US Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, leaves his hotel to attend a meeting with Chinese officials on the prices in Geneva on Saturday.
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images
hide
tilting legend
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images
GENEVA – Managers of the United States and China began trade-related talks here on Saturday, marking the first face-to-face conversations since President Trump has placed new 145% prices on Chinese products.
The meetings of a Swiss city known for its discretion and conflict resolution represent the first potential efforts to put an end to a trade war that has erased the financial markets in recent weeks, and has caused billions of dollars of import disturbances to the United States and China.
The American delegation is led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, alongside the commercial representative Jamieson Greer, and the only participant that the Chinese has confirmed is the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, Il Lifeng.
The talks take place in a large villa at the top of a hill with a panoramic view of the Lake Geneva used by the Swiss ambassador to the United Nations. None of the parties has published public statements since the start of talks early Saturday.
Only a few days before these discussions on seismic economic importance, the United Kingdom has become the first country to conclude its own limited trade agreement with the Trump administration – although the one who left rates of 10% still in place on most British exports.
But for Bessent, China was the “missing piece”, as he explained in a recent interview on Fox News – one of the only countries to have so far refused to take discussion on trade.
Bessent said that he originally visited Geneva to get closer to a separate trading arrangement and updated with the Swiss authorities. They told journalists at a press conference on Friday that they hoped that their own agreement with Washington could be struck in a few weeks.
In the meantime, Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, said that her country was happy to help facilitate dialogue between the two world economic superpowers, at a time when the planned prices have weighed heavily on stock prices and economic forecasts.
“Now the opportunity has been seized by China and the United States,” Keller-Sutter told NPR. “We really hope that this platform that we can offer will also result in a result, because it would be in interest, I would say, the global economy and world trade.”
On Friday, on his arrival in Geneva, Bessent had met senior Swiss officials, including Keller-Sutter. She told him that she hoped that the Holy Spirit who had visited Rome last week – during the election of a new Pope – could also go to Geneva this weekend, to help push things.
But a fast resolution seems unlikely, and this initial set of conversations could simply announce the start of a several -month negotiation marathon, explains Dmitry Grozoubinski, former diplomat and sales negotiator for Australia.
“The two delegations will feel each other – none of the parties particularly benefit from this current iteration of the trade war,” said Grozoubinski, now executive director of the Think Tank of the Geneva commercial platform.
“It will be the first steps of a dance where they try to feel:” OK, what a victory would look like, and it is a price that we are ready to pay “, while trying to communicate the same thing in the other direction,” he said.
