Barry Ritholtz, Columnist

Don't Blame Amazon for the Retail Apocalypse

The company, which Trump likes to zing on Twitter, is just responding to market forces.

April 9, 2018 at 4:52 PM UTC

Barry Ritholtz is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

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Photographer: David Ryder/Getty Images

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The U.S. president has repeatedly attacked one of the most successful American companies ever, Amazon.com Inc. Several times he has taken to Twitter to excoriate the giant online retailer, whose chief Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, a newspaper that has published a steady stream of articles that have proven embarrassing to Donald Trump and his administration.

I will leave aside whether Trump is engaging in a personal vendetta driven by jealously or bad news coverage or taxes or concern for the Post Office or whether his behavior is worthy of comparison to Mussolini. All of you have opinions on those subjects, which I am unlikely to sway no matter how many words I expend today.