Washington D.C, May 15, 2024 – China appears to still be weighing how it will respond to sweeping new tariffs on Chinese imports, but Joe Biden told Yahoo Finance that a retaliation is likely coming.
“I don’t think it’ll lead to any international conflict or anything like that, but I think they’ll probably try to figure out how they can raise tariffs, maybe on products that are unrelated,” Bident said in an exclusive Yahoo Finance interview.
The president said he expected the coming trade conflict to be manageable, telling Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi that China is “way over their skis on this.”
The stakes for the US are high, Biden added. He says China’s goal is to flood markets with cheap government-underwritten goods as an attempt to “put everybody else out of business and then they take over.”
Biden’s duties announced Tuesday are set to be quickly felt on a specific range of incoming Chinese goods, from electricity vehicles to semiconductors to medical products and more.
But experts say any response from China is likely to look very different. That’s because the US sends a much different (and not to mention smaller) basket of goods China’s way.
“The simple fact is that the Chinese are just not buying much from the United States,” notes Ashley Craig, a Washington, D.C.-based international trade lawyer.
But, like the Chinese retaliation that happened during the Trump era, that is likely to mean a few prominent American sectors could feel the pinch most acutely.
That could, for example, mean an impact on makers of machinery: “Caterpillar (CAT) comes to mind,” Craig said.
The response is also likely to target farmers looking to sell their crops overseas as well as the makers of other goods like chemicals.
Biden’s Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, responded to Biden’s announcement Tuesday outside of his hush money trial in New York, charging that Biden should introduce 100% tariffs on all Chinese vehicles and adding “China is eating our lunch right now.”
Asked about Trump’s comment Tuesday at the White House, Biden shot back that Trump “has been feeding them for a long time.”
For its part, China’s Foreign Ministry has already responded multiple times in recent days to Biden’s tariffs but offered little in the way of details.
On Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin reiterated to reporters that China opposes the move and “will take all measures necessary to defend our legitimate rights and interests.” (Yahoo Finance)
