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Trump Announces ‘Great Deal’ on Trade With Indonesia

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President Trump said the agreement would partly walk back some of the steep tariffs he threatened on the country last week. Indonesia’s president called Mr. Trump a “tough negotiator.”Indonesia’s president, Prabowo Subianto, confirmed on Wednesday the broad outlines of a trade agreement with the United States that was reached after what he called “tough negotiations” with Washington.Under the terms, which President Trump on Tuesday called a “great deal for everybody,” U.S. exports to Indonesia would face no tariffs, while Indonesian goods would be charged a tariff of 19 percent in the United States.Mr. Prabowo confirmed in brief remarks in Jakarta that the two nations had “finally” reached an agreement. “We understand their interests, and they understand ours,” he added.The announcement comes as the Trump administration is trying to close trade deals with numerous countries, and threatening to impose double-digit tariffs on the exports of two dozen nations as of Aug. 1 if agreements aren’t reached.U.S. and Indonesian officials have been engaged in trade talks for several months. Last week, Mr. Trump threatened Indonesia with a 32 percent tariff on its exports in a letter posted to his social media account, as he sent similar form letters to dozens of countries. Indonesian officials said they were surprised to receive the letter, given that talks had been going well.“I think it’s a good deal for both parties,” Mr. Trump said, while saying that a forthcoming deal with India would also follow similar lines. He added that Indonesia also had minerals and “very high-quality copper, which we’ll be using.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What Is a Trade Deal? Trump Takes an Expansive View.

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    The president is deploying the word “deal” liberally, using the term to describe all kinds of trade arrangements, some very limited or one-sided.The Trump administration is seeking “deals” with countries around the globe, telling major trading partners that it is open for negotiations before higher tariffs kick in on Aug. 1.But what constitutes a trade deal these days has become a tricky question. For the president, a trade deal seems to be pretty much anything he wants it to be.While traditional trade deals run into the hundreds of pages and take years to negotiate, Mr. Trump and his advisers have been using the term to refer to much more limited arrangements. That includes the framework deal announced with Britain in May, which was only a few pages long and included many promises that still need to be negotiated.The president also used the “trade deal” term for the handshake agreement announced with Vietnam last week. In a post on Truth Social, he said it would be “a Great Deal of Cooperation between our two Countries” and bring some tariffs on Vietnamese products down to 20 percent. But since then, neither country has yet publicly released any text or fact sheets describing what has actually been agreed upon.The president has also recently taken to referring to the trade truce his officials made with China in June as a “trade deal,” even though the agreement constituted only an agreement by the two governments to roll back the tariffs and other retaliatory measures they had taken against each other in recent months. A trade deal typically makes changes to the rules of trade — but this truce just returned the relationship to the status quo.In a cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump also used the term “deal” to refer to one-sided arrangements that other countries had not consented to at all: the letters that he has been sending via his social media account informing governments of new tariff rates on their exports.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Keeps Foreign Countries on Edge as Tariff Deadline Nears

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    The president is again threatening higher tariff rates on a dozen foreign nations, as a deadline elapses this week for making trade deals.President Trump is set to rekindle economic pressure on America’s trading partners this week, as a deadline for making trade deals elapses and the administration begins notifying countries of the tariffs they’ll face on exports to the United States.For 90 days, the administration has been trying to reach trade pacts with dozens of countries in an attempt to lower economic barriers to U.S. exports. In April, the president imposed stiff global tariffs on nearly every trading partner but paused most of those levies until July 9 to try and win concessions.So far, the United States has reached only two preliminary trade deals, with Britain and with Vietnam, which are scant on details and leave much to be worked out.More such limited trade deals could be announced in the coming days, including an initial trade framework with India. Countries that have so far agreed to trade deals, even preliminary handshake agreements, have qualified for lower tariff rates than what Mr. Trump threatened in April.Other countries that have not reached agreements are expected to face sharply higher tariffs, although the president and his advisers have recently implied that the tariffs may not go into effect until Aug. 1, rather than on July 9.Still, with tariffs threatening to strain diplomatic relations and bring some global commerce to a halt, a delay of a few weeks may not to do much to soothe many foreign governments. It could also further unsettle financial markets, which revolted when Mr. Trump initially announced his global tariffs, a meltdown that prompted Mr. Trump to institute the 90-day delay.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump’s Threat of More Tariffs Slows Trade Deals

