USA – Donald Trump has announced a further 100 per cent tariff on all Chinese goods after Beijing imposed export restrictions on rare earth metals.
Trump added that he was ‘surprised’ that China would do this, given his ‘good relationship’ with President Xi Jinping.
“This is not something that I instigated, this was just a response to something that they did. They didn’t really aim it at us, they aimed it at the whole world. It was very bad,” he said in an Oval Office press conference on Friday.
Trump sparked a frantic Wall Street sell-off when he teased the tariff earlier in the day.
The S&P 500 dropped 2.71 percent — its largest one-day decline since the Liberation Day tariffs on April 10.
The Dow closed down 1.9 per cent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 3.56 per cent.
The president said Friday that it left his scheduled meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit with President Xi at the end of the month in question.
“I haven’t cancelled, but I don’t know that we’re going to have it – but I’m going to be there regardless,” he said.
China this week announced new export controls on rare earth minerals, which are vital in the AI arms race, semiconductors, defence and high-tech industries.
The Communist power controls 70 per cent of the global supply, and 90 per cent of the processing capacity, giving it huge leverage over the high-tech supply chain.
“It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they have and the rest is history,” Trump said.
Nearly all goods imported from China already face steep duties, ranging from 50 per cent on steel and aluminum to roughly 7.5 per cent on many consumer products.
Trump said the new 100 per cent tariff, set to take effect on November 1 along with export controls on critical software, will be added on top of existing rates, dramatically increasing the cost of imports.
The president suggested there could be even more products up for export controls to come.
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