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Trump: China needs trade deal as economy ‘going down the tubes’
WASHINGTON, June 27, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A bullish President Donald Trump
warned China of an even deeper trade war Wednesday ahead of a G20 summit
where he will meet President Xi Jinping, saying China’s remaining imports are
“ripe” for tariffs.
Markets are anxiously watching the Trump-Xi meeting, due Saturday, for a
breakthrough in the dispute pitting the world’s two largest economies against
each other.
Insisting that a strong negotiating hand means he has no need to give way,
Trump did not especially seek to calm those nerves.
“China’s economy is going down the tubes — they want to make a deal,”
Trump said in an interview with Fox Business News just hours before taking
off for the summit in Osaka, Japan.
Trump has already hit $200 billion of Chinese imports with levies in an
effort to force Beijing into intellectual property protection and other
reforms of a trading system that Washington says gives China huge unfair
advantages.
On Wednesday, the president strongly indicated he was ready to slap
tariffs on all remaining Chinese imports — more than $300 billion worth.
“You have another $325 billion that I haven’t taxed yet — it’s ripe for
taxing, for putting tariffs on,” he told Fox.
According to Trump, it’s China that’s feeling all the pain.
“What is happening is people are moving out of China. Companies are moving
out of China, by the way, some are coming back to the United States because
they don’t want to pay the tariff,” he told Fox Business News.
Trump did say that a previous threat to tax this remaining segment at 25
percent could be changed to a less harsh 10 percent.
The two sides said they were close to a deal before talks broke down in
May.
“We were about 90 percent of the way there,” Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin told CNBC television, saying he was looking forward to the Trump-Xi
talks but stressing there would be no “deal for having the sake of a deal.”
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“I hope the message that we want to hear is that they want to come back to
the table,” Mnuchin said.
– Trump on diplomatic warpath –
Trump’s aggressive attempt to rewrite the rules with China are part of a
wider policy of fixing what he says is a system rigged against the United
States.
“Almost all countries in this world take tremendous advantage of the
United States. It’s unbelievable,” he said in the lengthy interview.
Casting his eye over the wider landscape, Trump also lashed out at close
partners Vietnam, Germany and Japan.
Vietnam is “even worse than China” when it comes to unfair trading
practices, he said. Vietnam is the “single worst abuser.”
He described Germany — part of the bedrock of the US alliance with
western Europe — as “delinquent” for not paying enough to NATO’s budget.
“So Germany is paying Russia billions and billions of dollars for energy,
okay,” he said. “So they are giving Russia billions of dollars yet we are
supposed to protect Germany and Germany is delinquent! Okay?”
Trump aired a similar complaint about Japan, Washington’s closest ally in
Asia, which has been under the protection of a US military umbrella since its
defeat in World War II.
“If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III. We will go in and
protect them with our lives and with our treasure,” he said. “But if we’re
attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us. They can watch it on a Sony
television.”
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