tweaks,” Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a commentary. “The much higher effective tariff rates in April onwards will likely act as a deterrent to imports, meaning imports are headed toward a cliff.”
The surge in imports in March will be a drag on the economy, at least on paper. Imports are tallied as a subtraction from gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the nation’s entire economic output. An estimate of the GDP in the first quarter is due Wednesday, and the uptick in imports could drag down the highly anticipated figure.
Several forecasters downwardly revised their estimates for first-quarter GDP growth Tuesday, including Oxford Economics, which said one of the worst quarters in history was in the cards.
The Federal Reserve Bank’s GDP Now tool, which tracks GDP along with economic data as it comes in, had the GDP falling at a 2.7% seasonally adjusted annual rate on Tuesday. If the economy shrinks in Wednesday’s data release, it would be the first time that’s happened since early 2022.
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