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    As America’s largest trading partners race toward deals, they are increasingly worried about being hit with future tariffs on their critical industries.Governments around the globe are racing to negotiate trade deals with the United States in order to forestall President Trump’s punishing tariffs, which could kick in on July 9. But the discussions have been slowed because Mr. Trump has threatened to impose more tariffs even if those deals are in place.Mr. Trump announced what he refers to as “reciprocal tariffs” on April 8, saying they were in response to other countries’ unfair trading practices. But he agreed to pause those levies for 90 days to give countries time to reach trade deals with the United States. Some administration officials recently suggested that the deadline could be extended, but Mr. Trump has signaled that he is ready to slap tariffs on countries he views as uncooperative. “We have countries that are negotiating in good faith, but they should be aware that if we can’t get across the line because they are being recalcitrant, then we could spring back to the April 2 levels,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday.India, Vietnam, Japan, the European Union, Malaysia and other governments have been working toward deals that could smooth relations with the United States and avoid double-digit tariffs. But the Trump administration has been moving forward with plans to impose another set of tariffs on certain industries that it views as essential to national security, a threat that has foreign leaders worried that there could be more pain ahead.These tariffs are dependent on the outcomes of trade investigations into lumber and timber, copper and critical minerals by the Commerce Department, which are expected to be completed soon and submitted to the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. A determination that imports pose a national security threat would allow the president to issue tariffs on those products in the coming weeks. Investigations on pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and electronic devices are also proceeding and could be finished in time for tariffs as early as next month, the people said.Mr. Bessent added that tariffs on imports of items such as lumber were being imposed on a different track from the reciprocal tariffs that were announced in April and are not part of the current round of trade negotiations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump’s Tariffs Drive a Rise in Trade Crime

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    As President Trump’s tariffs have ratcheted up in recent months, so have the mysterious solicitations some U.S. companies have received, offering them ways to avoid the taxes.Shipping companies, many of them based in China, have reached out to U.S. firms that import apparel, auto parts and jewelry, offering solutions that they say can make the tariffs go away.“We can avoid high duties from China, which we have already done many in the past,” read one email to a U.S. importer.“Beat U.S. Tariffs,” a second read, promising to cap the tariffs “at a flat 10%.” It added: “You ship worry free.”“Good News! The tariffs has been dropped finally!” another proclaimed.The proposals — which are circulating in emails, as well as in videos on TikTok and other platforms — reflect a new flood of fraudulent activity, according to company executives and government officials. As U.S. tariffs on foreign products have increased sharply in recent months, so have the incentives for companies to find ways around them.The Chinese firms advertising these services describe their methods as valid solutions. For a fee, they find ways to bring products to the United States with much lower tariffs. But experts say these practices are methods of customs fraud. The companies may be dodging tariffs by altering the information about the shipments that is given to the U.S. government to qualify for a lower tariff rate. Or they may move the goods to another country that is subject to a lower tariff before shipping them to the United States, a technique known as transshipment. More

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    Trump’s Computer Chip Deals With Saudi Arabia and UAE Divide US Government

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    Big deals to sell chips to the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia have divided the U.S. government over whether they could be remembered for shipping cutting-edge A.I. overseas.Over the course of a three-day trip to the Middle East, President Trump and his emissaries from Silicon Valley have transformed the Persian Gulf from an artificial-intelligence neophyte into an A.I. power broker.They have reached an enormous deal with the United Arab Emirates to deliver hundreds of thousands of today’s most advanced chips from Nvidia annually to build one of the world’s largest data center hubs, three people familiar with the talks said. The shipments would begin this year, with the vast majority of the chips going to U.S. cloud service providers and about 100,000 of them to G42, an Emirati A.I. firm.The administration revealed the agreement on Thursday in an announcement unveiling a new A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi supported by 5 gigawatts of electrical power. It would the largest such project outside the United States and help U.S. companies serve customers in Africa, Europe and Asia, the administration said. The details about the chips weren’t disclosed, and it’s not clear if they could still be subject to change.As Mr. Trump traversed the region in recent days, the United States also struck multibillion-dollar agreements to sell advanced chips from Nvidia and AMD to Saudi Arabia. The United States and Saudi Arabia are also still in discussions on a larger contract for A.I. technology, five people familiar with the negotiations said.The A.I. deals have caused people inside and outside the White House to wrestle with an unexpected question. Is the Trump administration, in its zeal to make deals in a region where Mr. Trump and his family have financial ties, outsourcing the industry of the future to the Middle East?The question speaks to divisions over A.I. policy that are rippling through the Trump administration. The deals were negotiated in the Middle East by David Sacks, the administration’s A.I. czar, and Sriram Krishnan, its senior policy adviser for A.I., who are both longtime venture capitalists. Leading figures in the A.I. industry, like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Jensen Huang of Nvidia, have also been involved in talks that have continued on the sidelines of the president’s trip in recent days.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How India Is Trying to Squeeze Pakistan Far From the Battlefield

