Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-trade-war-china-eu-us-tariffs-tensions-us-election-b1374133.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Via AP news wire
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/us-trade-deficit-671-billion-august-14year-high-us-trade-deficit-trade-deficit-level-ap-b835558.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Via AP news wire
“Hopefully they will continue to live up to the terms of the agreement,” Trump said of China.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/trump-says-china-deal-intact-hours-after-aide-declares-it-n1231845
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Adela Suliman and Kristen Welker and Martha C. White and Leou Chen
President Donald Trump could reimpose tariffs on aluminum imports from Canada later this week, a move that would reignite tensions with Ottawa and likely prompt retaliation just days before his signature North American trade deal goes into effect.
The U.S. is pressing for Canada to impose quotas to slow the surge of its exports of the metal, or else it will reimpose a 10 percent tariff on aluminum from Ottawa, multiple people familiar with the issue told POLITICO.
If the Trump administration moves forward with the tariffs, it would come just as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement enters into force on July 1 — a long-awaited date for officials in all three countries after three years of tense negotiations among the countries and within the U.S. Congress.
Multiple people called the decision to push on aluminum now “bad timing,” and one said: It’s “classic Trump method of leverage,” to do it days before a big event like the USMCA’s entry into force.
“Bringing back these tariffs would be like a bad horror movie. Most of the U.S. aluminum sector opposes them, and they’ll hurt American manufacturers who use aluminum as an input,” said Neil Herrington, senior vice president for the Americas at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer acknowledged last week in a Senate Finance Committee hearing that there were recent surges in imported steel and aluminum, “substantially from Canada, some from Mexico.”
“It’s something of genuine concern to us and that we are looking at,” Lighthizer said.
Last year, the Trump administration exempted Canada and Mexico from its tariffs on imported steel, after both countries lived with the tariffs for more than a year. Trump imposed those tariffs on most countries around the world in 2018 citing national security.
But under the agreement to lift the tariffs, the U.S. said it could raise duties again after it consults with Canada and “in the event that imports of aluminum or steel products surge meaningfully beyond historic volumes of trade over a period of time.”
The U.S. trade chief said he was in talks with both countries about it, but it’s not clear if those talks have been part of formal consultations as outlined in the agreement with Canada on the issue.
Canada, for its part, can retaliate only in the affected sector — aluminum — if the tariffs are reimposed.
However, sources argued that Canada could still push to retaliate with tariffs on other sensitive U.S. goods, like agricultural products. Ottawa previously imposed retaliatory tariffs against more than $12 billion in U.S. products, the bulk of which were American farm goods, in response to the U.S. tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Those tariffs were removed when the agreement was struck in May 2019.
Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. Kirsten Hillman on Tuesday confirmed that the U.S. and Canada have been in ongoing talks about imported aluminum since last year.
“We firmly believe that the Canadian aluminum exports to the U.S. aren’t hurting the U.S. market in any way,” Hillman said during a webinar hosted by the American Council for Capital Formation. “Our discussions are ongoing.”
She added that the USMCA will be positive for the region as it pushes for more aluminum made in North America and includes tools to curb transshipments of the metal from countries outside the region.
The push to reimpose tariffs stems from two U.S. primary aluminum producers — Century Aluminum and Magnitude 7 Metals, who argue that an increase in aluminum coming from Canada has led to aluminum prices plummeting.
But the broader U.S. aluminum industry, represented by the Aluminum Association, has pushed back and urged the Trump administration to not impose tariffs or quotas.
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion on this issue, but facts are facts,” Aluminum Association President Tom Dobbins said in a statement earlier this month. “Imports of primary aluminum from Canada today are consistent with long-term trends long predating the imposition of Section 232 tariffs.”
The dispute centers over whether there has been a “meaningful surge of imports” from Canada. A report from CRU Group, an independent aluminum analysis firm, seems to bolster the Aluminum Association’s position. It found the volume of U.S. imports of unwrought aluminum from Canada are on pace to increase 14 percent this year.
However, that still would be 5 percent less than 2017 import volume, and only 2 percent above average import levels in 2015-2017, the report said.
A report from a second analytical firm, Harbor Aluminum, supports Century Aluminum and Magnitude’s side of the argument. It concludes imports surged after Trump ended the tariff on Canadian aluminum last year.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/23/trump-tariffs-canada-aluminum-336069
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Sabrina Rodriguez
The move by the US Department of Transportation was in response to China refusing to allow US passenger airlines to resume flights
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-china-flights-us-travel-chinese-airlines-airports-wuhan-a9546976.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Danielle Zoellner
The ratcheting up of tensions comes as Beijing is hounded by questions over alleged missteps in its initial response to contain the virus.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-blames-u-s-growing-coronavirus-tensions-n1214156
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Yuliya Talmazan and Eric Baculinao
Taiwanese company to build $12 billion chip production plant in Arizona
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-administration-cuts-semiconductor-shipments-huawei-china-a9517841.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Justin Vallejo
Global cooperation is essential to fight coronavirus. Yet many nation states are led by Trump-type populist leaders
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-trump-china-us-cold-war-election-economy-iraq-a9494451.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Patrick Cockburn
President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday the U.S. wouldn’t leave the joint U.S. air base with Iraq “unless they pay us back,” and he doubled down on his threat to target 52 Iranian sites.
