00:00 Speaker A
President Trump is in deal mode Ben, it would seem for talks with China next week. What what do we need to know?
00:08 Ben
Yeah, so as as Lou mentioned, we’re looking ahead to to some of the to trade negotiations. We actually have two big high profile talks on in the offing in the coming days. The first of is actually on Sunday. What we learned this afternoon is that Trump is gonna take advantage of a trip to Scotland this weekend to also meet with the European Union, the European Commission president. He’s gonna be visit him on Sunday for talks for for the latest round of talks there. These are of course with the whole with the entire block, which is America’s largest trading partner. And what we’ve seen is they kind of negotiators report after report after report of them being close to a deal that currently is about at a 15% rate with some exceptions, but they’ve been at the proverbial five yard line for weeks now literally. Um and then the question being whether this can be another round to to push them over the line ahead of this August 1st deadline. And then as you mentioned, right on the follow on that is on Monday is China. The Treasury Secretary Scott Beason will lead the team to Sweden to meet with China um to with the Chinese negotiators. And that the main agenda item there is to implement another 90-day pause on tariffs. The that what we we would have a tariff snapback on August 12th, if there’s no action there. So the markets are clearly watching that the most closely to make sure that that that a tariff pause continues as the negotiators try to set the stage for a meeting between President Trump and President Xi, um presumably by this fall. Um there’s a whole lot of other issues on the table with with um China. One I want to flag because Jared mentioned it was currency. Trump had some really kind of sharp comments on the dollar and the the Chinese currency today. So that could be a flash point to watch on Monday and Tuesday when they’re when they sit down.
04:13 Speaker A
You know, but Ben, you’re mentioning that the trade talks there with China, with with the EU. I’m also interested to hear more about Japan, uh Ben, and just what do we know about how those talks are progressing, Ben, and how the two sides, how the US and Japan are thinking through that deal.
04:58 Ben
Yeah, so if you think of Europe and China has two steps forward, this Japan deal in the last couple hours has kind of taken a step back a little bit. This was one of the biggest developments of this week, a pact with Japan that would lower tariffs to 15% on a range of goods as well as autos. But what we have is really distant messages from the White House side and from the Japanese side about exactly what was agreed to. There’s no full text of a deal here. The big issue here is this $550 billion investment vehicle that Trump has touted as the centerpiece of the deal in a lot of ways from for his view. Um he’s described it as a signing bonus for the US. Other AIDS have described it as a sovereign wealth fund essentially, a a huge influx of money. The Japanese really are not are describing it as something very different. They they describe it as more of a handshake agreement to find areas of mutually beneficial investment for US and Japanese companies. So there’s a real disagreement there and it could and it it could sort of complicate this deal, but it’s also important because this provision is clearly a favorite of Trump and he’s looking to include it in a lot of others. He had some comments earlier today that suggests that he might be looking to include it with Europe as well. So we’ll see on that front exactly what was agreed to and whether he includes it with others as well.
