Why is the US buying more and more medicines?

The US economy decreased 0.3% (annualized rate) in the first quarter of 2025, after 2.4% had grown in the last quarter of 2024. reason, to summarize it in a prayer, is the economic war. What causes GDP fall is not the increase in imports, but, together with the increase in inventories, companies are stopping their expansion projects due to uncertainty about what will come in a few months.

Companies and consumers have stopped acting as they would normally. To protect themselves from tariffs accumulated many more foreign products than they would usually have. Thus they avoid the highest cost they have to pay now, because the tariffs are already in force.

The fall in GDP shows unequivocally that distorting the market without understanding its operation is a serious error, and emphasizes that it is perhaps the most important concept in the study of the economy: the opportunity cost. The cost of saving a new medicine box in the winery is the people who need that medicine and could be cured if they are taken today.

Real imports increased by 11 percent in the first quarter of 2025. The only similar increases occurred during the recession by confinement and in 2008, but in those two crises the commercial volume of the US was decreasing, while the increase in imports of the first months of this year has been the expression of the fastest increase in the commercial volume of EU in fifty years. Gringos consumers have seen the price increase on the horizon and say ‘tomorrow will be more expensive, so we are going to buy today’.

There are two sectors where this increase in imports has been more pronounced: the pharmacist and the computational. Imports of pharmaceutical products increased by 60 percent and those of computers of all kinds by 50 percent in the first quarter. The question, of course, is where are these medicines and these computers?

The data of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) show us that extra medicines (and other related products) that have bought the gringas companies became part of the inventories. That is, they put them in wineries. This increase in inventory in the pharmaceutical sector is the greatest increase in the history of EU (and the current inventory is four times higher than the previous record inventory). The trend indicates that not only the accumulation in this sector will not be slowed, but that the inventories will grow more. Companies are convinced that the risk is real, even when the gringo government, so far, has excluded almost all pharmaceutical articles from the commercial warfare.

As for computers, most of the increase in imports is not due to the fact that there are now more new laptops in store wineries such as Best Buy (OA there are more people with new computers stored in their home), but to the purchase of computational material by artificial intelligence laboratories and other companies dedicated to technology. This investment is already the highest investment figure in that sector in the history of the US, and -as well as the

Trend in the pharmaceutical sector- everything indicates that investment in computational material will continue to increase.

This accumulation of foreign goods caused a record increase in the gringo commercial deficit. Trump has said again and again that EU is the victim of the rest of the world. The reason? EU buys other countries more than those countries buy from the US. Well, Trump’s policy, in the short term, has caused EU to buy other countries even more, and the tariff response of other countries to gringos attacks will make these other countries buy less to the US.

Of course, the idea of ​​the gringo government is that this is only a temporal effect. That in a few months the companies will move their production lines to the US and then the gringos will only buy gringos and the rest of the world, surpassed by the US power, it will take place, that is, it will remove the tariffs from the US so that the gringos buy the few products that continue to occur in those countries after the escape of companies that Trump achieved. A fantasy of the Lord who lives today in the White House, then.

The hidden price of this policy, as I said before, is the opportunity cost. The computational material that is reaching the US could be used to open new artificial intelligence laboratories in other parts of the world, or to expand those who are looking to expand today, instead of laboratories in the EU they have it as a reserve for when they need it. All these embodied medicines could be used to cure people in the rest of the world that need them today, instead of having them in boxes just in a few months, someone in the US asks for.

The key is that gringas companies would not have bought that extra computers or that extra medicines. They are buying more because of the fear of the increase in these products in the near future. The story, then, is that a first distortion, tariff further.

Unfortunately we have no data to quantify how many great advances in technology would have achieved humanity without tariffs, or how many people would have stopped suffering or had saved themselves whether this surplus of medicines would not have gone to gringas wineries, but the cost exists. Let’s think about a day of our life that we felt that we did a thousand things, remember the sensation; And now let’s compare it with a day of procrastination in which we did anything, all day in bed watching the roof. We will never know exactly what we would have achieved on that day if we had left the blankets, but we do know, exactly, that we would have done more.