President Trump announced plans to lower tariffs on Chinese goods, with the aim of facilitating ongoing negotiations. The new tariff baseline would be 10% for 90 days, allowing for further discussion. He also retracted previous threats to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
The deal will be crafted by Trump, Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Lutnick. While Trump did not explicitly mention Peter Navarro, other individuals will reportedly be involved in the negotiations. No timeline for the negotiations was provided.
The IMF noted significant global economic slowdown due to Trump's tariffs, including a drop in US growth forecasts from 2.7% to 1.8%, and a reduction in Australia's projected growth. The IMF, however, did not forecast a US recession.
Trump said the deal would be crafted by himself, Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick – who this month counselled the president to wind back his so-called reciprocal tariffs to a baseline of 10 per cent for 90 days – to allow for negotiation.
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He said “others” would also be involved but did not mention by name his senior trade and manufacturing aide Peter Navarro, the hard-line tariff enthusiast.
The president gave no indication of a timeline or deadline for those negotiations to take place.
He also backtracked on earlier threats to oust Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, whom he has strongly criticised for being “too slow” to lower US interest rates. Trump said he had given no consideration to sacking Powell and “never did”.
“I have no intention of firing him. I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates. This is a perfect time to lower interest rates. If he doesn’t, is it the end? No, it’s not.”
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Last week, Trump said he was not happy with Powell and if he wanted Powell out, he would be out “real fast”.
The comments came after Bessent addressed a private meeting at JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest investment bank, in Washington on Tuesday and reportedly acknowledged the trade war with China was not sustainable.
“I do say China is going to be a slog in terms of the negotiations,” Bessent said according to a transcript obtained by The Associated Press. “Neither side thinks the status quo is sustainable.”
Meanwhile, world bankers and economists gathered at the International Monetary Fund in Washington heard the IMF was forecasting a significant slowdown in global growth due to Trump’s tariffs, and had slashed its US growth forecast from 2.7 per cent to 1.8 per cent, partly due to the tariff program.
The IMF also cut Australia’s 2025 growth forecast from 2.1 per cent to 1.6 per cent, a cost to the economy of about $13 billion.
IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourincha said the fund was not forecasting a US recession because the US economy was “coming from a position of strength”.
But the economy was already cooling off, and only 0.4 percentage point of the 0.9 per cent reduction in forecast growth was attributed to the tariffs, he said.
With AP
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