WASHINGTON – Three of President Donald Trump’s top aides will face their Chinese counterparts in London on June 9 for talks to resolve a trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies that has kept global markets on edge.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will represent Washington in the talks, said Mr Trump, who announced the talks in a post on his Truth Social platform but provided no more details.
It was not immediately clear who would represent China. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more details.
“The meeting should go very well,” Mr Trump wrote.
The scheduling of the meeting comes a day after Mr Trump spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping in a rare leader-to-leader call amid weeks of brewing trade tensions and a battle over critical minerals.
Mr Trump and Mr Xi agreed to visit one another and asked their staffs to hold talks in the meantime.
Both countries are under pressure to relieve tensions, with the global economy under pressure over Chinese control over the rare earth mineral exports of which it is the dominant producer and investors more broadly anxious about Trump’s wider effort to impose tariffs on goods from most US trading partners. China, meanwhile, has seen its own supply of key US imports like chip-design software and nuclear plant parts curtailed.
The countries struck a 90-day deal on May 12 in Geneva to roll back some of the triple-digit, tit-for-tat tariffs they had placed on each other since Mr Trump’s January inauguration.
That preliminary deal sparked a global relief rally in stock markets, and US indexes that had been in or near bear market levels have recouped the lion’s share of their losses.
The S&P 500 stock index, which at its lowest point in early April was down nearly 18 per cent after Mr Trump unveiled his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs on goods from across the globe, is now only about 2 per cent below its record high from mid-February. The final third of that rally followed the US-China truce struck in Geneva.
Still, that temporary deal did not address broader concerns that strain the bilateral relationship, from the illicit fentanyl trade to the status of democratically governed Taiwan and US complaints about China’s state-dominated, export-driven economic model.
Since returning to the White House in January, Mr Trump has repeatedly threatened an array of punitive measures on trading partners, only to revoke some of them at the last minute. The on-again, off-again approach has baffled world leaders and spooked business executives.
Beijing sees mineral exports as a source of leverage – halting those exports could put domestic political pressure on the Republican US president if economic growth sags because companies cannot make mineral-powered products.
In recent years, the United States has identified China as its top geopolitical rival and the only country in the world able to challenge the US economically and militarily. REUTERS
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