Bessent hails ‘substantial progress’ as US-China talks wrap up

President Trump mentioned commerce negotiations with China can be “substantive” and contrasted the UK commerce negotiations with the extra strained relationship with Beijing and the European Union.

“We are able to all play video games,” Trump advised reporters on the Oval Workplace. “Who made the primary name? … Does not matter. It solely issues what occurs in that group. However I’ll let you know that China very a lot needs to make a deal.”

Prime US officers, together with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Commerce Consultant Jamieson Greer, are set to fulfill with Chinese language counterparts this weekend in Geneva, Switzerland, for preliminary talks. The aim is deescalation, fairly than progress on a selected commerce deal, Bessent mentioned.

On Wednesday, Trump mentioned that he wouldn’t make concessions to get China to the negotiating desk. However when requested on Thursday if China tariffs might be lowered, Trump mentioned they could be, relying on how commerce talks go.

“We’ll see,” Trump mentioned. “Proper now it is at 145%. You may’t get any greater than that, so we all know it is coming down.”

Extra broadly, Trump steered that extra commerce offers can be within the offing quickly.

“That is only the start,” Trump mentioned. “We’ll be having conferences, or, in some unspecified time in the future, we cannot have conferences, we simply put out a press release that we simply signed this nation, that nation. And after quite a lot of these are achieved — no one has sufficient individuals to do it — we’re simply going to place out, ‘X nation goes to pay this. And in the event that they open up, they are going to do that and that.'”