WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump’s 10 percent tariff for almost all countries except China will likely remain in place going forward, his top economic advisor Kevin Hassett said Thursday.
A day earlier, Trump announced a 90-day pause on higher tariffs against all countries except China, reversing a policy that had roiled global stock markets and spooked the American bond markets – a key barometer of investors’ faith in the US government’s ability to pay its debts.
Trump’s announcement leaves China facing a steep 125 percent tariff, and almost all other countries facing a baseline tariff of 10 percent.
Speaking to CNBC before markets opened on Thursday, Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said that the 10 percent was likely here to stay.
Trump’s stunning tariff pause focuses trade war on China
“I think everybody expects the 10 percent baseline tariff is going to be the baseline,” he said. “And it is going to take some kind of extraordinary deal for the president to go below there.”
Hassett said the sharp rise in bond market yields in recent days had added “perhaps a little more urgency” to Trump’s decision to roll back some tariffs, but insisted that the decision would have ultimately have happened anyway.
“The president recognizes that in order to get the big change that we need for America’s workers… we need to create enough pressure on our trading partners that things that American presidents have been asking for for the last decades are actually offered at the table,” he said.
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