Ana Swanson and Alan Rappeport (New York Times)
The United States and China have settled on final terms of a phase one trade deal, moving both countries closer to signing a pact that President Donald Trump originally announced in October, four people familiar with the negotiations said.
Trump met with his top economic advisers at the White House on December 12 to discuss an arrangement that would slash the overall rate on the tariffs he has placed on $360 billion of goods by half, in return for Chinese commitments to purchase American agriculture and other concessions, the people said.
The president was widely expected to announce that he would delay or cancel new tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on $160 billion of consumer products from China as of December 15. On the morning of December 12, he tweeted that the United States was closing in on a trade deal with China.
“Getting VERY close to a BIG DEAL with China. They want it, and so do we!” the president wrote on Twitter.
Trump has yet to make an official announcement, and some advisers have cautioned that the president is the final arbiter of whether there will be a deal. Both sides have said they were on the verge of a deal before, only to see those agreements collapse.
The Chinese embassy in Washington directed inquiries to the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing.
Stocks rose to a record the same day with the S&P 500 gaining nearly 0.9 percent, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note touched 1.91 percent, the highest level in almost a month.
The benchmark has been trading in record territory as investors anticipated a de-escalation of the trade war, and amid signs that the domestic economy is holding up.
“We’re encouraged that China and the United States seem on the verge of a breakthrough on the phase-one negotiations,” said Myron Brilliant, the executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “If accurate, it would be a positive first step in improving our commercial relationship at a time of great uncertainty.”
Trump announced in October that the United States and China had reached an agreement in principle on the first phase of a trade deal. But in the weeks since, a concrete agreement had proved elusive as the two countries continued to grapple over its precise terms.
Chinese negotiators pushed their American counterparts to remove as many of the existing tariffs as possible, while the Trump administration pushed China to make more purchases of soybeans, poultry and other goods to help relieve the pressure the trade war has put on American farmers.
To ensure that China keeps its commitments, the Trump administration has insisted on quarterly reviews, as well as an agreement that China’s agricultural purchases would not drop below a certain amount. If China violates the terms of the agreement, tariffs that the Trump administration had removed would snap back into place.
China has been willing to discuss purchases of American agriculture, especially since a disease has devastated its swine population and led to spiraling pork prices. But in previous discussions, Chinese negotiators had pushed back against promising set purchase amounts far off into the future, saying such an arrangement could anger its trading partners and violate its commitments to the World Trade Organization to treat all members equally.
Some of Trump’s advisers have argued that the president does not need China to commit to the full $40 billion to 50 billion of agricultural purchases that he said he had secured earlier this year. Instead, they say, Trump should focus on getting China to purchase more than the record of $26 billion of agricultural goods it bought in 2012, which would allow him to claim on the campaign trail that he had secured the biggest trade deal with China ever. The deal would also require China to strengthen its protections for American intellectual property and open its financial markets to foreign firms, among other changes.
In recent months, American and Chinese officials have been locked in a contentious discussion of what proportion of U.S. concerns about Chinese economic practices are being addressed in the Phase 1 deal, and whether a corresponding proportion of Trump’s tariffs should be rolled back. The Chinese had enumerated the U.S. requests into a list of more than 100 items, and have argued that if they resolve half of them, then half of Trump’s existing tariffs should be removed.
Some American analysts have criticized the approach, saying a significant reduction could leave the United States with less leverage for the second- and third-phase discussions that are planned in the future, in which even more difficult subjects like Chinese subsidies would be included. They also point to the depreciation in China’s currency, the renminbi, this year, saying that drop would almost offset the impact of the tariffs.
But others say an across-the-board reduction in the rate of all existing tariffs does offer the U.S. some advantages, including not having to pick and choose between industries that would receive tariff relief.
