“China’s war games around Taiwan have led Biden administration officials to recalibrate their thinking on whether to scrap some tariffs or potentially impose others on Beijing, setting those options aside for now, according to sources familiar with the deliberations,” said Reuters in late Wednesday.
Key quotes
President Joe Biden has not made a decision on the issue, officials said.
‘I think Taiwan has changed everything,’ said one source familiar with the latest developments in the process, details of which have not been previously reported.
The Biden administration’s next steps could have a significant impact on hundreds of billions of dollars of trade between the world’s two largest economies.
As US officials considered getting rid of some of the tariffs, they sought reciprocal rollbacks from Beijing and were rebuffed, two sources said.
One of the sources, who said a unilateral removal of some U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports has been put on hold, said this was done in part because China failed to show any willingness to take reciprocal actions or meet its “Phase 1” trade deal commitments.
Biden has been concerned about rolling back tariffs in part because of labor, which is a key constituency for him, and because of China’s failure to buy the products it had agreed to purchase, according to the first source.
FX reactions
The news seemed to have probed the market’s optimism led by the downbeat US inflation data published for July, a few hours back. However, no major reaction could be witnessed.
Read: Forex Today: Dollar plunges on easing inflation
