China blasts US for its computer chip moves and for threatening student visas
'These practices seriously violate the consensus' reached during trade discussions in Geneva last month, the Commerce Ministry said in a statement.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Why Dispo's co-founder made the leap from social media to steelmaking
Daniel Liss, co-founder of the social network Dispo and the dating app Teaser AI, is convinced he's onto the next big thing: steelmaking. It all started, incongruously, with a few op-eds he wrote for TechCrunch about anti-trust enforcement in social media. The commentaries apparently caught the attention of some folks in Washington D.C., Liss told TechCrunch, and resulted in him being invited to guest judge a war game capstone exercise in spring 2023 hosted by the National War College. The war game was very au courant, running a scenario in which the U.S. and China fought for supremacy over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Liss's take away from the exercise? 'Our core supply chain of the arsenal of democracy — literally, the ships that my grandfather fought in — we don't have the ship-building capacity. If we did, we don't have the steel to make it,' he said. At that point, Liss said he became 'really interested — obsessed, even' with the steel supply chain. 'That was really the birth of Nemo Industries.' The basic pitch for Nemo Industries, Liss's latest startup, appears as though it were drawn from a Venn diagram of two very American anxieties, steelmaking and AI. The company, until now, has been operating in stealth, but Liss gave TechCrunch a peek behind the scenes. First, the obvious part: Nemo will use AI to optimize the production of pig iron, modernizing an industry that Liss said is woefully outdated. 'These plants are run on, at best, Excel spreadsheets. At worst, clipboard technology,' he said. The people who run them have 'unbelievable expertise,' he added, but that's the sort of thing that doesn't scale well. But Liss isn't pitching Nemo as just another piece of industrial software. Rather, Nemo is planning to build its own furnaces. The decision was driven by Liss's conviction that companies which use AI from inception will have a '20% to 30% margin advantage' over competitors. In steelmaking, such conviction doesn't come cheap. Hyundai Motor Group said in March that it would build a $6 billion steel plant in Louisiana to supply its factories in the U.S. Nemo's plant may not cost that much since its operations will be focused on pig iron, an intermediate product which steelmakers use to make a range of different alloys. Nemo will fire its furnaces using natural gas, which releases less carbon dioxide than coal, which is commonly used in the iron and steel industry. Liss said the company is considering capturing the furnaces' carbon pollution; tax incentives introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act remain largely intact, and they make the endeavor profitable for Nemo, he said. Liss's partner in Nemo is Michael DuBose, an investor who previously worked at Cheniere Energy, a natural gas company. 'He's built billions of dollars in LNG infrastructure,' Liss said. The startup will need that sort of scale if it's to succeed. Nemo previously raised $28.2 million, according to PitchBook, and it is currently in talks with existing investors to raise a $100 million Series A with existing investors, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company also has received offers for over $1 billion in incentives from two southern states if the company can build three plants over the course of 15 years, the person said. It's a tall order for anyone to tackle, but Liss said that sort of ambition is required if the steel industry is going to deliver the sort of returns desired by venture capitalists. And, he added, basic industries like steel have historically delivered big wins for investors. 'When you look at the history of our country, many of the greatest companies that created outsize outcomes for their initial investors were in these categories,' Liss said. 'Ultimately, what were the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the Melons and the Fricks investing in? The dollar amounts are so big in these categories.'
Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
EU-US trade deal expected to confirm duty-free trade in spirits, French exporters say
PARIS (Reuters) -The French wine and spirits exporters' federation FEVS said on Monday the trade deal struck between the European Union and the United States was expected to confirm duty-free trade in spirits. Since April, U.S. duties on EU spirits had been provisionally set at 10%. As far as wine was concerned, not everything has been decided yet, the federation said, calling on the European Commission and France to obtain a cut in customs duties. "Disaster has been avoided, but the coming days will be crucial for the sector," FEVS said in a statement. "The agreement ... should confirm the restoration of bilateral trade free of duties for spirits, which we are eager to see confirmed in the official documents expected," said federation President Gabriel Picard. "When it comes to wines, everything is not yet settled: that is why we are encouraging the European Commission and France to fully commit to this final stretch, to obtain the reduction in customs duties on wines, a proposal supported by both American and European stakeholders," he added. According to a study by the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association, a 15% increase in customs duties on wines would result in the loss of 17,000 jobs and a loss of more than $2.5 billion worth of business in the United States. Under the framework deal, announced on Sunday between two economies accounting for almost a third of global trade, the U.S. will impose a 15% import tariff on most EU goods from next month, but it offers some protection for critical industries such as cars and pharmaceuticals. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump is getting the world economy he wants -- but the risk to growth could spoil his victory lap