Why it matters: Iraq’s parliament passed a resolution earlier Sunday urging the government to expel U.S. troops from the country over the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani and the leader of an Iraqi militia on its soil.
What he’s saying: “We’ve spent a lot of money in Iraq,” Trump told reporters, according to a pool report.
Go deeper:
Source: https://www.axios.com/trump-threatens-iraq-iran-sanctions-sites-06abb035-1eaf-42ec-8135-b9f82269529c.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Rebecca Falconer
The president has spent more than a year trying to negotiate the deal, and will likely present it as a signature achievement in an election year
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-china-trade-war-trump-beijing-visit-xi-jinping-dollar-yen-latest-a9265866.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Dave Maclean
US president accuses countries of ‘massive devaluation’ of currencies
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/trump-tariffs-argentina-brazil-twitter-steel-federal-reserve-a9229351.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Ben Chapman
While the United States is sanctioning countries and causing them to shift away from the dollar, Russia and China continue boosting trade and their gold reserves, says Dmitry Orlov of popular Club Orlov blog.
“The strategy for both Russia and China is to let the Americans do it all to themselves, by themselves. There won’t be anyone but themselves to blame,” Orlov told RT’s Keiser Report.
According to the Russian-American social commenter, the US is limiting people’s access to dollar transactions by introducing sanctions and threatening to cut people off from the SWIFT payment network.
They are “basically sawing off the branch they are sitting on,” Orlov said, adding that “nobody has to help them.”
Meanwhile, Russia and China aim to continue mutual trade, to trade with other countries, to form various trade consortiums based on local currencies, and to provide currency swaps backed by gold, Orlov pointed out.
“Nobody is interested in major financial destructions which will occur but they will be produced by the United States acting alone,” he predicts.
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT’s business section
Source: https://www.rt.com/business/472295-us-dollar-russia-china-gold/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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The Article Was Written/Published By: RT
US manufacturing shrinks for the first time in three years following new tariffs
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/china-us-trade-war-trump-tariffs-economy-impact-a9091221.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Ana Swanson
President Donald Trump on Friday appeared to accuse companies of falsely claiming that they’ve been hurt by his escalating trade war with China, instead saying they’re mismanaging their businesses.
“If the Fed would cut, we would have one of the biggest Stock Market increases in a long time. Badly run and weak companies are smartly blaming these small Tariffs instead of themselves for bad management…and who can really blame them for doing that? Excuses!” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday.
Trump’s comments come just days before the U.S. is set to impose new tariffs on China in two rounds, with the first due to start on Sept. 1. The 10 percent tariff on approximately $112 billion of Chinese goods would likely raise prices for consumer items like electronics and shoes.
In one example of corporate America complaining about Trump’s trade war, the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America wrote a letter to the president this week stating that the planned tariffs would drive up costs for consumers.
“Imposing tariffs in September on the majority of all footwear products from China — including nearly every type of leather shoe — will make it impossible for hardworking American individuals and families to escape the harm that comes from these tax increases,” the group wrote. “This uncertainty the China trade war has brought to our industry is stifling U.S. growth and halting capital investment in jobs, infrastructure, technologies, and more competitive pricing for our customers.”
In an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro vigorously defended his boss’s use of tariffs.
“Absent the tariffs that have been put in place on China, China would never have come to the bargaining table and advanced this far in those negotiations,” Navarro said. “President Trump is using the tariff strategy brilliantly.”
Trump defended his strategy after Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said “there’s no question” the trade war is contributing to a slowdown of the economy.
“So what does Pat Toomey want me to do? Does he want me to say let me put my hands up and let China continue to rip us off?” Trump fired back in an interview on Thursday with Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio. Trump later added that talks with China would continue.
“I think they want to make a deal,” Trump said. “I sort of think they have to make a deal.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/30/donald-trump-china-trade-war-1479012
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Evan Semones
Dan talks trade and the U.S. economy with hedge fund manager and former Trump advisor turned critic Anthony Scaramucci.
