Protectionism (Trade)

Latest story

150 Shares17 Views

Trump Team Races to Form Trade Deals After Tariffs Sow Global Chaos

by

The president’s threats of tariffs have brought countries like Japan, South Korea and India rushing to negotiate, but they have sown chaos with bigger trading partners like China.For a president who advertises himself as a paramount deal maker, the next 11 weeks will be a pivotal test, as his advisers race to accomplish what no other administration has done before and reach dozens of individual trade deals with other governments.President Trump has promised big gains for American trade, and officials from Japan, South Korea, India and elsewhere have been pushing for agreements as they look to forestall punishing tariffs. But trade experts say the administration has set up a seemingly impossible task, given that traditional trade deals typically take months or years to negotiate.Mr. Trump has tried to use tariffs as leverage to notch quick agreements, and his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, has promised “90 deals in 90 days.” But the levies are creating chaos and financial pain for many businesses, and they have not brought some of America’s largest trading partners, including China, to the table.Some U.S. trade with China has ground to a halt after the countries imposed triple-digit tariffs on each others’ products, and a wave of bankruptcies, especially among small U.S. businesses that rely on Chinese imports, appears to be looming if the trade barriers are maintained.Some Trump officials recognize that the situation with China is not sustainable and have been strategizing how to reduce the tariffs between the countries, two people familiar with the discussions said. Another person familiar with the discussions said administration officials were concerned about the hit to the stock market, which has experienced intense volatility and some of its worst trading days in years. The S&P 500 is down 10 percent since Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he wanted to make a deal with China. But he said what happens with his tariffs on China “depends on them.” He denied any concerns about what the tariffs are doing to small businesses, but said that the high tariff “basically means China isn’t doing any business with us.”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

More stories

  • 88 Shares52 Views

    in Economy

    Peter Navarro: The Architect of Trump’s Tariffs

    by

    On a clear day last July in Miami, Peter Navarro emerged from four months in federal prison, where he’d been imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Mr. Navarro had refused to testify in an investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, an action he described as a defense of the Constitution.Just hours after his release from prison, Mr. Navarro flew to Milwaukee to speak at the Republican National Convention in support of Donald J. Trump’s re-election.“They convicted me, they jailed me. Guess what? They did not break me,” he said that night, punctuating each word as the crowd roared. It was an exercise in loyalty to Mr. Trump that seems to have paid off.For much of Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Navarro, a trade adviser, had been sidelined, mocked and minimized by other officials who saw his protectionist views on trade as factually wrong and dangerous for the country.But in the second Trump administration, Mr. Navarro, 75, an economist and trade skeptic, has been newly empowered. He returned to government more confident in his revanchist vision for the American economy, more dismissive of his critics, and with more than a dozen trade-related executive orders already drafted, many of which the president has since signed. Mr. Trump also came back to Washington more determined to finally realize the trade views he has held for decades, that an unfair trading system was ripping America off and needed to be radically changed.Why Peter Navarro switched sidesAna Swanson explains how China’s entry into the World Trade Organization turned Navarro, a Southern California professor, into President Trump’s biggest trade warrior.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

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Economy

    A Devastating Trade Spat With China Shows Few Signs of Abating

    by

    President Trump’s rapidly escalating trade war with China has resulted in eye-watering tariffs on products exchanged between the countries and scrambled prospects for many global businesses that depend on the trade. And there is no end in sight.The Trump administration has been waiting for the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to call Mr. Trump personally, but Beijing appears wary of putting Mr. Xi in an unpredictable and potentially embarrassing situation with the U.S. president.With the two governments at an impasse, businesses that rely on sourcing products from China — varying from hardware stores to toymakers — have been thrown into turmoil. The triple-digit tariff rates have forced many to halt shipments entirely.Mr. Trump has rapidly ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese products, from 54 percent on April 2 to 145 percent just one week later. The Chinese government has argued that the actions are unfair and closely matched his moves, raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 percent on Friday.But on Friday night, the administration created a significant carve out to its tariffs on China when it exempted some electronics, including smartphones, laptops and televisions. Those products will still be subject to other tariffs that Mr. Trump has put in place, like a 20 percent fee he added to Chinese goods in response to the country’s role in the fentanyl trade.Mr. Trump has said he would like to speak with Mr. Xi, but he has stopped short of requesting a phone call, believing that it is the Chinese government’s turn to ask for such a call, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump officials say that dozens of countries have reached out to the administration about negotiations since the levies were imposed. China did not, and instead responded with harsh words and tariffs of its own.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

  • 138 Shares109 Views

    in Economy

    Trump’s Tariff Fight With China Poses New Threat to US Farmers

    by

    After China unveiled steep retaliatory tariffs on American exports on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a sharp and somewhat surprising response: “So what?”The question underscored the Trump administration’s argument that America has the upper hand in a trade war with China given how reliant its economy is on exports to the United States.The United States buys far more goods from China than China buys from the United States. But Beijing’s decision to retaliate against President Trump’s punishing tariffs by raising levies on American imports to 84 percent could sting more than Mr. Bessent let on.“American companies that have been selling to China, and have been enormously successful doing that, are not going to be able to do that because of Chinese retaliation,” Sean Stein, the president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said in the hours before Mr. Trump ratcheted up his tariffs again.“Tariffs on the Chinese side and the U.S. side cover everything,” Mr. Stein added, meaning everything from aviation to medical imaging to agriculture would be affected and “trade is going to slow,” he said.The United States exported $143.5 billion of goods to China last year and imported $438.9 billion from that country, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.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

