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Trade and Trump — What you need to know in markets on Tuesday

The economic calendar slows some on Tuesday, with a couple mid-tier US economic data points highlighting the schedule.

At 8:30 a.m. ET we’ll get the October trade balance, with the deficit expected to widen by $42 billion, and later in the morning we’ll get the latest data on factory orders.

Markets will also continue to digest any comments from president-elect Donald Trump or other members of his economic team, as comments over the weekend from Trump suggested a potential import tax on goods sold in the US by US-based companies that move production overseas.

Amazon

After last week’s frantic economic calendar, let’s use the slightly-relaxed schedule to discuss a piece of sort-of-news that made waves on Monday: Amazon (AMZN) is set to trial a grocery store that features no check-out clerks.

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Called “Amazon Go,” the company will open a store in Seattle that sells ready-to-eat snacks and meals which customers will pay for using their Amazon app as they enter the store.

The company’s technology, Amazon outlines in a YouTube video, allows it to know what you’ve purchased as you move through the store and pick up items. When you’re done shopping, you just leave.

This all seems… good? You don’t have to wait in line to check out. You don’t have to feel the embarrassment of hitting the register with just four bags of Doritos and nothing else. And, if you’re into this story of thing, you don’t (necessarily) have to know how much you paid.

Of course, the announcement immediately had those who fear robots are taking all of our jobs and ending the modern economy as we know it concerned.

Which, on the surface, I understand. There are, as Business Insider’s Bob Bryan noted Monday, about 850,000 Americans employed as grocery store cashiers. This is not nothing. And, in theory, America’s grocery stores becoming Amazon Go-like places where the lines have been eliminated take with them these jobs.

But there are two problems with being worried about this cashier-less endgame.

For one thing, change happens slowly. One day you’re waiting in line at the grocery store dreaming of the day there are no lines. The next day you’re reading a news story about a radical new grocery stores with no lines. And ten years later you’re still waiting in line at the grocery store. Also, “robots” or “automation” — whatever word you want to use — have been taking away human jobs for centuries.

The second problem is that if you want to worry about Amazon killing incumbent industries and taking jobs with it, well, that ship has sailed a number of times already.

Amazon has killed big bookstores. It has killed electronics retailers. Amazon is, apparently, killing clothing retailers. And maybe it will kill grocery stores. But no single innovation from Amazon, or any other company, is going to change the trajectory of our economy beyond what certain shifts — towards a younger, more educated, more diverse workforce; towards a more services-focused economy and away from manufacturing — are already set to do in time.

Further Reading

Why Donald Trump is going to be great for Warren Buffett (Yahoo Finance)

Wall Street research is trying to get funny (Bloomberg)

Is it time for Disney to spin off ESPN? (Barron’s)

BuzzFeed’s former CMO is now BlackRock’s CMO (WSJ)

Myles Udland is a writer at Yahoo Finance.

Read more from Myles here; follow him on Twitter @MylesUdland