US President Donald Trump appeared poised to announce trade deals and deliver tariff warnings on Monday. Through the weekend, the EU (and other countries worldwide) negotiated frantically to avoid the highest punitive measures on their exports to the US before the Wednesday deadline.
The timeline for the talks appeared to be reset after US officials signaled that trading partners will have until 1 August before the tariffs kick in. That would give them the option of three more weeks for dealmaking.
For weeks, the administration warned that Trump would impose levies on July 9 for countries failing to secure an accord, reverting to the levels announced on 2 April. The European Union said that some progress toward securing a deal had materialised, and that the bloc was still working toward the Wednesday deadline.
Last-ditch efforts
Some European Union carmakers and capitals are pushing for an agreement with President Donald Trump that would allow for tariff relief in return for increasing investment in the US, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Member states learnt about the updated status of trade negotiations on Friday after a round of talks in Washington this week, and heard that a technical agreement in principle was close, the sources said.
Time is running out. – Friedrich Merz, German Bundeskanzler
The EU has until July 9 to clinch a trade arrangement with Trump before tariffs on nearly all of its exports to the US jump to 50 per cent. Mr Trump has imposed tariffs on almost all US trading partners, saying he wanted to bring back domestic manufacturing, needed to pay for a tax-cut extension and stop other countries from taking advantage of the US.
US and EU officials kept negotiating over the weekend, Bloomberg’s sources said. European Commission spokesperson Olof Gill said EU officials could see “progress towards an Agreement in Principle during the latest round of negotiations which took place this week” and “the Commission will now re-engage with US on substance over the weekend.” Mr Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke on Sunday and had a “good exchange,” the spokesman then said in Brussels on Monday.
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Short on time
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the weekend discussed how to resolve the US trade dispute in separate phone calls with Ms von der Leyen as well as counterparts from France and Italy, a government spokesman told reporters in Berlin on Monday. “Time is running out,” Mr Merz’s chief spokesman Stefan Kornelius told a regular government news conference in Berlin. He added that Germany continues to support the Commission’s strategy in the negotiations with the US. “It’s a complex matrix of factors that we need to take into account.”