Myanmar Summary
အမေရိကန်နှင့် တရုတ်နိုင်ငံတို့သည် ကုန်သွယ်ရေးသဘောတူစာချုပ် အဆင့်တစ်၏ နောက်ဆုံး အချက်များကို သဘောတူလိုက်ပြီဖြစ်သည်။ ထိုကဲ့သို့ သဘောတူလိုက်ခြင်းကြောင်း အမေရိကန်သမ္မတ Donald Trump က အောက်တိုဘာလတွင် ကြေညာထားသော စာချုပ်လက်မှတ်ရေးထိုးနိုင်ရေးဆီသို့ နီးစပ်သွားပြီဖြစ်ကြောင်း အဆိုပါ ကိစ္စနှင့် ပတ်သက်၍ ရင်းနှီးသူများက ဆိုသည်။
Trump သည် သူ၏ ထိပ်တန်း စီးပွားရေး အကြံပေးများကို ဒီဇင်ဘာလ ၁၂ ရက်နေ့က အိမ်ဖြူတော်တွင် တွေ့ဆုံခဲ့ကာ တရုတ်ကုန်စည်များအပေါ် ချမှတ်ထားသည့် အမေရိကန်ဒေါ်လာ ၃၆၀ ဘီလီယံ သွင်းကုန်အခွန်များကို ထက်ဝက်လျှော့ချပြီး တရုတ်ဘက်ကလည်း အမေရိကန်က ထုတ်လုပ်သည့် စိုက်ပျိုးရေးထုတ်ကုန်များနှင့် အခြား ကုန်စည်များကို ပိုမိုဝယ်ယူရမည့် သဘောတူညီမှုကို ဆွေးနွေးခဲ့သည်ဟု အဆိုပါ အရင်းအမြစ်များက ပြောကြာသည်။
အမေရိကန်သမ္မတအနေဖြင့် ဒီဇင်ဘာလ ၁၅ ရက်နေ့တွင် တရုတ်နိုင်ငံမှ ထုတ်ကုန်များအပေါ် အမေရိကန်ဒေါ်လာ ၁၆၀ ဘီလီယံ သွင်းကုန်အခွန်များကို ဆိုင်းငံ့ကြောင်း၊ သို့မဟုတ် ပယ်ဖျက်ကြောင်း ကြေညာလိမ့်မည်ဟု မျှော်လင့်ထားကြသည်။ ဒီဇင်ဘာလ ၁၂ ရက်နေ့တွင်တော့ အမေရိကန်သမ္မတ Trump က အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံအနေဖြင့် တရုတ်နိုင်ငံနှင့် ကုန်သွယ်ရေး သဘောတူညီချက်ရရှိရန် နီးစပ်နေပြီဖြစ်ကြောင်း တွစ်တာတွင် ရေးသားခဲ့သည်။
သို့သော် တရားဝင် ကြေညာချက်တော့ ထုတ်ပြန်ထားခြင်းမရှိသေးပေ။ အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံဆိုင်ရာ တရုတ်သံရုံးသို့ ဆက်သွယ်မေးမြန်းခဲ့ရာတွင် တရုတ်နိုင်ငံရှိ ကုန်သွယ်ရေးဝန်ကြီးဌာနကိုသာ မေးမြန်းရန် အကြောင်းပြန်ခဲ့သည်။
ထိုနေ့တွင် စတော့ရှယ်ယာ ဈေးနှုန်းများ တက်လာခဲ့ပြီး S&P 500 ၏ စတော့ဈေးမှာ သုညဒသမ ၉ ရာခိုင်နှုန်း တိုးတက်လာခဲ့ပြီး ၁၀ နှစ်သက်တမ်း ငွေတိုက်လက်မှတ်များကတော့ ၁ဒသမ၉၁ ရာခိုင်နှုန်း တက်လာခဲ့သည်။ အဆိုပါ ပမာဏမှာ တစ်လအတွင်း အမြင့်ဆုံးတက်ခဲ့ခြင်းလည်းဖြစ်သည်။
