According to US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the US is not limited to a specific date to sign the first phase of a trade pact with China and it is crucially important to ultimately work out the right deal. The investor and commerce secretary went on to note "they are in a better place on US-China trade deal" thanks to resumed talks.
"It has to be the right deal, and it doesn't have to be in November," Ross told Fox Business Network in a television interview, adding resolutely: "It's more critical that it be a proper deal that exactly when it occurs."
In parallel comments, White House aide and American financial analyst Larry Kudlow told Fox News that if phase one of the US-China trade talks are productive and "go well", the threatened December tariffs could be taken off the table.
The world's two biggest economies reached a limited deal last week seeking to end the trade war that has hugely impacted global markets, as the two has been exchanging a whole number of tariff exchanges vis-a-vis the countries' locally produced goods adn their exports.
Both sides are currently working toward a written agreement. Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, the chief negotiator in the contonuing trade talks, told a virtual reality conference in Nanchang, the key financial and cultural hub in Jiangxi province, that China and the US arrived at “substantial progress in many fields, laying an important foundation for the signing of a phased agreement.”
Per the International Monetary Fund's estimates, a tentative trade deal reached by Washington and Beijing last week could reduce the harm done by tit-for-tat tariffs over the past 15 months, limiting the damage for the global growth to 0.6%.
For the time being, the damage is being particularly felt in European countries which “rely on exports and are open to trade,” the European Union’s Economic and Financial Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici pointed out.
The fallout from Trump's tariffs is meanwhile expected to slow down global growth in 2019 to 3.0%, the slowest pace in a decade, the IMF estimated last week.
