CNA938 Rewind - 10% Trump tariffs: As good as it gets for Singapore?
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Business Times
6 minutes ago
- Business Times
Confusion over tariff stacking hampers Japan's bid to pin down US trade deal
[TOKYO] A fresh discrepancy in interpretations of the US-Japan trade deal came to the fore on Thursday (Aug 7), as Japan's chief negotiator visits Washington to press for follow-through on a pledge to cut a levy on car imports to 15 per cent. Japanese media reports said that Washington would not exempt Tokyo from an order stacking new 15 per cent across-the board tariffs on top of existing levies, hours before they come into effect. Japan's top trade negotiator Ryosei Akazawa had earlier disputed such an understanding. 'There will be no stacking,' Akazawa said on Tuesday before leaving for Washington. 'There's mutual understanding on this matter.' The 15 per cent rate will replace existing rates on items that currently face levies of less than 15 per cent, while items already saddled with levies higher than 15 per cent will see no change, according to Japan's Cabinet Secretariat. Asked about the matter on Thursday, Japan's chief spokesperson Yoshimasa Hayashi said that Akazawa has reconfirmed the agreement on universal tariffs with the US. Akazawa met with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday in the US, reiterating the terms of the trade agreement reached last month and calling for its quick implementation. The top priority for Japan is to have the US follow through as soon as possible on a promise to cut car tariffs. July's deal also included a pledge to change the universal levy on Japan to 15 per cent, up from the 10 per cent baseline but lower than a threatened 25 per cent. The new rate is to take effect on Thursday, but the discord over stacking shows the two sides are not on the same page over details and implementation steps. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Kyodo News cited an unidentified White House official as saying the 15 per cent levy would be added to current levies. That is in line with an executive order released by the US administration last week, which indicated that the 15 per cent cut-off applied to the European Union, but did not mention that it would apply for Japan. The discrepancy may be limited in scope. Before Trump began announcing new tariffs on nations around the world, the US had applied levies averaging 1.4 per cent on Japanese goods, according to estimates in February by Kenichi Kawasaki, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. More importantly, Japan is urging US President Donald Trump to lower tariffs on cars to 15 per cent from 27.5 per cent, a combination of an existing 2.5 per cent and additional 25 per cent, as agreed upon in the deal. It remains unclear when the change will take place. Implementing the deal is one of the reasons Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has cited for staying in his role even after his ruling party suffered a historic election loss last month. 'There are all sorts of debates over the tariffs, but we have reached an agreement,' Ishiba said at a press conference in Hiroshima on Wednesday. 'As stated by US government officials involved in previous US-Japan trade negotiations, it is much, much more difficult to implement the deal than to agree on it.' BLOOMBERG
AsiaOne
36 minutes ago
- AsiaOne
'I won't humiliate myself': Brazil's president sees no point in tariff talks with Trump, World News
BRASILIA — As US tariffs on Brazilian goods jumped to 50 per cent on Wednesday (Aug 6), Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told Reuters in an interview that he saw no room for direct talks now with US President Donald Trump that would likely be a "humiliation." Brazil is not about to announce reciprocal tariffs, he said. Nor will his government give up on cabinet-level talks. But Lula himself is in no rush to ring the White House. "The day my intuition says Trump is ready to talk, I won't hesitate to call him," Lula said in an interview from his presidential residence in Brasilia. "But today my intuition says he doesn't want to talk. And I won't humiliate myself." Despite Brazil's exports facing one of the highest tariffs imposed by Trump, the new US trade barriers look unlikely to derail Latin America's largest economy, giving Lula more room to stand his ground against Trump than most Western leaders. Lula described US-Brazil relations at a 200-year nadir after Trump tied the new tariff to his demands for an end to the prosecution of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is standing trial for plotting to overturn the 2022 election. The president said Brazil's Supreme Court, which is hearing the case against Bolsonaro, "does not care what Trump says and it should not," adding that Bolsonaro should face another trial for provoking Trump's intervention, calling the right-wing former president a "traitor to the homeland." "We had already pardoned the US intervention in the 1964 coup," said Lula, who got his political start as a union leader protesting against the military government that followed a US-backed ouster of a democratically elected president. "But this now is not a small intervention. It's the president of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country like Brazil. It's unacceptable." The Brazilian president said he had no personal issues with Trump, adding that they could meet at the United Nations next month or UN climate talks in November. But he noted Trump's track record of dressing down White House guests such as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. "What Trump did with Zelenskiy was humiliation. That's not normal. What Trump did with Ramaphosa was humiliation," Lula said. "One president can't be humiliating another. I respect everyone and I demand respect." [[nid:720809]] Lula said his ministers were struggling to open talks with US peers, so his government was focused on domestic policies to cushion the economic blow of US tariffs, while maintaining "fiscal responsibility." The president declined to elaborate on pending measures to support Brazilian companies, which are expected to include credit lines and other export assistance. He also said he was planning to call leaders from the BRICS group of developing nations, starting with India and China, to discuss the possibility of a joint response to US tariffs. "There is no coordination among the BRICS yet, but there will be," Lula said, comparing multilateral action to the strength of collective bargaining in his union days. "What is the negotiating power of one little country with the United States? None." Separately, he said Brazil was looking at lodging a collective complaint with other countries at the World Trade Organisation. "I was born negotiating," said Lula, who was raised in poverty and rose through union ranks to serve two terms as president from 2003 to 2010, then re-entered politics in the 2022 election to defeat the incumbent Bolsonaro. But he said he was in no rush to strike a deal or retaliate against US tariffs: "We need to be very cautious," he said. Asked about countermeasures targeting US companies, such as greater taxation of big technology companies, Lula said his government was studying ways to tax US firms on equal standing with Brazilian companies. Lula also described plans to create a new national policy for Brazil's strategic mineral resources, treating them as a matter of "national sovereignty" to break with a history of mining exports that added little value in Brazil. [[nid:721044]]
Business Times
36 minutes ago
- Business Times
BlackRock's GIP said to hire for South-east Asia infrastructure
[SINGAPORE] Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a private markets firm that's a unit of BlackRock, is setting up a team to finance infrastructure projects in South-east Asia that usually struggle to secure investment, according to sources familiar with the matter. The firm, which manages more than US$170 billion in assets, is hiring a regional head for infrastructure debt based in Singapore, said the sources, who asked not to be named discussing private deliberations. The person will build a small team to work on so-called blended finance deals, which combine public and private funding for projects often shunned by banks and investors due to long timelines or political and regulatory risks. The challenge around such ventures is creating a risk-reward structure that attracts enough private capital. A spokesperson for GIP declined to comment. GIP's hiring supports a debt financing commitment made in November by BlackRock and other institutions, including the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. This is part of Singapore's broader initiative called the Financing Asia's Transition Partnership, which aims to raise US$5 billion from public, private and philanthropic sources for blended finance projects that can help cut emissions in the region. Annual investment in clean energy in South-east Asia needs to double to US$130 billion till 2030 to help countries meet their long-term climate targets, according to the International Energy Agency. HSBC Holdings, Citigroup and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking are among other lenders targeting new deals in the market for blended finance globally. Such transactions totalled US$18 billion last year, according to data provider Convergence. BLOOMBERG
