Trump, Donald J

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Trump’s Threats About the Dollar Could Push Other Countries to Find Alternatives

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President-elect Donald J. Trump threatened to impose tariffs on countries that seek to replace the dollar in trade or undermine its global reserve currency status.When Republicans nominated Donald J. Trump to be their presidential candidate over the summer, the party’s platform included a pledge to maintain the role of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency.Since winning the election, Mr. Trump has indicated that he wants to deliver on that promise. Over the last week he warned that if the group of nations known as BRICS countries — which include Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — tried to create their own currency to rival the dollar, he would punish them with 100 percent tariffs and shut them out of U.S. markets.“There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.The warning was intended to preserve the dollar’s premier status, but economists and analysts suggested that it could have the opposite effect. Although it appears unlikely that the BRICS would be able to create their own currency, the aggressive use of tariffs and sanctions by the United States is the reason that other nations have increasingly been considering alternatives to the dollar. By making such threats, Mr. Trump could end up accelerating that trend.“Threatening retaliation against the unlikely creation of a BRICS currency only reinforces the rest of the world’s concerns about the U.S. willingness to wield dollar dominance as an economic and geopolitical weapon,” said Eswar Prasad, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. “This will intensify other countries’ attempts to diversify away from use of the dollar for international payments and for foreign exchange reserves.”The dollar has been the world’s dominant currency for about a century and has served as the world’s reserve currency since the end of World War II. It makes up the majority of foreign exchange reserves held in global central banks and is widely used in international transactions such as trade and loans.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 Selects Jamieson Greer as Trade Representative

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    President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday picked Jamieson Greer, a lawyer and former Trump official, to serve as his top trade negotiator. The position will be crucial to Mr. Trump’s plans of issuing hefty tariffs on foreign products and rewriting the rules of trade in America’s favor.Mr. Greer is a partner in international trade at the law firm King & Spalding. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Greer served as chief of staff to Robert E. Lighthizer, the trade representative at the time. He was involved in the Trump administration’s trade negotiations with China, as well as the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.Before that, Mr. Greer served in the Air Force, where he was a lawyer who prosecuted and defended U.S. airmen in criminal investigations. He was deployed to Iraq.“Jamieson will focus the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on reining in the Country’s massive Trade Deficit, defending American Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Services, and opening up Export Markets everywhere,” Mr. Trump said.The position of trade representative has historically been fairly low profile, but it has taken on greater importance under Mr. Trump. In his first term, the office helped wage a trade war against China, imposed substantial tariffs on its products and negotiated a series of trade deals.In his next term, Mr. Trump has promised to again make aggressive use of the government’s authority over trade. On Monday, he said he would impose tariffs on all products coming into the United States from Canada, Mexico and China on his first day in office.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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    Tariff Threats Show Trump’s Commitment to Upending Global Trade

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    The president-elect’s threat to hit Canada, Mexico and China with new tariffs is already rocking business and diplomatic relationships and could topple the trade pacts he signed in his first term.President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to impose damaging tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China may ultimately be an opening wager to try to use the power of the American market to persuade other countries to stem a flow of drugs and migrants across U.S. borders.But even if the threat to impose vast tariffs on some of the world’s largest economies is a negotiating tactic, it is also a gambit that has immediate real-world consequences.Before Mr. Trump even sets foot in the Oval Office, his threat to put tariffs on America’s three largest trading partners on his first day in office was reverberating around the world, shocking international businesses, rocking diplomatic relationships and calling into question two big trade deals that Mr. Trump negotiated during his first term.Mr. Trump’s pronouncement late Monday that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on products from China was immediately denounced by business groups, who said such a move would cause economic harm. Foreign officials rushed to reassure the incoming Trump administration that they had been working to stop drugs and migrants from coming into the United States — while warning that they were also ready to turn around and impose their own tariffs on American exports.Mr. Trump’s threats may have been intended to silence investors and economists who have recently questioned whether the president-elect would go through with imposing the big levies he promised while campaigning. In the run-up to the election, Mr. Trump pledged to put a 60 percent tariff on goods from China and a tax of at least 10 percent on all other imports. Such a move could ignite a global trade war, slowing economies around the world.Whether Mr. Trump’s threats ultimately show his prowess as a deal-maker or simply sow chaos, they are a reminder that the president-elect is eager to upend global relationships to try to secure points for the United States. That includes a willingness to potentially topple the trade pacts that he himself worked to put in place with Mexico, Canada and China during his first term after he used bruising tariffs to force them into making concessions.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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    Fed Minutes Show Options Are Open on Interest Rate Cuts

