Trump's ongoing trade deals lack clarity: 3 unanswered questions
Yahoo Finance Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul breaks down how the lack of legal texts and mixed signals from the White House are complicating these agreements.
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Been a lot of deals this week, a lot of headlines which I know has been the cadence for a while now. What do we actually know about some of these headline deals that we see in sort of the details if we do have any details on on the deals.
That that's exactly precisely the issue there, Josh, we don't have a lot of details on that and that's what I've been interested in today is that this kind of parallel tracks we've been seeing on the trade front this week. We on the one hand, as you mentioned, we have these reciprocal tariffs that are now in in place built around 10 to 20% duties on countries that have a deal. On the other side on the parallel track, we have these deals that are under increasing confusion, basically what's in them. We just we don't have legally binding text on any of the on any of them. We don't even have joint statements on a lot of them. And what we've seen is a lot of issues arise on on what what's there. The first the main one is whether these rates that we're seeing that went in place this week are all inclusive. In other words, does a 15% deal with Europe mean 15% on semiconductors? Does it mean 15% on pharmaceuticals and autos? Even the White House uh fact sheet on the deal says yes, but a variety of actions and words from the Trump administration this week have raised questions. We even saw the Japanese trade negotiator make a quick trip to Washington this week basically to get reassurance on that front. He came out saying that he's he's confident it's going to be resolved. This is a sort of temporary issue especially on autos. That's a giant issue for him. After all this negotiation to get it down from 25 to 15%, at the moment, the tariffs are still at 25% on autos. The other aspect of this is these investment deals that we're seeing in there. Trump describes them as a blank check for him basically for him to to decide what to do with a pot of money. These other countries described these very differently, more like a financing fund. This is all important because and another third aspect of these deals is Trump constantly saying he reserves the right to change any terms he wants if he feels unhappy. He basically he can raise the rates if he wants to. He says he has the right to do that if this isn't working out to his liking. So the bottom line for folks is that even though we have all these deals and we've had all these high profile announcements, these are very fragile agreements as we are still waiting on legally binding texts, which by all indications is still being worked out on on all these fronts. Um I think a very particular telling quote from came from Japan this week. This is one of the countries that's in the middle of this. Um their their prime minister has been under a lot of raised, had a lot of questions domestically on this and according to Washington Post report was meeting with lawmakers to try to mollify them and he reportedly talked about how dealing with Trump is particularly challenging and added that quote, in negotiations like this, implementation is far more difficult than reaching an agreement. In other words, we're going to be talking about how these work out for a long time to come.
Ben, you just hit on what I feel like is of course the the question of the moment. I know it's hard to answer, right? But is there any sense of of timeline? I mean at some point, we have to get details, right? For these tariffs to stay in place and be doing what they're supposed to be doing. We would there would have to be clear details at some point in the process.
Yeah, there is there is progress on some as an example, the UK had their first deal and we do have a little more detail there. We don't have the full the full text yet, but we have more there. Indonesia is as another example where we have a joint statement, which is a key step in this. Others are are further along. So I think they will continue to progress slowly, but the key thing is that we kind of front loaded this with the tariffs going into place and now we're kind of filling in all the back details there. So it could it could be a lot more changes in the head as as they sort of work out these there's a lot of big important issues um going forward.
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