As Trump's tariff deadline looms, where do things stand on trade agreements?
Dozens more are caught somewhere in the middle – with no trade deal signed, but as yet no threat of higher tariffs. Among them are some of America's closet allies and biggest trading partners, including Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand.
After market turmoil led Trump to twice postpone the implementation of the higher tariffs, the president insisted on Wednesday that the 1 August deadline 'will not be extended' any further, promising it would be 'a big day for America.'
However, Trump still faces a potential hurdle in the courts; hours before the new round of tariffs are due to come into effect on Friday, the US court of appeals for the federal circuit will hear arguments on whether the president even has the authority to impose the tariffs.
For many of the countries without a deal facing the threat of crushing tariffs, the impasse appears to be rooted in politics as opposed to economics.
Brazil is one of the few major economies with which the US runs a trade surplus – however earlier this month, Trump announced he would impose a 50% tariff on products sent from the country, tying the move to what he called a 'witch-hunt' trial against its former president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has urged the US president to avoid creating a 'lose-lose' relationship between two of the largest economies in the Americas and said he did not fear publicly criticising Trump, whom he recently called an 'emperor'.
Trump announced the US would impose a 25% tariff on goods from India plus an extra 'penalty' for the country buying arms and energy from Russia amid the war in Ukraine.
While saying that Delhi was a 'friend,' Trump said the US had a 'massive' trade deficit with India and linked its 'vast' purchases of military equipment and energy from Russia to Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.
Trump has threatened to impose a 30% tariff on Mexican goods, accusing the country of not doing enough to curb drug smuggling. Mexico is the largest trading partner of the US and president Claudia Sheinbaum has previously said she thought an agreement could be reached before the 1 August deadline.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has said tariff negotiations would probably not conclude by 1 August – but Trump has threatened to impose a 35% tariff on imports not covered by the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
In March, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on cars and auto parts imported from Canada. In June he announced a 50% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminium imports. The new rate would apply to all other goods.
On Wednesday, Trump said that Canada's decision to back statehood for Palestine would make it 'hard for us to make a trade deal with them.'
US and Chinese negotiators have agreed to push back the deadline for escalating tariffs after talks this week failed to find a resolution across the many areas of dispute.
China has taken an aggressive stance in response to Trump's threatened border taxes, retaliating with tariffs of its own on US goods and blocking the sale of vital rare earth metals and components used by American defence and hi-tech manufacturers.
So far the US has completed eight framework deals which promise tariffs lower than the levels threatened if no deal was reached, but considerably higher than the rates imposed before Trump's second term began – meaning US consumers may face higher prices if companies pass the costs.
While details remain to be negotiated, many of the countries concerned have made considerable concessions to the US.
Trump announced on Wednesday that the US would impose a 15% tariff on imports from South Korea – after negotiations that were an early test for South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who took office in June after a snap election.
Trump said South Korea had agreed to invest $350bn in the United States in projects selected by the US and to purchase $100bn of liquefied natural gas and other energy products.
A deal was reached on Sunday that includes a baseline US tariff of 15%, including to Europe's crucial automobile sector, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. As part of the deal, the EU has agreed to purchase energy worth $750bn and make investments in the US, according to Trump.
France's minister for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, said on Monday the agreement was 'unbalanced' and Germany's BDI business federation said the accord would have 'considerable negative repercussions.'
Japan's exports to the US will be taxed at 15%, including automobiles, an industry accounting for 30% of Japanese exports to the US in 2024.
Tariffs of 50% on Japanese steel and aluminium will continue to apply and the White House said that under the deal, Japan would make $550bn in investments in the US.
Products from the Philippines, a major exporter of hi-tech items and apparel, will face a 19% levy.
British products will be subject to a 10% base rate, with exceptions for some industries. The UK is still negotiating exemptions for its steel and aluminium products from the 25% rate in force.
In return, the UK had to open its market further to US ethanol and beef, which has caused concern domestically.
Vietnam reached a deal in early July with the US, its main export market for products including clothing and shoes.
The deal will see its shipments subject to a 20% tariff, but a 40% tariff will be imposed on transshipments – goods manufactured in third countries that use Vietnam to circumvent steeper trade barriers. US goods will not face any tariffs entering Vietnam.
Indonesian exports to the US will be taxed at 19% and, according to Washington, nearly all US goods will be able to enter Indonesia tariff free.
Indonesia had already made other concessions earlier in July, pledging to buy more US oil and industrial goods.
Pakistan – facing a potential 29% tariff on exports to the US – said on Thursday it had struck a deal that would result in lower tariffs, as well as an agreement in which Washington would help develop the country's oil reserves.
With Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
a few seconds ago
- The Guardian
Corporation for Public Broadcasting to close after US funding cut
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced on Friday it will shut down operations after losing federal funding, delivering a blow to America's public media system and the more than 1,500 local stations that have relied on its support for nearly six decades. The closure follows the Republican-controlled House's decision last month to eliminate $1.1bn in CPB funding over two years, part of a $9bn reduction to public media and foreign aid programs. 'Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,' said Patricia Harrison, the corporation's president and chief executive. The 57-year-old corporation distributed more than $500m annually to PBS, NPR and 1,500 local stations nationwide. Despite the federal support, stations mostly rely on viewer donations, corporate sponsorships and local government support for the remainder. Rural communities face the biggest impact, as 245 of the 544 grantee organizations are considered rural and many may close without federal support which could impact educational programming, children's shows and local news coverage. These rural stations also employ nearly 6,000 people, according to the CPB. Public broadcasting has historically served areas underserved by commercial media, providing emergency information during disasters and cultural programming not available elsewhere. Rural communities are already hard hit by a lack of community journalism, as one in three US counties don't have a full-time local journalist, according to a July report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. Most CPB staff will be terminated by September's end, with a small transition team remaining through January 2026 to wind down operations. Donald Trump and Republican allies have long argued that taxpayer funding for public media represents unnecessary government spending, while claiming that PBS and NPR programming exhibits anti-conservative bias. The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions despite the president's attempts to remove them. The closure ends nearly six decades of federal commitment to public broadcasting. The corporation was established by Congress in 1967 to ensure educational and cultural programming remained accessible to all Americans.
