US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday he expects coming talks with China to yield a “big breakthrough” in trade relations, adding that aid for soybean farmers could be announced as soon as Tuesday.
Bessent made the upbeat predictions during an interview with CNBC.
“The most important thing we’re going to see,” the Treasury chief offered, is a pull-aside meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at a regional summit in South Korea later this month, adding that his own trade talks with Vice-Premier He Lifeng “should show a pretty big breakthrough.”
The sanguine remarks come as the world’s two biggest economies continue their efforts to resolve issues related to tariffs and broader ties, when an extended trade war ceasefire will last until November. Washington and Beijing have agreed to dial back the triple-digit levies slapped on each other’s goods in April and May.
From Zurich, London, Stockholm to Madrid, Bessent has led the US team for four rounds of meetings with He since May. Both sides are expected to huddle again before or in early November.
Citing sources, the Post reported on Thursday that the US could be “very comfortable” with the current rate of tariffs since the Trump administration remains focused on collecting revenues to fix the American fiscal deficit.
Recent negotiations with China, according to sources, have mostly revolved around “broader” issues like TikTok, subsidies, trade deficit and export controls.
On Monday, the Trump administration also slapped new tariffs on furniture imports and widened a blacklist of Chinese companies.
The slump in China’s exports to the US continued to widen in August, with a year-on-year decrease of 33.1 per cent, compared with a decline of 21.7 per cent in July. Indicating less dependence on America, China’s overall outbound shipments in August rose by 4.4 per cent year on year to US$321.8 billion.
Meanwhile, Trump will take steps to support American farmers hurt by a prolonged drought in orders from China, especially for soybeans.
The US leader said on Wednesday that soybeans would be a major topic of discussion when he meets with his Chinese counterpart, Xi, in four weeks, likely on the sidelines of the Apec summit.
“The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
The US president is said to be considering providing US$10 billion-US$14 billion aid, out from the tariff revenue, to help soybean farmers and other growers as they continue to reel from the impact from shrinking exports, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The report added that a deal with China to buy soybeans, which Trump aims to broker with Xi when they meet, could change Trump’s calculation about providing aid to farmers.
Widely seen as a negotiating tactic, China has been shunning the US crop when it is already the autumn harvest in America, even as both countries take steps to stabilise trade and broader relations.
The pause in purchases by the largest buyer of American farm products has cost billions of dollars in lost sales to American farmers from Nebraska to Iowa, who are staunch supporters of Trump and the Republican Party. Beijing has shifted the bulk of its orders this year to Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere.
In an admission of the prolonged plight facing soybean growers across the US, Bessent called this year’s yield so big that “we may run out of storage”.
Bessent said he had a meeting on Wednesday with Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and that an announcement would be made next Tuesday on support for American farmers and the soy sector in particular.
Trump signalled as much in a social media post on Wednesday, saying that the US has “made so much money on tariffs” that his administration is “going to take a small portion of that money and help our farmers”. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