  • 138 Shares117 Views

    in Economy

    Inside Trump’s Reversal on Tariffs: From ‘Be Cool!’ to ‘Getting Yippy’

    by

    Economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused President Trump to reverse course on the steep levies.For the past week, President Trump has been urging calm in the face of the financial chaos that he created and resisting calls for him to rethink his approach.“I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told Republicans on Tuesday as the massive tariffs he had imposed sent global markets into a tailspin. “BE COOL!” he said in a social media post on Wednesday morning. “Everything is going to work out well.”At 9:37 a.m. Wednesday, the president was still bullish on his policy, posting on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”But in the end, it was the markets that got him to reverse course.The economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused Mr. Trump to blink on Wednesday afternoon and pause his “reciprocal” tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, according to four people with direct knowledge of the president’s decision.Asked to explain the decision, Mr. Trump told reporters: “Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”Behind the scenes, senior members of Mr. Trump’s team had feared a financial panic that could spiral out of control and potentially devastate the economy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others on the president’s team, including Vice President JD Vance, had been pushing for a more structured approach to the trade conflict that would focus on isolating China as the worst actor while still sending a broader message that Mr. Trump was serious about cracking down on trade imbalances.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

  • 138 Shares130 Views

    in Economy

    Trump’s Tariff Goal Is to Eliminate Trade Deficits. Economists Have Doubts.

    by

    Behind Trump’s new tariffs is a goal that is as ambitious as it is unrealistic: eliminating the bilateral trade deficit with every U.S. trading partner.Behind President Trump’s decision to hit some of America’s largest trading partners with stiff tariffs is his fixation on the trade deficit that the United States runs with other nations. But many economists say that is a poor metric for judging the quality of a trade relationship.The steep tariffs, which went into effect on nearly 60 trading partners on Wednesday, were calculated based on bilateral trade deficits, or the gap between what the United States sells to each country and what it buys.Mr. Trump has long viewed that gap as evidence that America is being “ripped off” by other countries. He argues that other countries’ unfair behavior has made trade so skewed and that the United States needs to be able to manufacture more of what it consumes. But economists argue this is a flawed way to approach the issue, given that bilateral trade deficits crop up for many reasons beyond unfair practices.“It’s totally silly,” Dani Rodrik, an economist who studies globalization at Harvard University, said of Mr. Trump’s focus on bilateral deficits. “There’s no other way to say it, it makes no sense.”Some economists do agree with the Trump administration that America’s overall trade deficit with the rest of the world reflects a problem for the U.S. economy, because the United States is so dependent on manufacturing elsewhere, including in China. But others don’t see it as an issue. And nearly all economists say that focusing on imbalances from country to country can be highly misleading.Last year, for example, the United States ran bilateral trade surpluses with 116 countries globally. It ran bilateral trade deficits with 114 countries, according to World Bank data.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

  • 50 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    China Condemns American ‘Protectionism’

    by

    The Chinese government on Wednesday issued a lengthy denunciation of American trade policies, accusing the United States of years of protectionism and of violating the trade agreement the two sides had negotiated late in President Trump’s first term.The document was issued by Beijing’s cabinet information office several hours after Mr. Trump raised to 104 percent the extra tariffs on Chinese goods that he has imposed in his second term.The missive assailed the United States for preparing to impose additional 90 percent tariffs on May 2 on low-value parcels from China, which enter the United States with no customs inspection and no duties paid. The value of these so-called de minimis shipments has soared more than tenfold in recent years, exceeding $60 billion last year.There were a few unexpected conciliatory notes in the Chinese statement. “As two major countries at different stages of development with distinct economic systems, it is natural for China and the U.S. to have differences and frictions in their economic and trade cooperation,” it said.The report, issued by the State Council Information Office, criticized the United States for having considerably tightened export controls on the transfer to China of technologies with both civilian and military applications. The office suggested that this was a violation of the spirit of the so-called Phase One agreement reached in 2020. It said that China had abided by the pact, which also called for China to increase its purchases of American energy, agricultural products and manufactured goods, such as aircraft from Boeing, the American aerospace giant.“The Chinese side upheld the spirit of contract and endeavored to overcome multiple adverse factors, including the unexpected impact of the pandemic, subsequent supply chain disruptions, and global economic recession, to ensure implementation of the agreement,” the report said.China cited production delays by Boeing during the pandemic as reasons for not fulfilling that part of the pact. While Boeing has had delays, Chinese government-controlled airlines have refused to accept delivery of dozens of previously ordered planes for six years. At the same time, a heavily subsidized state-owned manufacturer, the Shanghai-based Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, is racing to make its own single-aisle passenger planes.The commentary praised de minimis shipments as giving greater choice to consumers and helping small businesses to compete. Large Chinese e-commerce sites like Shein and Temu have expanded their shipments from factories in China straight to American households.The document noted that China allows de minimis shipments of parcels through delivery services. But in practice, China allows a far narrower exemption from tariffs than the $800 under the U.S. de minimis rules, limiting the value of many exempted parcels to $27.The document also did not mention that Congress raised the American de minimis limit to $800 in 2016, from $200 previously, kicking off a huge surge in such shipments across the Pacific from China and fueling a boom for Chinese e-commerce companies. More

