White House’s main authorities alluded to potential trade agreement with China on Sunday, after representatives from both countries had negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend.
In comments to the reporters in Geneva, the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US commercial representative Jamieson Greer made an optimistic tone on the state of potential trade agreement with China, noting that the government would provide additional details in the second -year.
“I am happy to inform you that we have made substantial progress between the United States and China in very important commercial negotiations,” Bessent told reporters, adding that “negotiations were productive.”
The brief observations – just over two minutes – were thin in detail, but Greer seemed to refer to an agreement between the two sides as he praised negotiations as constructive.
“That was, as the secretary pointed out, two very constructive days,” said Greer. “It is important to understand how quickly we were able to reach an agreement, which reflects that perhaps the differences were not as big as they would think. That said, there were many foundations that entered these two days.”
Greer continued, referring to a commercial deficit with China and saying that “we are confident that the agreement we closed with our Chinese partners would” help the US “work to solve this national emergency.”
In April, Trump stated that “foreign trade and economic practices created a national emergency.”
A Chinese Embassy door in Washington, DC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Bessent said he and Greer talked to Trump on Saturday and that the president was “totally informed of what is happening.”
Going over the weekend, White House officials indicated that they were eager to negotiate, even if they insisted that the US would not unilaterally reduce duties without concessions from the Chinese.
“I think we’ll have a good weekend with China,” Trump said during the Thursday presentation of a preliminary trade agreement in the UK.
“De-sharing, reducing these rates where they could, where they should be, I think it’s the goal of Scott Bessent,” Terard Lutnick Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC on Friday. “And that’s what the president expects to be a good result; it’s a climbing world, where we come back to each other and then work largely together.”
While Trump tried to soften the aggressive stance he demonstrated during his speech on “Liberation Day” last month, critics say the new approach was marked by uncertainty and half-men. Analysts of the capital Economics consulting pointed to the preliminary agreement announced by the US and the United Kingdom on Thursday as evidence of “Trump’s desperation to show progress in commerce.”
“The ‘complete and comprehensive trade agreement between the US and the United Kingdom today announced in a hurry by President Donald Trump and the first -Keir Stmerer is not like that,” analysts wrote in a note to customers shortly after the announced the contract. “As Trump admitted to his press conference, the ‘final details’ still need to be ‘written in the coming weeks’.”
The stunning trend continued on Friday, when Trump posted on social media that they reduced rates on Chinese imports from 145% to 80% “seems right”, just for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, say later that the figure was simply one that president “played abroad.”
Bessent had already characterized Trump’s approach as “strategic uncertainty.”
And in a post about Truth Social on Friday, Trump called the agreement with the UK “amazing for both countries,” saying British Airways’s father had ordered $ 10 billion in new Boeing aircraft, although officials of the airline controlling company, IAG, said the order did not occur as a result of commercial negotiations.
“Let’s make a fertilization with tariffs, only smart people understand that,” Trump wrote.
The US rates in China rose to 145% last month, after the president signed an executive order that imposed 125% of tasks on all imports in that nation, plus 20% of tasks imposed at the beginning of his second term in response to China’s alleged inaction in Fentanil flows.
China, in turn, answered with 125% tasks about US imports, while markedly condemned Trump government tariff actions and saying that it would no longer get involved in retaliatory increases.
China may have already found a way to fulfill the 145% tasks. On Friday, he released data that showed that his exports had risen 8.1% year by year in April, amid an increase in remittances to other nations of Southeast Asia. This is an indication that China may simply be using a transhipment strategy to circumvent duties, experts told CNBC.
It is too early to tell if the scarcity fears on the US shelves will materialize, but the Flexport logistics group reported last week that the Pacific Ocean transporters were removing the capacity “at faster rates than Covid”, anticipating reduced demand.