Trump says China will take down trade barriers, deal on IP
US President Donald Trump said in a tweet on Sunday that China would take down its trade barriers and that the two countries would reach a deal on intellectual property.
On Thursday, Trump directed US trade officials to identify tariffs on another $100 billion of Chinese imports, upping the ante in an already high-stakes trade confrontation between the world’s two largest economies, Reuters reported.
China warned on Friday it was fully prepared to respond with a “fierce counter strike” of fresh trade measures if the United States follows through on Trump’s threat to slap tariffs on an additional $100 billion of Chinese goods.
Trump, in light of what he called China’s “unfair retaliation” against earlier US trade actions, had upped the ante on Thursday by ordering US officials to identify extra tariffs, escalating a tit-fortat confrontation with potentially damaging consequences for the world’s two biggest economies.
China’s Commerce Ministry spokesman, Gao Feng, calling the US action “extremely mistaken” and unjustified, said the spat was a struggle between unilateralism and multilateralism and that no negotiations were likely in the current circumstances.
“The result of this behavior is to smash your own foot with a stone,” Gao told a news briefing in Beijing. “If the United States announces an additional $100 billion list of tariffs, China has already fully prepared, and will not hesitate to immediately make a fierce counter strike.”
The dueling trade threats rattled Wall Street on Friday, ending a volatile week with major indexes .DJI.SPX.IXIC closing down more than 2 percent on the day. The dollar .DXY also fell, while safe havens such as the Japanese Yen JPY= and gold futures Gccv1 rose.
The week started with China imposing $3 billion of tariffs on US goods, and rapidly escalated to threats that could seriously curtail hundreds of billions of dollars in trade between the world’s two largest economies.