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    The nuclear-armed rivals are also wrangling over Pakistan’s access to desperately needed foreign aid, as India explores ways to use its soft power and relationships to bedevil its old enemy.Even as India was gearing up to use its military to strike at Pakistan this week, calling it revenge for a terrorist strike in Kashmir last month, the government was pursuing other forms of power projection as well: bloodless and more refined, and mostly aimed at Pakistan’s economic vulnerability.On Friday, May 9, the executive board of the International Monetary Fund is scheduled to meet three blocks from the White House. Indian officials have suggested that they will make a new case there: that the Fund should refuse the extension of a $7 billion loan to Pakistan described as crucial to getting the country on more solid footing financially and to fund desperately needed services for its people. And though Indian officials will not confirm it, other potential sources of Pakistani aid may also be in India’s sights, according to domestic media reports.In two weeks before its strikes against Pakistan on Wednesday, India was already testing new ways to aggrieve its old enemy.On April 23, India pulled out of a river-sharing treaty that has safeguarded Pakistan’s vulnerable water supply since 1960. Pakistan called it an act of war.India turned to its softer power, as well. As tensions rose after the terrorist attack in Kashmir, India tinkered with its internet controls to cut off Pakistani musicians and cricketers from their audiences on Indian social media, much as it blocked Indians from using Chinese-owned TikTok after a clash with China in 2020.India also announced that it would sever all trade between the two countries. In practice, there wasn’t much to begin with. India exports mainly sugar, medicines and some other chemicals to Pakistan. Some Indian exporters said they never got a legal notice from the government — so they are still fulfilling contracts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Can President Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock?

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    Historians make their names by persuading people to see patterns in the chaos. In the late 1970s, the French historian Fernand Braudel thought that one of those patterns was about to repeat. Braudel was a student of the slow-moving currents that shape events. He wanted people to pay less attention to great men like Napoleon and more to seemingly humble things like the potato, a New World import that made it easier for European farmers to grow more food than they needed; this surplus, in turn, gave a wider array of Europeans time to engage in new hobbies like complaining about their rulers. One might say that he regarded the potato as the cause of Napoleon.Listen to this article, read by Malcolm HillgartnerIn the third volume of his epic “Civilization and Capitalism,” published in 1979, Braudel explored the forces that made one city at a time the economic center of the Western world, from Venice to Amsterdam to London, and then inexorably lifted up another in its place. He wrote that cities rose as centers of commerce, and then, as they prospered, they began to invest their surpluses in building new centers, engineering their own declines. Commerce moved on, leaving a financial hub behind.Braudel’s account ended with the decline of Amsterdam, the entrepôt of Europe through the 17th and into the 18th century, a city of astonishing wealth and diversity. Wide-eyed visitors wrote of its wonders with the same astonishment as later generations would write of New York. The young czar of Russia went home so impressed that he built St. Petersburg in its image. But as Amsterdam grew fat and happy, its merchants became bankers and began to seek better returns in fast-growing London. Amsterdam, Braudel wrote, became “a society of rentier investors on the lookout for anything that would guarantee a quiet and privileged life,” a society that had moved on “from the healthy tasks of economic life to the more sophisticated games of the money market.”Braudel noted that London, too, eventually ceded its role, underwriting the rise of New York in the early 20th century. And in the late 1970s, he judged that New York was entering the “autumn” of its era as the center of the global economy. Commerce and industry were fleeing the city, leaving behind a thriving financial center — a sure sign in Braudel’s view that New York, and the nation it anchored, were on the edge of decline.Donald Trump became Donald Trump in that city, building towers and bankrupting casinos as Wall Street boomed and the working class faded away, and he emerged with a similarly bleak view of America’s prospects. His career as a political figure has been built on his conviction that America is losing its wealth and its power. If Ronald Reagan filled voters with hope, Trump offers to keep them company in their misery. He has an intuition for the things that people fear and is comfortable saying what other politicians won’t. Where other presidents intone that it’s still Morning in America, Trump has touched a nerve by insisting that it’s not long before midnight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.S. and China to Hold First Trade Talks Since Trump’s Tariffs

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    Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, will discuss trade and economic matters with the officials this week.Top officials from the Trump administration will meet with their Chinese counterparts in Switzerland this week, the first formal meeting about trade between the United States and China since President Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports to triple-digit levels last month.Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, plan to meet with Chinese officials during a trip to Geneva, where they will discuss trade and economic matters, according to separate announcements from the office of the trade representative and the Treasury Department.A spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that He Lifeng, the vice premier for economic policy, would visit Switzerland from Friday to Monday and hold talks with Mr. Bessent. Mr. Bessent said on Fox News that the talks would be held on Saturday and Sunday.The meeting could help to defuse an economically damaging trade standoff that has persisted between the world’s largest economies for a month. In early April, Mr. Trump escalated tariffs on Chinese exports to a minimum of 145 percent, to punish Beijing for retaliating against his earlier levies.While both sides appear to be interested in reducing those tariffs, neither has wanted to make the first move. It remains unclear how quickly the United States and China might strike any kind of agreement, or what its contents could be.The Trump administration has criticized China for its role in bringing fentanyl and ingredients to make the drug to the United States, as well as a bevy of unfair trade practices. Mr. Trump and his advisers have also censured China for failing to stick to the terms of a trade deal the president negotiated in his first term. China, in return, has called Mr. Trump’s tariffs “illegal and unreasonable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More