Thursday, August 2, 2018

Full-scale bailout for industries impacted by tariffs would cost $39 billion, Chamber of Commerce sa

Spreading a bailout across all industries affected by the ongoing trade war would cost taxpayers $39 billion, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis.

The Chamber opposes the billions in tariffs that President Donald Trump has slapped on a host of goods from China as well as steel and aluminum imports.

To compensate for the economic damage, Trump recently approved $12 billion in emergency aid for farmers who produce certain goods, particularly soybeans. The package was touted as a temporary solution while negotiations continue, but the president has taken seething criticism including from his own party and some farmers themselves.

In its study of what would happen should the aid program spread, the Chamber said the effects would be substantial.

"The best way to protect American industries from the damaging consequences of a trade war is to avoid entering into a trade war in the first place," Neil Bradley, the organization's executive vice president and chief policy officer, said in a statement. "The administration's focus should be expanding free trade and removing these harmful tariffs, not allocating taxpayer's money to only marginally ease the suffering for some of the industries feeling the pain of the trade war."

The aid package, Bradley said, is "a slippery �� and costly �� slope."

The Chamber compared the total amount of the farmers' aid to the amount of exports affected by the tariffs, then applied the same ratio across other impacted industries, to come up with the bailout requirement if it was applied across the board.

Doing so produced the $39 billion total �� $12 billion to the farmers, plus another $27 billion to other industries. The impact ranged from $43 million for starch and glue producers up to $7.6 billion for auto, motorcycle and parts manufacturers.

There have been no indications from the White House that it is considering extending the aid package to other industries.

As a matter of proportion, if the administration did decide to compensate all industries and the Chamber's figures are accurate, the total would amount to about 0.2 percent of GDP and just shy of 1 percent of the fiscal 2018 budget total.

CNBC has reached out to the White House for comment.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

3 Reasons This Analyst Thinks Amazon Stock Will Hit $2,000

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is scheduled to report the results of its 2018 second quarter on Thursday, July 26, after the market close. The company has been one of the top performers in the market this year, up more than 50%, far outpacing the S&P 500, which is up just about 5% as of this writing.

Despite its meteoric rise so far this year, which has already seen the stock achieve all-time highs, at least one analyst believes Amazon still has further to climb. Investors might be justifiably skeptical of such a call. Rather than taking this at face value, let's take a look at his logic and see if his argument holds water.

$100 bill with stock market graph overlay.

Image source: Getty Images.

The call

Canaccord Genuity raised its price target on Amazon to $2,000 from its previous level of $1,800 -- the stock closed on July 19 with a share price of $1,812.97. That target, would give the company a market cap of more the $970 billion.

In a note to clients, a team led by analyst Michael Graham laid out a compelling argument for why they believe the company will continue to thrive.

E-commerce is just beginning

Worldwide e-commerce sales have been increasing at a fast clip and accounted for more than 10% of all retail in 2017. That trend is expected to continue, growing to more than 17% of all sales by 2021.�Amazon's position as the world's largest online retailer and its growing network effect should help that growth continue.

Graham said, "We think fundamentals remain as strong as ever as e-commerce business continues to grow nearly 30%, [excluding] Whole Foods." The company's product sales recently accelerated, growing 33% and 35% year over year, respectively, in the two previous quarters.�

Strong levels of investment

Amazon continues to invest a significant amount of its profits in growing the reach of its business. Graham notes that this is creating a wide moat against the competition. "Amazon's rapidly growing scale of investment is strengthening long-term competitive barriers," he said.�

As outlined by my colleague Adam Levy, Amazon continues to invest in numerous other areas including, grocery delivery, its voice-activated Alexa products, Prime video, advertising, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud computing

Speaking of AWS, Amazon pioneered the concept of renting unused space on its servers in 2006, and cloud computing has become one of the company's fastest-growing and most profitable businesses. "AWS remains the market leader, accelerating growth to almost 50% last quarter," Graham said.�

A look at Amazon's results for the first quarter confirms that view, as AWS grew 49% year over year, accounting for more than 10% of the company's revenue and nearly 73% of the company's operating profit. With that type of growth, some believe the cloud-computing operations could triple over the next five years.

FB Chart

Data by YCharts.

A parting thought

Graham went a step further, saying, "We continue to see Amazon as having the most robust and durable growth outlook in the group," referring to the vaunted FANG stocks:�Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google-parent Alphabet.�That's pretty high praise considering that the companies that make up the FANG acronym have all beaten the broader market by a wide margin this year.

Amazon also possesses a number of other advantages, including the growing adoption of its Prime membership, its fulfillment and logistics operation, and its industry-leading voice-activated speaker system, which encourages consumers to spend more on its e-commerce site.

With all of these things working in its favor, I think the analyst's price increase is justified -- and the target may actually be a little too low.