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    Minutes from a Nov. 6-7 meeting showed that Federal Reserve policymakers favored lowering rates “gradually.”Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s November meeting offered little signal about whether officials would cut interest rates at their next gathering, though they suggested that policymakers did expect to continue to lower borrowing costs “gradually” over time.The account of the central bank’s Nov. 6-7 meeting, released on Tuesday, showed that Fed officials still planned to cut interest rates further. But with the job market holding up better than expected and the economy growing at a solid clip, they are in no rush to slash them rapidly.Fed officials thought it “would likely be appropriate to move gradually toward a more neutral stance of policy over time,” the minutes showed.At the moment, central bankers think that their policy rate — which is set to a range of 4.5 percent to 4.75 percent — is “restrictive,” which means it is high enough to weigh on growth.That’s by design. Policymakers lifted rates to high levels in 2022 and 2023 to make borrowing more expensive, hoping to cool the economy and wrestle rapid inflation under control. But over the past year, inflation has been slowing toward the Fed’s 2 percent goal, and the unemployment rate had begun to nudge higher.Given that, officials began to cut rates in September, then made a second rate cut in November. The goal was to ease off the economic brakes a little, allowing the economy to slow gently without risking a painful crash. When Fed officials last released economic forecasts, in September, policymakers expected to make one final quarter-point rate cut in 2024.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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    Mexican President Mulls Retaliatory Tariffs After Trump’s Threats

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    Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, hit back on Tuesday morning at President-elect Trump’s vow to impose 25 percent tariffs on all products coming into the United States from Mexico, signaling that her country was prepared to respond with retaliatory tariffs of its own.Ms. Sheinbaum also said that raising tariffs would fail to curb illegal migration or the consumption of illicit drugs in the United States, an argument that Mr. Trump had made in his warning on tariffs.“The best path is dialogue,” Ms. Sheinbaum said at her daily news conference, calling for negotiations with the incoming Trump administration while laying out steps that Mexico has already taken to assuage some of Mr. Trump’s concerns.Ms. Sheinbaum, reading from a letter she is planning to send to Mr. Trump, noted that illegal crossings at the border between Mexico and the United States had plunged from December 2023 to November 2024, largely as a result of Mexico’s own efforts to stem migration flows within its own territory.“Migrant caravans no longer reach the border,” she added.Ms. Sheinbaum also called on U.S. authorities to do more to address the root causes of migration.“Allocating even a fraction of what the United States spends on warfare toward peace building and development would address the deeper drivers of migration,” Ms. Sheinbaum wrote in the letter.Ms. Sheinbaum also raised the specter of a broader tariff war that could inflict damage on the economies of both nations, pointing to multinational car manufacturers like General Motors, Stellantis and Ford Motor Co., which have operated in Mexico for decades.“Why endanger them with tariffs that would harm both nations?” Ms. Sheinbaum wrote. “Any tariffs imposed by one side would likely prompt retaliatory tariffs, leading to risks for joint enterprises.”Mexico is far more dependent on trade with the United States than vice versa, exporting about 80 percent of its goods to its northern neighbor.But numerous sectors in the United States, such as semiconductor and chemicals manufacturers, also rely on exporting to Mexico. Exports to Mexico accounted for nearly 16 percent of overall American exports in 2022.Ms. Sheinbaum also said that Mexico was already taking steps to combat the smuggling of fentanyl to the United States. But she argued that the core problem was demand for fentanyl within the United States, calling the crisis “fundamentally a public health and consumption issue within your society.”“It is widely known that the chemical precursors used to produce fentanyl and other synthetic drugs are illegally entering Canada, the United States, and Mexico from Asian countries,” Ms. Sheinbaum wrote. “This underscores the urgent need for international collaboration.” More

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    Trump Plans Tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico That Could Cripple Trade

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    President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he would impose tariffs on all products coming into the United States from Canada, Mexico and China on his first day in office, a move that would scramble global supply chains and impose heavy costs on companies that rely on doing business with some of the world’s largest economies.In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump mentioned a caravan of migrants making its way to the United States from Mexico, and said he would use an executive order to levy a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico until drugs and migrants stopped coming over the border.“This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” the president-elect wrote.“Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem,” he added. “We hereby demand that they use this power, and until such time that they do, it is time for them to pay a very big price!”In a separate post, Mr. Trump also threatened an additional 10 percent tariff on all products from China, saying that the country was shipping illegal drugs to the United States.“Representatives of China told me that they would institute their maximum penalty, that of death, for any drug dealers caught doing this but, unfortunately, they never followed through,” he said.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 Wall Street Billionaires Deliver on Trump’s Blue-Collar Promise?

