President Trump’s threatened prices against Mexico, Canada and China entered into force on Saturday evening.
By slapming a 25% price on Mexico and Canada at the same time, Trump adopts a more aggressive strategy against the neighbors of the nation than in his first administration. At that time, he adopted a more targeted approach to specific industries, such as steel and aluminum. China, for the moment, is only taken with a price of 10%.
This time, prices seem to apply to most categories, although oil and gas seem to be exempt at the moment. Trump told journalists on Friday that he already structured his next series of prices.
“We are going to put prices on oil and gas. It will happen soon. Think around February 18 and we are going to put a lot of prices on steel, “said Trump of the White House on Friday.
By announcing the prices on Saturday, the White House added that there was a “reprisal clause” added to the measures.
“Thus, if a country chooses to retaliate in any way, the signal will be to take additional measures with regard to the probably increased prices,” said the White House.
The oil prices would have the most impact on Canada, which sends approximately 97% of all its gross oil exports to the United States, according to Canada’s energy regulator. Trump also suggested on Friday that he would tariff China’s micropuces in his next series of prices, strengthening trade barriers on critical technology in the race on artificial intelligence.
Gregory Daco, chief economist at Ernst & Young, said that the taxation of prices “to major trade partners would have serious economic consequences” for the United States, Mexico and Canada, and could lead to an environment at the times a higher inflation environment and also an environmental drop in growth due to the importance of trade with these two economies. »»
He added: “We tend to think a lot about goods as automobile products, furniture items and these types of heavy equipment. But we must not forget that we are also doing a lot of trade on the agricultural front. We could therefore see upward pressure for the prices of meat, upward pressure for the prices of dairy products. These are the types of categories that directly strike consumers’ portfolios. »»
After meeting the CEO of the Nvidia flea manufacturer, Jensen Huang, Trump said: “Finally, we are going to put prices on the tokens.” He provided few details beyond that.
The United States is already applying export controls that restrict the most powerful micropuces in China, as US companies like OPENAI are trying to revive AI challenges in Chinese applications like Deepseek.
