Major US retailers 'warn President Trump of empty shelves' if tariff policies continue _ BBC News

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00:00Lots of mentions of the word deal there, Faisal. What's your sense of whether one may be close?

00:09Hi, Jane. Yeah, we've had some significant developments really in the last hour or so

00:13that may help to explain the conciliatory tone that I picked up and communicated in that report,

00:19which is that our partners CBS News are reporting that the chief executives of Walmart and Target

00:26have privately warned President Trump of empty shelves in the coming weeks if he continues with

00:33his tariff policies. And that probably particularly concerns the prohibitive tariffs both ways on U.S.-China

00:41trade. We're hearing from the ports on the west coast of America, Los Angeles in particular, of a

00:47potential collapse in China to U.S. cargoes, down 33 percent this week, potentially 44 percent in the

00:55first week of May. This is a serious hit to the world economy and something that will be seen

01:02visibly in the U.S. on shelves if you believe the CEOs of some of America's biggest companies,

01:08or at least the reporting of what they have said privately. This is highly significant stuff.

01:12May explain, as I say, some of the reaches for deals. We think there might be a meeting between

01:18Scott Besson, who you saw in my report, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, and his Chinese counterpart.

01:22That meeting, if it happens, assumes incredible importance in bringing the world down from this

01:29trade war. We don't know if it happens. We don't know if the Chinese want to pick up the phone and

01:33attend that. We don't know what the conditions will be. But incredibly important meetings happening

01:39here at the IMF, in D.C., and not just involving the U.K.