Go deeper: Scaramucci says Trump may need to be replaced for 2020
Source: https://www.axios.com/pro-rata-podcast-anthony-scaramucci-us-china-trade-war-964e1e80-a5dc-43ae-a739-7a51ccd61176.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Axios
Sen. Lindsey Graham acknowledged on Sunday that Americans would have to “accept the pain” caused by the Trump administration’s trade war with China, but argued the U.S. maintains the advantage.
Sen. Lindsey Graham acknowledged on Sunday that Americans would have to “accept the pain” caused by the Trump administration’s trade war with China, but argued the U.S. maintains the advantage.
“The Democrats for years have been claiming that China should be stood up to. Now, Trump is, and we’ve just got to accept the pain that comes with standing up to China,” the South Carolina Republican said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “How do you get China to change without creating some pain on them and us? I don’t know.”
The senator and key Trump ally suggested China will try to drag the trade war out through the 2020 elections.
“I think they’re trying to wait Trump out,” Graham said. “I think they’ve made a calculation that our elections are right around the corner. They can play this game to 2020.”
Still, Graham asserted the Trump administration has the ability to pressure China, directing his comments toward the president.
“Listen, you got more bullets than they do,” Graham explained. “They sell us a lot more stuff than we sell them … the goal is to get them to change their behavior.”
“Until they feel the pain,” he said, “they’re not going to stop.”
How much pain might his home state of South Carolina face?
“Some,” Graham acknowledged. “Consumer prices on commodities are gonna go up. We’re now that part in the trade war where you feel price increases at Wal-Mart.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/25/graham-china-trade-war-1475218
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The Article Was Written/Published By: krahman@politico.com (Kamran Rahman)
Oil, light aircraft, cars and agricultural products are among more than 5,000 products affected
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/us-china-trade-war-tariffs-trump-latest-a9076426.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Ben Chapman
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned trade war rivals, China and the US, that hiking tariffs only harms both domestic and global growth. The IMF also noted that manipulating exchange rates also doesn’t work.
“Higher bilateral tariffs are unlikely to reduce aggregate trade imbalances,” the IMF said on Wednesday.
The Washington-based organization added that imposing levies on imports from countries “deemed to have undervalued currencies,” as the recent US accusation against China, is actually futile. The IMF explained that the tariffs do not necessarily offset the same percentage of a more appreciated or overvalued exchange rate. For example, the average US tariffs on Chinese products have increased by about 10 percentage points since last year, while the yuan fell by about the same 10 percent relative to the dollar, largely as a result of these trade actions and associated uncertainties.
Also on rt.com
China vows immediate retaliation if US proceeds with new tariffs
“US importers and consumers are bearing the burden of the tariffs. The reason: the stronger US currency has had a minimal impact thus far on the dollar prices Chinese exporters receive because of dollar invoicing,” the statement added.
The IMF called on the sides to find other ways to resolve the trade frictions, like taking into account the underlying macroeconomic and structural sources of trade imbalances. It would be more effective than adopting “ineffective, or even counterproductive, measures such as tariffs” that only divert trade flows to other countries.
Also on rt.com
China prepares its ‘nuclear option’ in trade war
At the same time, the deliberate weakening of one’s own currency has only proven to be ineffective, according to the IMF. It warned that such a policy can have a negative impact on the functioning of the international monetary system.
The US was supposed to hit $300 billion of Chinese imports with new tariffs starting September 1, but the Trump administration has recently backtracked on the threat. The new levies were delayed until December 15, possibly leaving room for the two sides to hammer out a long-anticipated trade deal.
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT’s business section
Source: https://www.rt.com/business/466988-tariffs-do-not-work-imf/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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The Article Was Written/Published By: RT
As President Donald Trump escalates its trade war with China, the administration is adamant that China is bearing the brunt of the tariffs. “They’re not hurting anybody [in the United States],” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on CNN’s State of the Union this weekend. “They’re hurting China.”
Trump and his defenders quite often use this rationale for the tariffs currently imposed on nearly $250 billion of Chinese exports to the United States. The tariffs, they say, will cause economic pain to China and force the Beijing government to make concessions on things like market access and stronger protections for intellectual property. When China recently announced that its quarterly economic growth had slowed from 6.4 percent to 6.2 percent, Trump tweeted that the slowdown was a direct result of his tariffs and would compel China to make a trade deal. The administration routinely claims that it wants to make a trade deal, but Trump especially seems to delight in evidence that his policy is causing economic suffering in Beijing. As a recent analysis in Foreign Affairs put it, “it has become clear that the administration is bent on severing, not fixing, the relationship.”
This policy is predicated on the belief that China can sag and even collapse without the United States and the rest of the world feeling the pain too. That is patently absurd. To believe that economic weakness in China will not translate into economic weakness in the United States domestically is to live in a 1950s fantasy, a denial of Truman Show proportions. Trump likes to think of the China-U.S. spat as a zero sum game—when China is down, the U.S. is up; in a globalized economy, the more likely result is that we’ll both be dragged down together.
