Kathmandu. US President Donald Trump said the US and China have signed a trade deal.
He said he expected a deal with India soon. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Bloomberg TV that the deal was signed earlier this week. Neither Lutnik nor Trump provided any details about the deal.
“We just signed with China,” Trump said Thursday night. Lutnik said the deal was “signed and sealed” two days ago. It is the result of initial talks in Geneva in early May.
The talks led both sides to postpone major tariff hikes. The tariff hikes threatened to halt much of the trade between the two countries. Later talks in London set the framework for the talks, and the deal Trump mentioned appears to have formalized that agreement.
“The president likes to make these deals himself. He’s a deal maker. “We will make one deal after another,” Lutnik said.
China has not announced any new deals, but it announced earlier this week that it is speeding up the approval of exports of rare earth elements, materials used in high-tech products such as electric vehicles.
Recently, there has been intense competition between the European Union, the United States, Japan, South Korea and China in the production of electric vehicles. As China moves ahead alone in electric vehicles, other countries are fighting for supremacy, saying that China’s global auto market could be taken over by other countries.
Beijing’s limits on rare earth exports have become a major point of contention. China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Thursday that Beijing is speeding up the review of export license applications for rare earth elements. It said it was granting and had approved a “certain number of compliance applications.”
China imposed permit requirements on seven rare earth elements in April, and export controls on minerals appear to have overtaken tariffs in the latest trade talks between Beijing and Washington. The controls on those minerals threaten to disrupt the production of cars, robots, wind turbines and other high-tech products in the US and around the world.
The deal reached in Geneva in May called on both sides to reduce punitive tariff increases imposed as Trump escalated his trade war and sharply increased import tariffs. Some of Washington’s high tariffs related to the fentanyl trade and tariffs on aluminum and steel remain in place. The rapidly changing policies are affecting the world’s two largest economies. .
The U.S. economy shrank at an annualized rate of 0.5 percent from January to March, partly as companies and households rushed to buy foreign goods. Factory profits in China fell more than 9 percent in May from a year earlier.
Automakers have borne the brunt of that decline. They fell more than 1 percent year-on-year in January-May. Trump and other U.S. officials have signaled they expect to reach trade deals with several other countries, including India. “We’ll make one deal after another,” Lutnick said. RSS
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