President Trump and his team have been aggressive this week in touting their ambitious efforts to strike trade deals.
“We are doing well with every country,” the president said Tuesday afternoon, noting how investors seemed to be noticing: “I see the stock market was up nicely.”
But the claims — which have indeed helped spur a market boost that continued Wednesday morning — haven’t yet been backed by concrete signs of progress.
The closest thing to public receipts, as Trump officials like to say, are agreements that essentially boil down to a plan to begin formal talks. The term of art in one recent back and forth was the finalizing of “terms of reference for the trade negotiation.”
And it’s unclear the status of other major talks — especially with China.
“We’re talking to China,” offered Trump last week before sidestepping that question Tuesday and then saying Wednesday “everything is active.”
That last comment came at roughly the same time that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters in a roundtable that tariffs between the US and China need to come down first before talks can begin between the two economies.
“We are engaged in meaningful discussions and look forward to talking with others,” Bessent added Wednesday in a speech. “China in particular is in need of a rebalancing.”
China had previously signaled it wanted to wait on formal talks until it saw things like more “respect.”
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Guo Jiakun responded to Trump’s recent comments Tuesday by saying, according to a translation, “We don’t want a trade war, but we are not afraid of one.” Yet, he added, “Our doors are wide open.”
These plans and a flood of accompanying optimistic language boosted stock prices alongside a series of signs that Trump is easing back on some of his hard-line tariff signals, including a new Wall Street Journal report Wednesday that he is considering cutting rates on China.
Secretary Bessent declined to comment on that report Wednesday, saying he would be surprised if discussions on slashing tariffs by the administration are happening, noting, “No unilateral offer from the president to deescalate, not at all.”
He instead wants tariffs to decline in a “mutual way,” but perhaps the question is how patient markets will continue to be amid what former Treasury official Brad Setser recently described as a “consistent gap” between White House rhetoric and the apparent status in actual talks.
“I think the administration has been spinning a bit too hard here,” added Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a recent Yahoo Finance appearance. “They want to give the stock market a little bit of hope, but the actual negotiations don’t seem to be moving nearly as fast.”
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