China threatened with more U.S. tariffs

U.S. may target $500B in imports over alleged currency manipulation

WASHINGTON— President Donald Trump on Friday escalated his threats to punish China for its trade policies, warning anew that he’s prepared to impose tariffs on all Chinese imports and arguing that Beijing has manipulated its currency at the expense of the United States.

In a taped interview with the business channel CNBC, Trump warned, “I’m willing to go to 500,” meaning he’s prepared ultimately to impose tariffs on $500 billion in Chinese imports — roughly the value of all the goods Beijing shipped to the United States last year. Doing so would mean that American households and companies would have to pay sharply higher prices for all Chinese products, as long as the tariffs remained in effect.

Trump has already imposed tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods, and Beijing has retaliated with tariffs on an equal amount of American exports.

Trump had earlier threatened to target up to $550 billion in Chinese products — a figure that exceeds the $524 billion in goods and services China actually shipped to the United States last year. But his remarks to CNBC caught financial markets by surprise Friday. U.S. stocks sank in early trading before rebounding. Global markets have remained generally calm in recent weeks and months despite the eruption of a full-blown U.S.-China trade war and a host of other conflicts that Trump has ignited between the United States and key trading partners, including Canada and the European Union.

“I’ve been surprised that up until now, markets seem overly sanguine about the risks” of a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies, said David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s China studies centre and a former official at the World Bank and U.S. Treasury Department.

Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs have hit American soybeans and pork.