What would a deal even look like?/Bunch of earnings calls

With Treasury Secretary Bessent saying yesterday on Fox News that the trade/tariff talks with China are "a bit stalled," it again begs the question of what a deal would even look like. Will it be similar to the 2018-2019 deal with China buying more soybeans and other stuff? Will it be more substantive with China lowering barriers to doing business there and some firm legal assurances on IP protection (which was attempted before), among other things? Would love to be a fly on that negotiating wall.

With so many earnings calls to go through, I'll just get right to it.

From Costco:

They talked about "delivering some strong financial results while also maintaining our competitive price position despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop."

"Our buyers continued to do an excellent job finding new and exciting items at great values, which are resonating well with our members, even as they remain very choiceful in their spending on discretionary items."

On how they are dealing with tariffs. "we rerouted many goods sourced from countries with large tariff exposure to our non-US markets. In the US, we pulled forward some items that we had planned for the summer and sourced additional locally produced goods to reduce tariff impacts and ensure that we were in stock."

"In the quarter, gold and jewelry, toys, housewares, and home furnishings were up double digits. While we continue to grow share in most non-food departments, we are seeing some deceleration in y/o/y growth as we start to lap tougher compares in bullion and gift card sales from a year ago. Food and sundries had mid to high single digit comps, with cola and frozen food showing the strongest results."

On pricing/inflation, "Fresh food and sundries inflation remained relatively similar to last quarter. In non-foods, we saw low single digit inflation return for the first time in a number of quarters. This was driven primarily by imported items. As a reminder, about a third of our sales in the US are imported and about two-thirds of those ales are in non-foods. Items imported from China represent about 8% of total US sales."

To a question on whether Costco saw consumers pull forward spending ahead of expected tariff induced price increases, "we saw a slight impact on it. To quantify it, it was very tough to do. It was very tough to quantify that we saw any certain percent of pull forward over the fear of tariffs."

From Best Buy: