Donald Trump said overnight that group of US trading partners, including the bloc, would get a letter ‘today or tomorrow’
The EU and financial markets are on nervous standby to see if Donald Trump will carry through with his latest threat to hike import duties to 15% or 20%.
If he does it would signal a breach of good faith in negotiations which intensified in the past 10 days and almost certainly lead to calls for counter tariffs.
Trade ministers meet in Brussels on Monday and are expected to agree to extend its current 90 day pause on retaliation if a deal is announced today or over the weekend.
It has threatened 25% tariff on more than €20bn worth of US imports but paused them to create space for negotiations.
On Thursday night Trump ramped up his assault on Canada declaring he would impose a 35% tariff on imports next month and planned to impose blanket tariffs of 15% or 20% on most other trading partners adding the EU and Canada could receive tariff letters by Friday.
“Not everybody has to get a letter. You know that. We’re just setting our tariffs,” Trump told NBC News.
“We’re just going to say all of the remaining countries are going to pay, whether it’s 20% or 15%. We’ll work that out now.”
The declaration will have exasperated EU leaders who were already resigned to taking a 10% tariff as the price of doing trade with Trump, an import duty rate five times the average rate that applied before he was inaugurated in January.
EU diplomats said an agreement in principle is effectively on Trump’s desk waiting to be approved since Wednesday, his original self-imposed deadline for a deal.
