The former CEO of Sears Canada, Mark Cohen, says corporate America is “terrified” of President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war, but CEOs of big-box retailers are too afraid to speak out against it.
“Few in industry are speaking out loud about [this], for fear of retaliation, which is a form of cowardice,” Cohen, who directs the retail studies program at Columbia Business School, told Fortune. “They are frantically trying to figure this out,” he said, describing retailers and manufacturers calling him panicking under the pressure to rewrite forecasts, protect margins, and renegotiate with suppliers.
“I don’t want to sound alarmist here,” Cohen said, “but the sum total of what Trump is up to is catastrophe personified.”
“Almost everything we consume … is being burdened with these taxes, with these tariffs that he’s created,” he said. “What Trump has done is created a burden on every element in the supply chain.”
Companies also must now front tariff payments before goods clear customs; a shift, he said, that has already triggered a liquidity crisis across “tens of thousands” of smaller importers.
“It’s not been part of their financing structure to be able to support this incremental, sudden, inflated cost of doing business,” Cohen said.
Cohen thinks CEOs of these large retailers should be stepping in to defend the broader retail industry from the tariffs, and go to the White House to lobby against them. If he were still the CEO of Sears Canada, he said, he wouldn’t be a “coward,” and would be attaching incremental price increases to his price tags so that consumers could see the rising costs were coming from tariffs.
“I would be very actively engaged in efforts to stop this train, because the notion of this going on for the next three and a half years brokers the possibility of a deep recession here,” Cohen said. “Especially since the world is eminently ready to retaliate.”
Cohen argued the U.S. is now locked in a retaliatory spiral. He pointed to China restricting rare-earth minerals, Canada responding to timber and auto tariffs, and European partners now preparing countermeasures that will likely increase costs for U.S. manufacturers. Trump wakes up everyday with a “new fight on his hands,” driving the industry “nuts” since they can’t plan inventory or pricing.
With rising prices suppressing demand, Cohen said many businesses will choose to slash orders in the upcoming holiday season, triggering layoffs and accelerating economic slowdown.
But what alarms him most is the silence from the business community. He thinks maybe chief executives are “privately” lobbying Trump, but sees that strategy as a dead end.
“Ikea may very well be the canary in the coal mine.”