The Guardian
a few seconds ago
- The Guardian
US appeals court indiciates it might declare Trump's birthright citizenship order unconstitutional
Donald Trump's order restricting birthright citizenship appeared on Friday to be headed toward being declared unconstitutional by a second federal appeals court, as judges expressed deep skepticism about a key piece of the US president's hardline immigration agenda. A three-judge panel of the Boston-based first US circuit court of appeals sharply questioned a lawyer with the federal justice department as to why they should overturn two lower-court judges who blocked the order from taking effect. Those lower-court judges include one in Boston who last week reaffirmed his prior decision to block the order's enforcement nationally, even after the US supreme court in June curbed the power of judges to broadly enjoin that and other policies. The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals last week became the first federal appeals court to hold Trump's order as unconstitutional. Its ultimate fate will likely be determined by the supreme court. Eric McArthur, a justice department attorney, said on Friday that the citizenship clause of the US constitution's 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868 after the US civil war, rightly extended citizenship to the children of newly-freed enslaved Black people. 'It did not extend birthright citizenship as a matter of constitutional right' to the children of people in the US without documentation, he said. But the judges questioned how that argument was consistent with the supreme court's 1898 ruling interpreting the clause in United States v Wong Kim Ark, long understood as guaranteeing American citizenship to children born in the US to non-citizen parents. 'We have an opinion by the supreme court that we aren't free to disregard,' said David Barron, the chief US circuit judge who like his two colleagues was appointed by a Democratic president. Trump's executive order, issued on the Republican's first day back in the Oval Office on 20 January, directs agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of US-born children who do not have at least one parent who is a US citizen or lawful permanent resident, also known as a 'green card' holder. Every court to consider the order's merits has declared it unconstitutional, including the three judges who halted the order's enforcement nationally. Those judges included Leo Sorokin, a US district judge in Boston, who ruled in favor of 18 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, who had swiftly challenged Trump's policy in court. 'The supreme court has repeatedly recognized children born to individuals who are here unlawfully or who are here on a temporary basis are nonetheless birthright citizens,' Shankar Duraiswamy, a lawyer for New Jersey, argued Friday. The 6-3 conservative majority US supreme court on 27 June sided with the administration in the litigation by restricting the ability of judges to issue so-called universal injunctions and directing lower courts that had blocked Trump's policy nationally to reconsider the scope of their orders. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion But the ruling contained exceptions, allowing federal judges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and the ninth circuit to issue new decisions stopping Trump's order from taking effect nationally. The rulings on appeal to the first circuit were issued by Sorokin and the New Hampshire judge, who originally issued a narrow injunction but more recently issued a new decision in a recently-filed class action blocking Trump's order nationwide. Separately, in an immigration-related ruling on Friday, US district Judge Jia Cobb in Washington DC blocked the Trump administration from fast-tracking the deportation of potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were paroled into the country under humanitarian programs during Joe Biden's presidency. Cobb said it served the public interest to put on hold the Department of Homeland Security's expedited removals for those who entered with temporary parole rather than cause irreparable harm to immigrants by allowing them.
Reuters
a few seconds ago
- Reuters
Canada working with US to deal with countries slow to accept deportees, document shows
TORONTO, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Canada is working with the United States to "deal with" countries reluctant to accept deportees as both nations increase efforts to ship migrants back to their home countries, according to a government document seen by Reuters. Since President Donald Trump began his second term in January, the United States has cracked down on migrants in the country illegally. But the U.S. has at times struggled to remove people as quickly as it would like in part because of countries' unwillingness to accept them. As Canada has increased deportations, which reached a decade-high last year, it has also run up against countries reluctant to accept deportees. Canadian officials issued a single-use travel document in June to a Somali man they wanted to deport because Somalia would not provide him with travel documents. In a redacted message to an unknown recipient, cited in a February 28 email, the director general of international affairs for Canada's Immigration Department wrote, "Canada will also continue working with the United States to deal with countries recalcitrant on removals to better enable both Canada and the United States to return foreign nationals to their home countries." The department referred questions about the message to the Canada Border Services Agency, which declined to specify how Canada and the U.S. were cooperating, when the cooperation started, and whether the working relationship had changed this year. "Authorities in Canada and the United States face common impediments to the removal of inadmissible persons, which can include uncooperative foreign governments that refuse the return of their nationals or to issue timely travel documents," an agency spokesperson wrote in an email. "While Canada and the United States do not have a formal bilateral partnership that is specific to addressing this challenge, the Canada Border Services Agency continues to work regularly and closely with United States law enforcement partners on matters of border security." When the email was sent, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in his last days in office before being replaced in March by Prime Minister Mark Carney. The Canada-U.S. relationship was strained by Trump's threat of tariffs, which he said were partly a response to migrants illegally entering the U.S. from Canada. The spokesperson added the CBSA has committed to deporting more people, from 18,000 in the last fiscal year to 20,000 in each of the next two years. Immigration has become a contentious topic in Canada as some politicians blame migrants for a housing and cost-of-living crisis. The rise in Canada's deportations largely reflects an increased focus on deporting failed refugee claimants. Refugee lawyers say that could mean some people are sent back to countries where they face danger while they try to contest their deportation. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
