Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs threaten a trade war

The Trump administration is putting the squeeze on the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, but gradually — it’s adding more of Huawei’s subsidiaries to its trade blacklist, even as it’s delaying a ban on US companies doing business with Huawei.

The decisions by the US government are, in part, the result of an escalating trade war between the US and China. But they also tie into longstanding concerns about potential spying by Huawei and other national security threats.

The US and the European Union have had a beef beef for years. But after steak-ing out their relative positions, they finally just agreed to meat in the middle.

President Donald Trump just announced a new deal under which the EU will accept a high number of American beef exports, a move that will surely increase profits for US farmers and related industries. The EU will accept 45,000 tons of hormone-free beef from foreign countries every year, and America will be allowed to fulfill 35,000 tons of that quota after seven years — roughly 80 percent of the total.

Just in case you weren’t there yet, President Trump’s recent threats to impose tariffs on Mexican imports into the US confirm that his trade policy is erratic, chaotic, and reckless.

But there’s a core principle beneath it all: the desire for import substitution — meaning that instead of buying goods from abroad, we produce and sell those goods here at home. The idea is that instead of importing, say, mobile phones made in China or car parts from Mexico, we shift production of these and other current imports here to the US, with the goal of increasing domestic production, employment, and output.

It’s gotten a little lost in the intensifying trade war with China, but President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum, first applied in March 2018, remain in place.

But now Canada and Mexico will get a reprieve, as the US has reached a deal to lift tariffs on steel and aluminum coming from those two countries. This eliminates a huge hurdle to the ratification of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the revised version of NAFTA.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Wednesday barring US companies from using information and communication technology made or controlled by firms that pose a national security risk, and declaring a national emergency on the matter.

While the order didn’t mention any countries or companies in particular, it’s clearly aimed at China. More specifically, many are arguing, it’s aimed at Huawei, the Chinese telecoms and smartphone manufacturing giant.

The United States has increased pressure on China by placing one of its top technology companies on a list that some refer to as receiving the “death penalty.”

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that it put the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and 70 affiliates on its “Entity List.” That prohibits Huawei from buying parts from US companies without federal government approval. Since Huawei is reliant on US suppliers for parts like chips, it could prove a major blow to the Chinese firm.

China is clearly unhappy about President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war — and it just retaliated in a way that could hurt global markets and further damage ties between the world’s two biggest economies.

On Friday, Trump raised tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on $200 billion of Chinese goods after Washington and Beijing failed to reach a long-sought trade deal despite days of intense talks.

TOKYO — Most Western predictions about the future of China’s rise are ominous, ranging from theories about how the country will perfect an authoritarian society to how it will serve as a model for a less free future.

But while reporting in Japan on Wednesday, I heard the most troubling prediction about China yet — and it was actually about the country’s decline.

President Donald Trump and members of his administration are quite excited about Saturday’s handshake deal between the US and China.

They claim Beijing agreed to lower tariffs on American cars entering the Chinese market from 40 percent to zero. And even though China hasn’t confirmed this detail, it sounds like good news, as lower tariffs would greatly reduce the price of US vehicles, perhaps making them more attractive to China’s billion-plus consumers.

President Donald Trump has taken hard-line stances against North Korea, China, and Iran — and in the last 72 hours, each country pushed back on America’s pressure campaign.

On Friday, North Korea threatened to build more nuclear weapons unless the US offers some sanctions relief. Three days later, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Beijing would survive the trade war with America and continue exporting goods around the world. Also on Monday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed to “break” Trump’s latest and greatest imposition of financial penalties.

The Trump administration won’t participate in trade talks with China until Beijing makes huge concessions, the latest salvo in the months-long trade war that could threaten global economic growth.

For years, the US has complained American companies can’t fairly compete in China’s market, in part because Beijing forces foreign businesses to hand over their proprietary technology to enter it. That gives Chinese companies an advantage, many experts say, as they can steal the intellectual property US businesses spent years developing.

For the past several months, President Donald Trump has been waging a costly trade war with China, which has had no shortage of ill effects on US farmers.

The president decided to use millions of American taxpayer dollars to bail them out — but that money may also end up helping Chinese-owned and foreign-owned agriculture companies operating in the US.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is accusing the Trump administration of rigging its trade wars.

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts Democrat asked the Commerce Department’s inspector general to investigate the agency’s process of granting and rejecting exemptions to the steep tariffs Trump placed on imported steel and aluminum products in March. She said the agency has made “troubling” decisions, such as granting relief to the US subsidiary of a sanctioned Russian company.

