White House Official Says More Than 15 Countries Have Made Trade Deal Offers

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

A senior White House trade official said that more than 15 countries made trade deal offers to the Trump administration after reciprocal tariffs were announced last week, and before President Donald Trump paused the duties on Wednesday.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told reporters at the White House on Thursday that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative “has informed us that there are maybe 15 countries now that have made explicit offers that we’re studying and considering and deciding whether they’re good enough to present [to] the president.”

In an interview with CNBC, Hassett on Thursday said, “We’ve got a few deals that we’ve been working on ahead of this that are really, really well advanced.”

In comments to Fox News, he said that the 90-day pause announced by Trump was part of the president’s plan all along.

Trump said on Wednesday that he paused the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days on every country except China—which now faces a total tariff rate of 145 percent on all goods—to give U.S. trading partners, who contacted the White House to negotiate, space to reach agreements. 

A baseline 10 percent tariff on all countries remains in effect, White House officials later said.

Hassett confirmed on Thursday that the 10 percent tariff will remain in effect as part of trade talks.

“It is going to take some kind of extraordinary deal for the president to go below” the baseline, he said.

Elaborating on why Trump acted when he did, Hassett told Fox News that the president may have been influenced by a recent increase in U.S. government bond yields.

“Everything was moving, but then when the bond market started to say, ‘Hey, we don’t believe these guys,’ I think the president decided on his own really, that, well, we’re gonna announce this anyway, we might as well do it today,” he said. 

“There’s a little bit of an extra push for the bond market.”

Trump on Wednesday indicated that investor concerns played a role in his decision to announce the pause earlier that day.

“I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” the president said during remarks at the White House. “They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”

Trump’s tariffs pause on Wednesday, which came hours after the new tariffs kicked in for many trading partners, followed an intense episode of financial market volatility not seen in years.

After the decision, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up by 2,900 points, while both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 posted similarly high gains. As of Thursday morning, all three major U.S. stock indexes saw declines.

The European Union’s executive commission said on Thursday that it will put its retaliatory measures against new U.S. tariffs on hold for 90 days to match Trump’s pause and to leave room for a negotiated solution.

New tariffs on 20.9 billion euros ($23 billion) of U.S. goods entering the EU will be put on hold for 90 days because “we want to give negotiations a chance,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement.