Trump hits China with more tariffs, says Xi moving too slow on trade

By Andrea Shalal and Alexandra Alper

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would impose a 10% tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports from Sept. 1 and could raise tariffs further if China’s President Xi Jinping fails to move more quickly to strike a trade deal.

The announcement extends Trump’s trade tariffs to nearly all China’s imports into the United States and marks an abrupt end to a temporary truce in a trade war that has disrupted global supply chains and roiled financial markets.

“I think President Xi … wants to make a deal, but frankly, he’s not going fast enough,” Trump said.

Trump made the announcement in a series of Twitter posts after his top trade negotiators briefed him on a lack of progress in U.S.-China talks in Shanghai this week.

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Trump later said if trade negotiations fail to progress he could raise tariffs further - even beyond the 25 percent levy he has already imposed on $250 billion of imports from China.

The news hit U.S. financial markets hard.

Oil prices plummeted 7%, with Brent crude registering the biggest daily percentage drop since February 2016. The benchmark S&P 500 <.SPX>, which had been in solidly positive territory on Thursday afternoon, closed down 0.9%. Benchmark U.S. Treasury yields also fell.

Retail associations predicted a spike in consumer prices. Target Corp tumbled 4.2%, Macy’s Inc fell 6% and Nordstrom Inc was down 6.2%.

Asked about the impact on financial markets, Trump told reporters: “I’m not concerned about that at all.”

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Moody’s said the new tariffs would weigh on the global economy at a time when growth is already slowing in the United States, China and the euro zone.

The tariffs may also force the Federal Reserve to again cut interest rates to protect the U.S. economy from trade-policy risks, experts said.

Raising tariffs would lower the prospects of a deal rather than expedite it, China’s Global Times newspaper said. Beijing would focus more on efforts to survive a prolonged trade war, Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Communist Party-backed newspaper, said on Twitter.

“New tariffs will by no means bring closer a deal that the U.S. wants; it will only make it further away,” Hu said.

FRUSTRATED

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin briefed Trump on their first face-to-face meeting with Chinese officials since Trump met Xi at the G20 summit at the end of June and agreed to a ceasefire in the trade war.

“When my people came home, they said, ‘We’re talking. We have another meeting in early September.’ I said, ‘That’s fine, but until such time as there’s a deal, we’ll be taxing them,” Trump told reporters.

A source familiar with the matter said Trump grew frustrated and composed the tweets shortly after Lighthizer and Mnuchin told him China made no significant movement on its position.

Previous negotiations collapsed in May, when U.S. officials accused China of backing away from earlier commitments.

CROPS AND DRUGS

Trump said Beijing had failed to stop sales of the synthetic opioid fentanyl to the United States, as it had promised to do. He also said Beijing had not fulfilled a goodwill pledge to buy more U.S. agricultural products.

Trump has failed to make good on a goodwill gesture he said he would make after the G20 meeting to relax restrictions on sales to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

Trump had been pressing Xi to crack down on a flood of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances from China, which U.S. officials say is the main source of a drug blamed for most of more than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths in the United States in 2017.    

   China had pledged that from May 1 it would expand the list of narcotics subject to state control to include the more than 1,400 known fentanyl analogues, which have a slightly different chemical makeup but are addictive and potentially deadly, as well as any new ones developed in the future.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday confirmed a small private sale to China of 68,000 tonnes of soybeans in the week ended July 25.

It was the first sale to a private buyer since Beijing offered to exempt five crushers from the 25% import tariffs imposed more than a year ago. Soybean futures opened lower on Thursday as traders shrugged off the purchase because of the small volume involved, and losses accelerated after Trump’s tweets.

RETAIL IMPACT

The new tariffs will jack up prices for consumers at the start of the back-to-school buying season, four large retail trade associations said on Thursday.

“President Trump is, in effect, using American families as a hostage in his trade war negotiations,” said Matt Priest, president of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America.

Stephen Lamar, executive vice president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, said his group’s members were shocked that Trump had not allowed the resumed U.S.-China trade talks to proceed further before acting.

The measure will hit U.S. consumers far harder than Chinese manufacturers, who produce 42% of apparel and 69% of footwear purchased in the United States, Lamar said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Alexandra Alper; Additional reporting by Stella Qiu and Beijing Monitoring Desk; Steve Holland, David Lawder, Tim Ahmann, Susan Heavey, Makini Brice, Nandita Bose and Jonathan Landay in Washington, Chris Prentice in New York, and Mark Weinraub and Karl Plume in Chicago; Editing by Simon Webb, Sonya Hepinstall and Grant McCool)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.