US and China reportedly agree to critical extension, preventing tariff surge on the world's two largest economies
Asia
ChinaFacebookTweetLink
Follow
The United States and China agreed to pause tariff hikes on each other's goods for an additional 90 days, according to multiple reports citing White House officials. Without the agreement, tariffs were set to immediately surge, risking a return to ultra-high levels that had formed an effective blockade on trade between the world's two largest economies.
The news, first reported by CNBC, comes hours ahead of a 12:01 am ET deadline when tariffs on Chinese goods were set to rise to 64% from 30%. It's unclear what rates China would have charged on American goods, which are currently subject to minimum 10% tariffs.
It also comes after Trump imposed a slew of 'reciprocal' tariffs on trading partners around the world, which have raised the United States' effective tariff rate to levels not seen since the Great Depression.
Higher tariffs on Chinese goods, America's second-largest source of imports, would have almost certainly raised the costs many American businesses and consumers could pay — or already are paying — because of increased import taxes Trump enacted.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump nominates conservative economist to head agency that compiles jobs, inflation data
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Monday that he has nominated E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to head the agency that compiles and publishes the nation's employment and inflation figures. 'Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,' Trump said on social media late Monday. Antoni, if approved by the Senate, would replace Erika McEntarfer, who was appointed commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics by former President Joe Biden. Trump fired McEntarfer Aug. 1 after the July jobs report showed hiring slowed sharply this spring, with job gains in May and June revised much lower than initially estimated. Trump accused McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the jobs data for political reasons. The announcement comes one day before the BLS is scheduled to release the latest inflation data, for July. It is forecast to show that consumer prices rose for the third straight month as tariffs are pushing up the cost of many imported goods. ___ Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed to this report. Christopher Rugaber, The Associated Press Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump selects Heritage Foundation's Antoni to head Bureau of Labor Statistics
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was nominating economist E.J. Antoni as the new Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, ten days after firing the statistics agency's previous leader after a weak scorecard of the U.S. job market, accusing her without evidence of manipulating the figures. Antoni is currently the chief economist at the influential U.S. conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. "Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE," Trump said on Truth Social. Antoni, who must be confirmed by the Senate, takes over an agency that had a staff of 2,300 as of September 2024 and that has come under heightened scrutiny for the eroding quality of the data it produces. Its monthly figures about the state of the U.S. job market and inflation are consumed by a global audience of economists, investors, business leaders, public policymakers and consumers, and their release routinely has a visible and real-time effect on stock, bond and currency markets around the world. Trump added to growing concerns about the reliability of BLS and other federal government economic data when he fired Erika McEntarfer as BLS commissioner on August 1. Her dismissal came hours after the agency reported much weaker-than-expected U.S. job growth for July and issued an historically large revision to its employment figures for May and June, reducing the estimated number of jobs created in the two months by nearly 260,000. In announcing her firing, Trump accused McEntarfer - appointed to the role by former President Joe Biden - of manipulating the employment data for political purposes. There is no evidence of that being true. He promised he would replace her "with someone much more competent and qualified." Antoni, who holds a doctoral degree in economics, was previously an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and has taught courses on labor economics, money and banking, according to the Heritage Foundation. He must now address the difficulties BLS has had with declining survey response rates and with data collection problems in other critical statistical series, such as for inflation. The nonfarm payrolls report provides a monthly snapshot of the U.S. job market, offering scores of figures including how many jobs were created, what the unemployment rate was, how many people joined or left the labor force and what workers earn per hour and how many hours they work in a week. Its headline estimates for job creation are revised twice after their initial release to account for the submission of additional survey responses from employers and updates to the seasonal factors that underly the statistics. They are also subject to an annual benchmark revision process. The monthly Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index together historically have provided a comprehensive picture of U.S. inflation, including hundreds of data points depicting the changes in cost for everything from eggs to auto insurance, figures relied upon heavily by policymakers like those at the Federal Reserve. CPI is used to set the annual cost-of-living-adjustment for retirees receiving Social Security payments. Earlier this year, though, BLS said a staffing shortage was forcing it to reduce the