Trump to sign executive orders targeting trade abuses

President Donald Trump talked tough on trade on the campaign trail, vowing to renegotiate a slew of major deals and to label China a currency manipulator on “Day One”. Now his administration appears to be taking a more cautious approach. On Friday, the president will sign a pair of executive orders aimed at cracking down on trade abuses, according to top administration officials. The first calls for the completion of a large-scale report to identify “every form of trade abuse and every non-reciprocal practice that now contributes to the US trade deficit,” said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Officials would have 90 days to produce a country-by-country, product-by-product report that would serve as the basis of future decision-making by the administration on trade-related issues, Ross said on Thursday night. “It will demonstrate the administration’s intention not to hip-shoot, not to do anything casual, not to do anything abruptly, but to take a very measured and analytical approach, both to analysing the problem and therefore to developing the solutions for it,” he said. Trump trade reset gives China and Europe opportunity to rebalance relations While Trump has long argued that trade deficits imperil US workers, Ross cautioned that they aren’t necessarily all bad. In some cases, for instance, the United States simply can’t produce enough of a product to meet domestic demand. In others, foreign countries may make products substantially cheaper or better than in the US. They can also mean that foreign countries and entities are investing in US assets. Still, Ross argued, the US had the lowest tariff rates of any developed country. The report, he said, would examine whether deficits were being driven by things like cheating, specific trade agreements, lax enforcement and World Trade Organisation rules. Ross said the report would not focus extensively on currency manipulation, which was under the purview of the US Treasury Department, despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The second order will focus on stepping up the collection of anti-dumping and countervailing duties, which are levied against foreign governments that subsidised products so they could be sold below cost. Why the world has reason to fear Donald Trump’s trade tantrums Peter Navarro, the director of the White House National Trade Council, said the US is leaving billions of dollars on the table as a result of lax enforcement. The order would establish more effective bonding requirements, among other measures. The orders come a week before the president is scheduled to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump tweeted on Thursday evening that his first meeting with the Chinese leader would “be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits ... and job losses.” “American companies must be prepared to look at other alternatives,” he wrote. The US deficit with China was $347 billion last year. Navarro insisted the orders had nothing to do with Xi’s visit or sending a message to China. ...and job losses. American companies must be prepared to look at other alternatives. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017 “Nothing we’re saying tonight is about China. Let’s not make this a China story. This is a story about trade abuses, this is a story about an undercollection of duties,” he said, later adding: “We’re not here for tweets.” The US trade deficit totaled US$502.3 billion last year, a slight increase from 2015, according to the Commerce Department. The trade gap rose to its highest level since 2012 last year, though the imbalance remained below its 2006 high, shortly before the Great Recession struck. Nothing we’re saying tonight is about China. Let’s not make this a China story Peter Navarro, White House National Trade Council director Trump has portrayed trade deficits as strangling economic growth and devastating factory jobs. Research last year by academic economists, including David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that China’s emergence hurt some communities and they have yet to fully recover. But foreign trade has also helped reduce prices for clothing, cars and furniture, among other items. This has created savings for US consumers. While economists concede the benefits of trade can be uneven, they argue the job losses that Trump blames on trade pacts can largely be attributed to automation. A study released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that robots accounted for up to 670,000 lost factory jobs between 1990 and 2007. Both exports abroad and imports into the United States fell in 2016, but exports declined by a greater sum in part due to a stronger dollar making American-made goods and services more expensive overseas.

Trump to sign executive orders targeting trade abuses

White House’s Peter Navarro says orders have nothing to do with China president’s visit and do not target China