Big tariffs off table for now, Mnuchin says
WASHINGTON — The United States has put on hold its plan to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese products as it presses forward with negotiations to reduce its trade deficit with Beijing, a top priority of President Trump.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said Sunday that the two countries had made progress as they concluded two days of intense trade negotiations in Washington late last week. The planned tariffs on $150 billion worth of Chinese goods are off the table while the talks proceed, he said.
“We’re putting the trade war on hold,” Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday.”
After finishing the talks in Washington, the two sides released a joint statement Saturday that offered little detail about what had been decided. Mnuchin said Sunday that they had agreed on a “framework” under which China would increase its purchases of U.S. goods, while putting in place “structural” changes to protect U.S. technology and to make it easier for U.S. companies to compete in China.
While U.S. officials had signaled last week that China had agreed to increase purchases by $200 billion, Mnuchin declined to confirm that figure. “We have very specific targets; I’m not going to disclose what they are,” Mnuchin said.
He suggested that under a deal, China would make big increases in its purchases of U.S. agricultural products and energy over the next several years.
Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic adviser, said Sunday that the $200 billion number was a “rough ballpark estimate” that both sides had used. It is a figure that simply “interests the president a lot,” he said, and is not an indication that a deal of that size is imminent.
“They are offering to make structural reforms, such as lower tariffs and lowering nontariff barriers, which will permit us to export billions and billions more goods to China,” Kudlow said of China on ABC’s “This Week” program.
Economists have voiced doubts about the $200 billion figure, an amount equivalent to more than half the annual U.S. trade deficit with China. They say it would be difficult to increase U.S. exports by anything close to that figure, given structural hurdles in China and limits to how much the United States could increase its production of goods.