Is Amazon, on net, bad for America?Now Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin didn’t go quite that far on CNBC yesterday, but he may have landed in the same zip code. In a Squawk Box interview, Mnuchin said he was all for the Justice Department including the mega-retailer in its antitrust review of Big Tech. Here’s why: “I think if you look at Amazon, although there are certain benefits to it, they’ve destroyed the retail industry across the United States so there’s no question they’ve limited competition.” Not exactly a “two cheers for Amazon.”Now retail is a pretty important part of the American economy. It would certainly be big news — and certainly bad for America — if it had been somehow destroyed. When bad things do happen to retail, such as during a recession, you certainly hear about it. But American retail is alive and kicking. According to the National Retail Federation, US retail sales this year are expected to rise between 3.8% and 4.4% to more than $3.8 trillion. And while Mnuchin may have spotted some shuttered malls in his travels, that seems to be mostly a problem of years of overbuilding, resulting in America having “far more indoor shopping space than anyone else on the planet,” as Axios recently noted.