CPI index collection sample after closing operations in Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Provo, Utah. The percentage of prices that are imputed rather than gathered has more than tripled this year to 35%. Starting this month, BLS is ending the calculation and publication of about 350 components of PPI, a key measure of inflation at the wholesale level. BLS, like other government agencies, has faced a hiring freeze imposed by Trump on his return to the White House in January and likely will see a wave of departures at the end of the summer as staff who opted into a deferred resignation program formally leave government employment. A Reuters poll last month of 100 economists and policy experts found the vast majority had at least some concern about the eroding quality of U.S. economic statistics. "I can't help but worry some deadlines are going to be missed and undetected biases or other errors are going to start creeping into some of these reports just because of the reduction in staff," Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017 during President Barack Obama's second term and the first months of Trump's first term, told Reuters as part of the poll. Keith Hall, appointed BLS commissioner by President George W. Bush in 2008, told Reuters in a recent interview the agency has seen little to no budget growth for a decade, even as the costs for data collection have risen. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Seoul-based Datumo raises $15.5M to take on Scale AI, backed by Salesforce
Most organizations say they aren't fully prepared to use generative AI in a safe and responsible way, according to a recent McKinsey report. One concern is explainability – understanding how and why AI makes certain decisions. While 40% of respondents view it as a significant risk, only 17% are actively addressing it, per the report. Seoul-based Datumo began as an AI data labeling company and now wants to help businesses build safer AI with tools and data that enable testing, monitoring, and improving their models—without requiring technical expertise. On Monday the startup raised $15.5 million, which brings its total raised to approximately $28 million, from investors including Salesforce Ventures, KB Investment, and SBI Investment, among others. David Kim, CEO of Datumo and a former AI researcher at Korea's Agency for Defence Development, was frustrated by the time-consuming nature of data labeling so he came up with a new idea: a reward-based app that lets anyone label data in their spare time and earn money. The startup validated the idea at a startup competition at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). Kim co-founded Datumo, formerly known as SelectStar, alongside five KAIST alumni in 2018. Even before the app was fully built, Datumo secured tens of thousands of dollars in pre-contract sales during the customer discovery phase of the competition, mostly from KAIST alumni-led businesses and startups. In its first year, the startup surpassed $1 million in revenue and secured several key contracts. Today, the startup counts major Korean companies like Samsung, Samsung SDS, LG Electronics, LG CNS, Hyundai, Naver, and Seoul-based telecom giant SK Telecom among its clients. Several years ago, however, clients began asking the company to go beyond simple data labeling. The seven-year-old startup now has more than 300 clients in South Korea and generated about $6 million in revenue in 2024. 'They wanted us to score their AI model outputs or compare them to other outputs,' Michael Hwang, co-founder of Datumo, told TechCrunch. 'That's when we realized: we were already doing AI model evaluation — without even knowing it.' Datumo doubled down on this area and released Korea's first benchmark dataset focused on AI trust and safety, Hwang added. 'We started in data annotation, then expanded into pretraining datasets and evaluation as the LLM ecosystem matured,' Kim told TechCrunch. Meta's recent $14.3 billion acquisition-like investment in data-labeling company Scale AI highlights the importance of this market. Shortly after that deal, AI model maker and Meta competitor OpenAI stopped using Scale AI's services. The Meta deal also signals that competition for AI training data is intensifying. Datumo shares some similarities with companies like Scale AI in pretraining dataset provisioning, and with Galileo and Arize AI in AI evaluation and monitoring. However, it differentiates itself through its licensed datasets, particularly data crawled from published books, which the company says offers rich structured human reasoning but is notoriously difficult to clean, according to CEO Kim. Unlike its peers, Datumo also offers a full-stack evaluation platform called Datumo Eval, which automatically generates test data and evaluations to check for unsafe, biased or incorrect responses without the need for manual scripting, Kim added. The signature product is a no-code evaluation tool designed for non-developers like those on policy, trust and safety, and compliance teams. When asked about attracting investors like Salesforce Ventures, Kim explained that the startup had previously hosted a fireside chat with Andrew Ng, founder of at an event in South Korea. After the event, Kim shared the session on LinkedIn, which caught the attention of Salesforce Ventures. Following several meetings and Zoom calls, the investors extended a soft commitment. The entire funding process took about eight months, Hwang said. The new funding will be used to accelerate R&D efforts, particularly in developing automated evaluation tools for enterprise AI, and to scale global go-to-market operations across South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. The startup, which has 150 employees in Seoul, also established a presence in Silicon Valley in March. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