Another day, another escalation in President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war with China.

On Tuesday, the US Treasury Department announced that Trump will impose 25 percent tariffs on $16 billion worth of Chinese goods. The tariffs will hit multiple industries and target around 280 electronic, plastic, and chemical products, as well as motorcycles and railway cars.

President Donald Trump can’t keep his numbers straight on trade.

On Wednesday, Trump decried “weak” politicians calling for him to stop imposing tariffs on US trade allies — and repeated a lie to make his case: The US “lost $817 billion on trade last year,” he tweeted.

As the clock struck midnight and July 6 began, the United States formally imposed 25 percent penalty taxes on a long list of Chinese products; the Chinese government — as it has previously said it would — responded in kind with an equally large set of new taxes on what is designed to be an equal quantity of American products, mostly agricultural goods.

Paired with an earlier round of US tariffs on Canadian and European steel — and Canadian and European countertariffs on American goods — it’s clear that the United States is now embroiled in a multi-front trade war. Indeed, according to an official statement from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, Trump has just “launched the biggest trade war in economic history so far.”

The Trump administration will impose tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods on Friday. As expected, China is likely to respond by initiating tariffs on an equivalent amount of American goods.

Trump has been threatening a trade war with China and many other countries for several months now. He has insisted that he’ll “do it in a very loving way,” and that other countries will “respect us much more.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s job responsibilities cast him as a central player in the multi-front trade wars the Trump administration has been instigating this spring. Ross is also an extraordinarily wealthy man who, according to blockbuster reporting out this week from Forbes’s Dan Alexander, has never divested from major financial conflicts of interests.

This lacks the comic elements of some of the Scott Pruitt corruption scandals and has largely been ignored amid mass outrage over the separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, but it’s a significant story in its own right and a sign of congressional Republicans’ ongoing abdication of oversight responsibility even in a policy area where they’ve sometimes been at odds with President Trump.

The widening gulf between the United States and some of its biggest trading partners grew even larger over the weekend.

In a rare and striking act, six of the seven countries that make up the G7 (Group of Seven), an informal bloc of some of the nation’s most powerful industrialized countries, came together on Saturday to condemn its seventh member, the US, over Trump’s latest tariffs on steel and aluminum.

President Donald Trump’s threats to levy sweeping trade tariffs on China and other countries have provoked near-universal condemnation, from Democrats as well as Republicans. These critics say tariffs will raise prices and invite foreign countries’ retaliation while doing little or nothing to bring back the glory days of bountiful middle-class manufacturing jobs.

They have a point. The nation’s trading partners are already preparing lists of iconic made-in-America goods like bourbon and jeans to hit with their own restrictions. And, indeed, the very promise of tariffs — the whole point of them — is that they raise prices for the protected product: If they didn’t, the policy wouldn’t work for the industry meant to be helped. There are also plenty of explanations besides globalization for the loss of manufacturing jobs. Automation has reduced the number of workers needed to churn out a slab of steel.

President Donald Trump on Thursday set in motion his highly controversial plan to make American steel and aluminum great again.

Flanked by metalworkers in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Trump signed proclamations on Thursday afternoon that will impose a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports into the US. They will go into effect in 15 days.

Business leaders from nearly every American industry are furious with President Trump right now.

They’ve been pressuring his administration to back off from its plan to add steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, which are used to make everything from cars to boats and even soup cans.

President Trump’s decision on Thursday to enact new tariffs on steel and aluminum could break his promise to protect the coal miners he adores so much, leaving everything from oil pipelines to wind turbines vulnerable to foreign retaliation.

As part of his “America First” doctrine, Trump wants protections for US manufacturers from foreign competition and is tacking on a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent on aluminum (Canada and Mexico are exempt).

In case you missed it, President Donald Trump recently announced his decision to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. It’s supposedly a move to protect the US steel industry from foreign competition, but in practice, it makes no sense as policy — instead setting up the United States for a disadvantaged economy and a trade war.

Republicans are panicking about the potential for conflict ahead of the 2018 midterm elections and have spent the past few days privately lobbying within the White House. House Speaker Paul Ryan has spoken out publicly, saying, “We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan.”

Raising taxes and tariffs is usually Congress’s job. But on Thursday, President Donald Trump officially raised tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, despite widespread opposition from Republicans in Congress — and it was completely in his right to do so.

Trump signed an executive order calling on the Commerce Department to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum. His reason: Foreign countries’ current trade practices with the United States are a threat to national security.