The US treasury secretary revealed that although China and the US would arrive at a phase two agreement of the trade deal, the latter may still impose thousands of Chinese import tariffs. The sentiment was given even after US President Donald Trump announced that he would remove all tariffs if phase two of the China-US trade deal would be completed.
Last Tuesday, US treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin hinted that the US might still retain the tariff impositions on thousands of Chinese imports to the country even after completing a more comprehensive trade agreement between the countries.
Mnuchin claimed that the phase of the China-US trade deal might not be a significant improvement in the trade war developments, which promises that the US would waive all the tariffs from China. "We may do 2A and some of the tariffs come off... We can do this sequentially along the way," Mnuchin told The Wall Street Journal during an interview.
Last Wednesday, China and the US reached an agreement and signed phase one of the China-US trade deal. The agreement allegedly eased trade tensions between two of the strongest economies of the world and opened the start of further negotiations between them. Phase one of the trade deal allegedly lowered Chinese tariff rates, but still left about 360 billion USD worth of tariff impositions on Chinese products.
Furthermore, UIS President Donald Trump also promised last week that he would waive all the import tariff rates on Chinese products by the time that phase two of the China-US trade deal would be completed. He also added that he would leave them on for the moment as a bargaining stand for the US. However, he did hint that all of them would be removed if both countries develop a more comprehensive agreement the second time around.
Despite Trump's promise to China, US trade representative Rober Lighthizer along with other US administration officials opposed his plans regarding phase two of the trade deal. They also claimed that there had been no agreement that confirms the tariff rollbacks promised by Trump.
In other news, South China Morning Post reported that Trump said during the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he and China President Xi Jinping "love each other." The said sentiment was reported to be in response to swifter trade agreements between China and the US in recent weeks. He also hinted that phase two of the China-US trade deal would start shortly after the signing of phase one last week.
