US, Chinese trade negotiators meeting in London
Top U.S. and Chinese officials are meeting in London on Monday to try to fortify the countries' temporary trade truce, which is currently on track to expire in August.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer are in the U.K. for the talks with Chinese Vice President He Lifeng. It's unclear how long negotiations could last, but Chinese officials have predicted they could extend several days.
'The two sides need to make good use of the economic and trade consultation mechanism already in place, and seek win-win results in the spirit of equality and respect for each other's concerns,' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian wrote in a post on X ahead of the meeting. 'The Chinese side is sincere about this, and at the same time has its principles.'
President Trump confirmed plans for the London confab last week after a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who the president has described as 'extremely hard to make a deal with.'
'The call lasted approximately one and a half hours, and resulted in a very positive conclusion for both Countries,' Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday.
The two sides have been attempting to hash out a long-term trade agreement following Trump's announcement of sweeping tariff hikes on most countries in April. The Trump administration urged countries last week to come forward with deals more favorable to U.S. interests.
U.S. and Chinese leaders brokered their temporary pause in the tariff hikes after meeting in Geneva last month.
Under that arrangement, the U.S. lowered its tariff rate on Chinese goods from 145 percent to 30 percent, and China agreed to lower its tariff to 10 percent from 125 percent for 90 days.
China's exports to the U.S. were down 35 percent in May compared to last year, according to the latest analysis from Dutch multinational banking and financial services firm ING Group, adding pressure ahead of the latest round of meetings between the two countries.
'Exports to the U.S. surprisingly decelerated despite the trade war reprieve,' ING's analysts wrote. 'We expect that export growth to the US could recover in the coming months.'
'We could see import front-loading amid the still elevated risk that tariffs could once again move higher in light the uncertainty about trade talks over the past month,' the firm added.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fox News
16 minutes ago
- Fox News
US Marines to deploy to Los Angeles to help quell anti-ICE riots
A battalion of 500 U.S. Marines are mobilizing to Los Angeles to respond to anti-immigration enforcement riots, Fox News has learned. The Marines will be tasked with protecting federal property and federal personnel, according to a senior defense official, and the deployment is open-ended. The Marines will not be carrying out a law enforcement role, but it's unclear what their use of force rules are if protesters throw things or spit at them. The new deployment comes after President Donald Trump sent some 2,000 National Guardsmen to the riot-racked city over the weekend. The Marines are from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines at Twentynine Palms, California. Moments before the deployment, Trump expressed optimism that the situation in Los Angeles is improving. "I mean, I think we have it very well under control," he told reporters. "I think it would have been a very bad situation. It was heading in the wrong direction. It's now heading in the right direction." The Marine mobilization is sure to draw outcry from liberal critics: California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed suit against the Trump administration on Monday for deploying the Guard. Newsom and the California attorney general claimed Trump and Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth "trampled over" California's sovereignty by calling up the state's National Guard without Newsom's approval. Meanwhile Trump defended the decision on Monday, and added that if protesters spit in the face of guardsmen in Los Angeles, they'll "be hit harder than they have ever been hit before." "IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT," Trump wrote. "Such disrespect will not be tolerated!" Federal law typically bars the U.S. military from carrying out domestic law enforcement purposes, unless the president invokes the Insurrection Act. Newsom claimed Trump is trying to "manufacture a crisis" and that the president is "hoping for chaos so he can justify more crackdowns, more fear, more control." The protests began in reaction to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the City of Angels as the Trump administration moves to make good on its promise of mass deportations. Over the weekend, protests devolved into violence that left vehicles charred to a crisp and windows smashed at the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters.
New York Post
18 minutes ago
- New York Post
700 Marines will deploy to Los Angeles after Hegseth warned California to control riots
A US Marine battalion is being sent to Los Angeles to help maintain order as anti-ICE riots continued to rage across Southern California. On Sunday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Marines to prepare for deployment to LA 'if violence continues.' On Monday, he made good on the promise, ordering 700 Marines from Twentynine Palms, California, to travel to LA, CNN and ABC News reported, citing sources. Advertisement 3 A sign sits at the entrance to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Wednesday, March 10, 2021, in Twentynine Palms, Calif. AP The incoming marines will join the 300 National Guards troops already on the ground. President Trump ordered 2,000 members of the California National Guard to be ready to deploy in LA. The incoming marines are expected to help relieve some of the guard members, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Advertisement 3 On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Toby Canham for NY Post 3 Protesters have set cars ablaze as chaos ensues in Los Angeles. Toby Canham for NY Post On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for dispatching the National Guard to the protests, claiming that it has only encouraged more chaos in the streets. This is a breaking story. Please check back for updates.
