Both sides can claim victory in US-EU tariff deal, but devil may be in detail

Yahoo

7 hours ago

After weeks of tense negotiations between their top trade officials, the EU and US have finally struck a deal - and it comes on the eve of America's latest round of tariff talks with China.
Ultimately it took leaders from Washington and Brussels to sit down face to face to reach Sunday's agreement.
That's something we've also seen with the other deals that President Donald Trump has struck - his personal involvement is what has pushed them over the line – even when the prospects of a breakthrough did not seem bright.
This matters to both sides because so many businesses and jobs depend on what the EU calls "the world's largest bilateral trade and investment relationship".
Both President Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen can paint this as something of a victory.
For the EU, the tariffs could have been worse at 15%, rather than the 30% that had been threatened – although it's not as good as the UK's 10% rate.
For the US that equates to the expectation of roughly $90bn (£67bn) of tariff revenue for government coffers – based on last year's trade figures - plus there's $600bn of investment now due to come into the country.
A lot of other big numbers have been thrown around in terms of how much the EU will invest in the US, but the devil will be in the detail.
Questions like exactly when those investments will be made, and in what areas, are for now, unanswered.
This deal is being sold as a landmark moment in relations between the US and the EU.
It has not been easy getting to this point.
Washington and the 27-nation bloc have both played hardball and neither was ready to give in easily, which is why these talks went down to the wire.
But neither side wanted these negotiations to drag on beyond the 1 August deadline.
For years, the US president has railed against what he regards as Europe's unfair trade practices.
The first part of that is the deficit. Last year that meant the US bought $236bn of goods more from the EU than it sold to the bloc.
Trump takes the somewhat simplified view that this is American wealth needlessly leaving the country. The reality is that international trade is a more complex affair.
The other complaint has been that the EU's strict regulations on everything from cars to chickens make it harder for American companies to sell their products in the EU than the other way round.
When we get more details of this deal, we may know how much has been done to address that.
But European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen seemed to acknowledge the need to tackle the deficit.
In announcing the agreement, she said: "We have to rebalance it. We have an excellent trade relation.
"It's a huge volume of trade that we have together. So we will make it more sustainable."
This deal shows how serious President Trump is about renegotiating how the US, the world's biggest economy, does business with everyone else.
Given the EU consists of 27 very different countries, it has seemed one of the trickier trade agreements to pull off.
It comes days after the US struck another major agreement with Japan - there have also been deals with the UK, Vietnam and Indonesia.
The other big ones still on the table are with the three biggest US trade partners - Mexico, Canada and China.
And with the US president in a deal-making mood, there could be more positive news for the global economy over the next 48 hours.
For the third time in as many months, the US and China are holding their next trade talks in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday and Tuesday
There is some expectation that higher tariffs could be suspended for another 90 days.
A few days ago Trump said the US was "getting along with China very well" and implied that the major sticking point of rare earth metals exports had been overcome.
With the broad outlines of an EU agreement in the hold, Washington's trade negotiators have the wind in their sails going into talks with Beijing.
But China has so far taken a more uncompromising approach than other US trade partners.
And if talks between the world's two biggest economies falter, global trade could still be heading for choppy waters in the months ahead.
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