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    The president-elect has named wealthy financiers for key economic positions, raising questions about how much they will follow through on promises to help the working class.When Donald J. Trump first ran for the White House in 2016, his closing campaign advertisement lamented the influence of Wall Street in Washington, flashing ominous images of big banks and the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros.Now, as president-elect, Mr. Trump has tapped two denizens of Wall Street to run his economic agenda. Scott Bessent, who invested money for Mr. Soros for more than a decade, is his pick for Treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, will be nominated to lead the Commerce Department. Mr. Trump’s choices to lead his economic team show the prominence of billionaire investors in setting an agenda that is supposed to fuel a “blue-collar boom” but that skeptics think will mostly benefit the rich.As Mr. Trump prepares to assume the presidency in January, business owners and investors are closely attuned to which of his economic promises he will ultimately follow through on. He has promised to slash tax rates, impose hefty tariffs on China and other countries, and deport millions of immigrants who work in American farms and businesses.The selections of Mr. Bessent and Mr. Lutnick cement a hold by Wall Street executives over the two most important economic posts in any administration. The picks are drawing blowback from Democrats and left-leaning groups, who assailed Mr. Trump for giving top jobs to rich donors and suggested that they would soon be working to create new tax breaks for the rich, not those who are struggling.“For all his talk of looking out for working-class Americans, President-elect Trump’s choice of a billionaire hedge fund manager to lead the Treasury Department shows he just wants to keep a rigged system that only works for big corporations and the very wealthy,” said Tony Carrk, the executive director of the government watchdog group Accountable.US.Yet the decision to tap Mr. Bessent and Mr. Lutnick is raising speculation that Mr. Trump could take a more market-friendly approach to many of his economic policies than some had feared because of his professed love of tariffs, which had the potential for igniting a global trade war.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 Trade Agenda Could Benefit Friends and Punish Rivals

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    Donald Trump has a record of pardoning favored companies from tariffs. Companies are once again lining up to try to influence him.The sweeping tariffs that President-elect Donald J. Trump imposed in his first term on foreign metals, machinery, clothing and other products were intended to have maximum impact around the world. They sought to shutter foreign factories, rework international supply chains and force companies to make big investments in the United States.But for many businesses, the most important consequences of the tariffs, enacted in 2018 and 2019, unfolded just a few blocks from the White House.In the face of pushback from companies reliant on foreign products, the Trump administration set up a process that allowed them to apply for special exemptions. The stakes were high: An exemption could relieve a company of tariffs as high as 25 percent, potentially giving it a big advantage over competitors.That ignited a swift and often successful lobbying effort, especially from Washington’s high-priced K Street law firms, which ended up applying for hundreds of thousands of tariff exemptions. The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which handled exclusions for the China tariffs, fielded more than 50,000 requests, while the Commerce Department received nearly 500,000 exclusion requests for the tariffs on steel and aluminum.As Mr. Trump dangles new and potentially more expensive tariffs, many companies are already angling to obtain relief. Lawyers and lobbyists in Washington say they are receiving an influx of requests from companies that want to hire their services, even before the full extent of the president-elect’s tariff plans becomes clear.In his first term, Mr. Trump imposed tariffs of as much as 25 percent on more than $300 billion in Chinese goods, and 10 percent to 25 percent on steel and aluminum from a variety of countries, including Canada, Mexico and Japan.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 Picks Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Labor Secretary

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    Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a first-term Republican representative from Oregon who narrowly lost her House seat this month, was chosen on Friday to serve as labor secretary in the coming Trump administration.“Lori has worked tirelessly with both business and labor to build America’s work force, and support the hardworking men and women of America,” President-elect Donald J. Trump said in a statement.A moderate from a swing district that includes parts of Portland, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, 56, is not a major figure in American labor politics. But she was one of only a few House Republicans to support major pro-union legislation, and she split her district’s union endorsements with her Democratic opponent, Janelle Bynum, earning nods from ironworkers, firefighters and local Teamsters.When the House speaker, Mike Johnson, spoke at a Chavez-DeRemer rally in October, he said, “She’s got more labor union endorsements than any Republican I’ve ever seen in my life.”Labor leaders criticized Mr. Trump’s policies during his first term as president, and at one point in the race this year, he praised Elon Musk for a willingness to fire workers who go on strike. But Mr. Trump also proposed ending taxes on tips and overtime, and many rank-and-file union members embraced his pro-tariffs economic agenda.After Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s defeat this month, the president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, urged Mr. Trump to consider her for the labor secretary role, Politico reported. On Friday, Mr. O’Brien praised her selection, posting a photograph on X of himself standing with Mr. Trump and Ms. Chavez-DeRemer.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