Over the past two decades, the United States and China have developed a trade relationship that exceeds $700 billion dollars. China has become the world’s second largest economy, with a GDP in the neighborhood of $15 trillion—and the world’s largest if that GDP is fully adjusted for purchasing power. China’s economy is also deeply enmeshed in the global matrix of supply chains, which includes a large proportion of the biggest American-domiciled multinational corporations, which in turn support millions of domestic American jobs.
The idea, then, that China could catch an economic cold without the rest of the world sneezing should be ridiculous. Just how connected China is to the U.S. domestic economy is already clear. American exports to China, mainly agricultural, have plummeted as Beijing retaliated against U.S. tariffs. That in turn necessitated the U.S. government to appropriate $28 billion to prop up those farmers whose export business evaporated, which is more than the Treasury has collected from the tariffs themselves (which of course are also paid by American companies). Chinese direct investment in the United States has also plummeted, from a high of more than $40 billion in 2016 to less than $10 billion this year. What’s more, Chinese purchases of U.S. real estate have contracted, and Chinese students and tourists are spending less money in the United States.
But these consequences of the trade war will be the least of our problems if China’s economy slumps. A sagging domestic economy in China will not only continue to hit U.S. exporters and those who rely on Chinese investment. It will impact the entire Asian sphere. Japan and South Korea are especially vulnerable as their economies have become dependent on selling high-end products to China. The same goes for Germany in the European Union, and a faltering Germany in turns raises the pressure on the entire European bloc. The result will likely be a global recession, which will include the United States.
Some of China’s economic weakness this year has nothing to do with the U.S. trade war. China has its own particular domestic challenges, ranging from sky-rocketing debt and overpriced real estate to the chronic inability and unwillingness of the Beijing government to reform and disassemble China’s vast and sclerotic state-owned enterprises. The regime of President Xi Jinping has taken on corruption as an impediment to more economic activity, but it has also tightened control and that has stifled innovation and entrepreneurship. And its vast investments in countries in Asia and Africa have not yielded particularly good results as yet.
But the tariffs and the increasing unwillingness of foreign companies to invest more and expand their footprint in China because of the trade war are certainly an aggravating factor. Those tariffs are the plangent policy of an America that doesn’t realize that its unipolar moment has long past. They carry a bite in China, as they are meant to, but they are also biting back.
Already, there are signs that the U.S. economic recovery is waning. It may have been heading that way regardless of what the Trump administration did, but the tariffs are not helping. Fears of a major recessions remain only that, but unease and uncertainty are chipping away at business confidence, which has been a major positive tailwind for the past three years. The White House may have convinced itself that it can do what it wants toward China with no blowback, but that is not what the latest economic numbers suggest.
There are signs that the American people understand the costs more than the White House does. A just-released poll offered some stark news for those who claim that economic confrontation with China is wildly popular. Sixty-four percent of those polled support the idea of free trade, up sharply since the beginning of Trump’s term, while only 27 percent are opposed. This may be a classic case of the wisdom of crowds: While Trump and his allies claim that China has taken advantage of the United States because of years of bad deals, many are waking to the fact that whatever its defects, the China-U.S. economic relationship has immensely benefitted both societies and that its fracturing, and the possible hit to both economies, will do considerable damage to domestic prosperity.
The lesson here is obvious: It is easy to say that the era of globalization is over, but it’s harder to end it. A system that has been woven together assiduously and expensively over 20 years is easy to burden but not so easy to tear down without causing considerable pain. The Trump administration has propagated the fiction that it can coerce China and sever that relationship with minimal cost to the United States domestically. Because the trade war is still little more than a year old, with only a few tens of billions in actual tariffs levied, that fiction has not been exposed. The story is getting harder to maintain, and the numbers harder to deny.
It is easy to stand tall and talk tough, but the more strain that places on China, the more strain it will place on the United States. The wishful thinking of the White House notwithstanding, China and the United States remain intimately enmeshed. Systemic change that disentangles the U.S. and Chinese economies may be possible, but it will take far longer and cause more pain and disruption than the White House has promised. A chance like that requires real sacrifice and clear-eyed vision. The Trump administration has said that Americans won’t be asked for the former, and it has demonstrated little of the latter. It has faced minimal blowback so far, but those days are numbered.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/21/trump-china-economy-227633
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The Article Was Written/Published By: (Zachary Karabell)
As the trade war continues to escalate, China is becoming increasingly active in Iran and is considering retaliating with what has long been described as the country’s ‘nuclear option’.Source: https://www.rt.com/business/466716-china-nuclear-option-us/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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The Article Was Written/Published By: RT