  • 150 Shares159 Views

    in Economy

    Global Leaders Rush to Woo Trump, Hoping to Sway Him on Tariffs

    by

    Dozens of foreign governments were trying to appeal to the president to have steep tariffs rolled back, but the president and his advisers have indicated negotiations could be difficult.President Trump’s plan to impose sweeping tariffs on most of America’s trading partners has governments across the globe racing to schedule phone calls, send delegations to Washington and offer up proposals to lower their import taxes in order to escape the levies.On Monday, European officials offered to drop tariffs to zero on cars and industrial goods imported from the United States, in return for the same treatment. Israel’s prime minister was expected to personally petition Mr. Trump on Monday in meetings at the White House. Vietnam’s top leader, in a phone call last week, offered to get rid of tariffs on American goods, while Indonesia prepared to send a high-level delegation to Washington, D.C., to “directly negotiate with the U.S. government.”Even Lesotho, the tiny landlocked country in Southern Africa, was assembling a delegation to send to Washington to protest the tariffs on its exports to the United States, which include denim for Calvin Klein and Levi’s.Mr. Trump and his advisers have given mixed signals on whether the United States is willing to negotiate. On Sunday, Mr. Trump said that the tariffs would remain in place until U.S. trade deficits disappeared, meaning the United States is no longer buying more from these countries than it sells to them. But the administration still appeared to be welcoming offers from foreign nations, which are desperate to try to forestall more levies that go into effect on Wednesday.On Monday, as markets recoiled for a third day and Mr. Trump threatened even more punishing tariffs on China, the president said that “negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.”“Countries from all over the World are talking to us,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Monday morning. “Tough but fair parameters are being set. Spoke to the Japanese Prime Minister this morning. He is sending a top team to negotiate!”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

  • 138 Shares135 Views

    in Economy

    After Navarro Defends Tariffs, Bessent Says Trump Is Ready to Negotiate

    by

    Peter Navarro, a senior White House trade adviser, on Monday defended the sweeping tariffs President Trump has imposed on foreign nations and indicated that other countries’ offers to drop their own tariffs on American products would be insufficient to convince the president to retreat.Mr. Navarro, who has been the architect of many of President Trump’s trade plans, said on CNBC that the United States was facing a national emergency based on chronic trade deficits, and the only fix would be foreign countries removing trade barriers that had hindered the flow of American goods.The European Union offered Monday to drop its tariffs on American cars and industrial goods to zero if the United States did the same. But Mr. Navarro criticized the bloc for its value-added taxes and restrictions on American meat exports, as well as systematically higher tariffs.“You steal from the American people every which way is possible,” Mr. Navarro said. “So, don’t just say we’re going to lower our tariffs.”Mr. Navarro also targeted Vietnam, which has appealed to the president in recent days to have its tariffs reduced. He accused Vietnam of dumping products into U.S. markets, engaging in intellectual property theft and killing industries like shrimp, kitchen cabinets and others.“When they come to us and say, we’ll go to zero tariffs, that means nothing to us, because it’s the non-tariff cheating that matters,” Mr. Navarro said.But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who, with Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, was put in charge of negotiations with Japan, signaled in an interview later in the day that Mr. Trump is ready to negotiate. “President Trump, as you know, is better than anyone at giving himself maximum leverage,” he said. Mr. Bessent said he had suggested that foreign officials “keep your cool, do not escalate and come to us with your offers.” He added: “And at a point, President Trump will be ready to negotiate.”In the CNBC interview in the morning, Mr. Navarro said that tax cuts were forthcoming, as well as other benefits for Americans, like deregulation, lower energy prices, lower interest rates and the restructuring of manufacturing.“We’re going to get to a place where America makes stuff again, real wages are going to be up, profits are going to be up,” he said, adding, “the market’s going to find a bottom.” Stock markets closed slightly lower Monday, following two days of punishing losses last week.He was also asked about Elon Musk’s very public criticism of tariffs and of Mr. Navarro specifically over the weekend. Responding to a social-media post praising Mr. Navarro, Mr. Musk on Saturday mocked Mr. Navarro’s Ivy League degree as useless, and then said Mr. Navarro had not “built” anything.On Monday, Mr. Navarro said that Mr. Musk was “not a car manufacturer” but “a car assembler,” mentioning that Tesla’s plant in Texas imported batteries, electronics, tires and other parts. “He wants the cheap foreign parts, and we understand that,” he said. More