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Amazon wants to become a global marketplace for AI
Amazon Web Services isn't betting on one large language model (LLM) winning the artificial intelligence race. Instead, it's offering customers a buffet of models to choose from. AWS, the cloud computing arm of Amazon (AMZN), aims to become the go-to infrastructure layer for the AI economy, regardless of which model wins out. By making customer choice a defining principle, AWS hopes to win out against rivals that have aligned closely with specific LLM providers — notably Microsoft (MSFT), which partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI ( 'We don't think that there's going to be one model to rule them all,' Dave Brown, vice president of compute and networking at AWS, told Yahoo Finance. The model-neutral approach is embedded into Amazon Bedrock, a service that allows AWS customers to build their own applications using a wide range of models, with more than 100 to choose from. Brown added that after Chinese startup DeepSeek surprised the world, AWS had a fully managed version of the disruptive model available on Bedrock within a week. Two years after its launch, Bedrock is now the fastest-growing service offered by AWS, which accounted for over 18% of Amazon's total revenue in the first quarter. It's why Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees Bedrock as a core part of the company's AI growth strategy. But to understand the competitive advantage AWS hopes to offer with Bedrock, you have to go back to its origin story. Bedrock dates back to a six-page internal memo that Atul Deo, AWS's director of product management, wrote in 2020. Before OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in 2022 and made 'generative AI' a household term, Deo pitched a service that could generate code from plain English prompts using large language models. But Jassy, the head of AWS at the time, didn't buy it. 'His initial reaction was, 'This seems almost like a pipe dream,'' Deo said. He added that while a tool that makes coding easy sounds obvious now, the technology was 'still not quite there.' When that project, initially known as Code Whisperer, launched in 2023, the team realized they could offer the service for a broader set of use cases, giving customers a choice of different models with 'generic capabilities' that 'could be used as a foundation to build a lot of interesting applications,' according to Deo. Deo noted that the team steered away from doubling down on its own model after it recognized a pattern of customers wanting choice in other AWS services. This led to AWS becoming the first provider to offer a range of different models to customers. With this foundational approach in mind, Amazon renamed the project Bedrock. To be sure, the model-agnostic approach has risks, and many analysts don't consider Amazon to be leading the AI race, even though it has ramped up its AI spending. If there is ultimately one model to rule them all, similar to how Google came to dominate search, Amazon could risk further falling behind. At the beginning of the year, Amazon and its peers Meta (META), Microsoft, and Google parent Alphabet (GOOG) expected to spend $325 billion combined, mostly on AI infrastructure. To keep pace, Amazon has hedged its bets with its own technology and one LLM provider in particular: Anthropic. In November 2024, AWS doubled its investment in Anthropic to $8 billion in a deal that requires Anthropic to train its large language model, Claude, using only AWS's chips. (For comparison, Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI.) The $8 billion deal allows Amazon to prove out its AI training infrastructure and deepen ties with one LLM provider while continuing to offer customers a wide selection of models on Bedrock. 'I mean, this is cloud selling 101, right?' said Dan Rosenthal, head of go-to-market partnerships at Anthropic. 'There are some cases where it's been very clear that a customer wants to use a different model on Bedrock for something that we just frankly don't focus on, and that's great. We want to win where we have a right to win.' Amazon also launched its own family of foundational models, called Nova, at the end of 2024, two years after the launch of ChatGPT. But competition and expectations remain high: Revenue at AWS increased 16.9% to $29.27 billion in Q1, marking the third time in a row it missed analyst estimates despite double-digit growth. The Anthropic partnership also underscores a bigger competition AWS may be fighting with chipmakers, including Nvidia (NVDA), which recently staged a $1 trillion rally in just two months after an earnings print that eased investor concerns about chip export controls. While Amazon is an Nvidia customer, it also produces highly effective and more affordable AI chips based on power consumed (known as 'price performance'). On Bedrock, AWS lets clients choose whether to use its own CPUs and GPUs or chips from competitors like Intel (INTC), AMD (AMD), and Nvidia. 'We're able to work with the model providers to really optimize the model for the hardware that it runs,' Brown said. 'There's no change the customer has to make.' Customers not only have a choice of model but also a choice of which infrastructure the model should run and train on. This helps AWS compete on price — a key battleground with Nvidia, which offers the most expensive chips on the market. This 'coopetition' dynamic could position Amazon to take market share from Nvidia if it can prove its own chips can do the job for a lower sticker price. It's a bet that Amazon is willing to spend on, with capital expenditures expected to hit $100 billion in 2025, up from $83 billion last year. While AWS doesn't break out its costs for AI, CEO Andy Jassy said on an earnings call in February that the 'vast majority of that capex spend is on AI for AWS.' In an April letter to shareholders, Jassy noted that 'AI revenue is growing at triple-digit YoY percentages and represents a multibillion-dollar annual revenue run rate.' Sign in to access your portfolio