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is getting his way with the world economy. Trading partners from the European Union to Japan to Vietnam appear to be acceding to the president's demands to accept higher costs — in the form of high tariffs — for the privilege of selling their wares to the United States. For Trump, the agreements driven by a mix of threats and cajoling, are a fulfillment of a decades-long belief in protectionism and a massive gamble that it will pay off politically and economically with American consumers. On Sunday, the United States and the 27-member state European Union announced that they had reached a trade framework agreement: The EU agreed to accept 15% U.S. tariffs on most its goods, easing fears of a catastrophic trans-Atlantic trade war. There were also commitments by the EU to buy $750 billion in U.S. energy products and make $600 billion in new investments through 2028, according to the White House. 'We just signed a very big trade deal, the biggest of them all,' Trump said Monday. But there's no guarantee that Trump's radical overhaul of U.S. trade policy will deliver the happy ending he's promised. The framework agreement was exceedingly spare on details. Most trade deals require months and even years of painstaking negotiation that rise and fall on granular details. High-stakes negotiations break Trump's way Financial markets, at first panicked by the president's protectionist agenda, seem to have acquiesced to a world in which U.S. import taxes — tariffs — are at the highest rates they've been in roughly 90 years. Several billion in new revenues from his levies on foreign goods are pouring into the U.S. Treasury and could somewhat offset the massive tax cuts he signed into law on July 4. Outside economists say that high tariffs are still likely to raise prices for American consumers, dampen the Federal Reserve's ability to lower interest rates and make the U.S. economy less efficient over time. Democrats say the middle class and poor will ultimately pay for the tariffs. 'It's pretty striking that it's seen as a sigh of relief moment,' said Daniel Hornung, a former Biden White House economic official who now holds fellowships at Housing Finance Policy Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'But if the new baseline across all trading partners is 15%, that is a meaningful drag on growth that increases recession risks, while simultaneously making it harder for the Fed to cut.' The EU agreement came just four days after Japan also agreed to 15% U.S. tariffs and to invest in the United States. Earlier, the United States reached deals that raised tariffs on imports from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom considerably from where they'd been before Trump returned to the White House. More one-sided trade deals are likely as countries try to beat a Friday deadline after which Trump will impose even higher tariffs on countries that refuse to make concessions. Trump's long-held theory now faces reality The U.S. president has long claimed that America erred by not taking advantage of its clout as the world's biggest economy and erecting a wall of tariffs, in effect making other countries ante up for access to America's massive consumer market. To his closest aides, Trump's use of tariffs has validated their trust in his skills as a negotiator and their belief that the economists who warned of downturns and inflation were wrong. Stocks rose slightly on Monday morning on tariffs that once seemed unthinkably risky. 'Where are the 'experts' now?' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on X. But the story is not over. For one thing, many of the details of Trump's trade deals remain somewhat hazy and have not been captured in writing. The U.S. and Japan, for instance, have offered differing descriptions of Japan's agreement to invest $550 billion in the United States. 'The trade deals do seem to count as a qualified win for Trump, with other countries giving the U.S. favorable trade terms while accepting U.S. tariffs,' said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist. "However, certain terms of the deals, such as other countries' investments in the U.S., seem more promising in the abstract than they might prove in reality over time.'' Trump is also facing a court challenge from states and businesses arguing that the president overstepped his authority by declaring national emergencies to justify the tariffs on most of the world's economies. In May, a federal court struck down those tariffs. And an appeals court, which agreed to let the government continue collecting the tariffs for now, will hear oral arguments in the case Thursday. And he's yet to reach an accord with China — which has deftly used the threat of retaliatory tariffs and withholding exports of rare earth minerals that are desperately needed for electric vehicles, computer chips and wind turbines to avoid caving in to Trump's demands. The U.S. and China are talking this week in Stockholm, Sweden. Economists remain skeptical of the impacts for US consumers There is also skepticism that tariffs will produce the economic boom claimed by Trump. Analysts at Morgan Stanley said 'the most likely outcome is slow growth and firm inflation,' but not a recession. After all, the 15% tariffs on the EU and Japan are a slight increase from the 10% rate that Trump began charging in April during a negotiation period. While autos made in the EU and Japan will no longer face the 25% tariffs Trump had imposed, they will still face a 15% tax that has yet to appear in prices at U.S. dealerships. The administration has said the lack of auto price increases suggests that foreign producers are absorbing the costs, but it might ultimately just reflect the buildup of auto inventories to front-run the import taxes. 'Dealers built stocks ahead of tariff implementation, damping the immediate impact on retail prices. That cushion is starting to wear thin,' Morgan Stanley said in a separate note. 'Our Japan auto analyst notes that as pre-tariff inventory clears, replacement vehicles will likely carry higher price tags.' Economist Mary Lovely of the Peterson Institute for International Economics warned of a 'slow-burn efficiency loss'' as U.S. companies scramble to adjust to Trump's new world. For decades, American companies have mostly paid the same tariffs – and often none at all – on imported machinery and raw materials from all over the world. Now, as a result of Trump's trade deals, tariffs vary by country. 'U.S. firms have to change their designs and get inputs from different places based on these variable tariff rates,'' she said. 'It's an incredible administrative burden. There's all these things that are acting as longer-term drags on economy, but their effect will show up only slowly.'' Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said that the United States' effective tariff rate has risen to 17.5% from around 2.5% at the start of the year. 'I wouldn't take a victory lap,'' Zandi said. 'The economic damage caused by the higher tariffs will mount in the coming months.'' Josh Boak And Paul Wiseman, The Associated Press Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
