By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
The US-China trade truce. Treasury Secretary Scott Benson and US trade representative Jameson Greer confirming this morning, the US and China will both pause reciprocal tariffs for 90 days. US will now tariff China at 30%, while China will tariff US imports at 10%. Secretary Benson saying negotiations will attempt to balance the trade deficit.
00:29 Scott Benson
Neither side wants a decoupling. We do want trade, we want more balanced trade, and I think that both sides are committed to achieving that. Uh we would like to see uh China open to more US goods.
01:06 Speaker A
Joining us now with more on trade is Greg Valliere, AGF investments chief US policy strategist. Greg, great to speak with you. We got a lot to get to in a short amount of time here. This 90-day pause, where are the tariff rates heading from here? Is the lower tariff rate we’re talking about this morning, that 30% and 10%, a floor or ceiling?
01:38 Greg Valliere
It could go a little bit higher. Uh we’re we’re in now Madison for another 90 days of this room a rumor every day, a leak every day, uh fighting back and forth. I’m happy to see this agreement and I’m happy to see the markets up, but I think we still have a long way to go before there’s a deal.
02:11 Speaker B
Greg, they say the devil is in the details and previously, as we think about what the phase one of 2019-2020 trade deal looked like, it was $200 billion over two years that was anticipated and targeting manufactured goods, agricultural products, energy products, services. How much do you think a deal that may come forward between the US and China will look similar to that or are some of the categories dramatically shifted and what needs to be addressed here?
03:05 Greg Valliere
Hard to say. Uh I think it’ll probably look a lot like the earlier deal. Uh we’re arguing over the numbers as you say, the the devil is in the details. So I I do think that in the in the world of trade negotiations, 90 days is not a long period of time.
03:48 Speaker B
So with that in mind, will they come to a a long much ranging, a wide-ranging perhaps conclusion after those 90 days here, or do you think there are going to be different phases of trying to get a deal done?
04:18 Greg Valliere
Probably phases. I mean, there’s a lot that has been left unsaid. Maybe we’ll hear more in the next 24 hours, but what does this mean for Canada? And what does this mean for Western Europe? I mean, there are still a lot of angles to this story that have not been played out. And we have another big crisis that’s starting to loom, and that’s the decreasing prospects for getting a tax bill.
05:04 Speaker A
Greg, that’s exactly where I wanted to go with you because we know that the tariffs are supposed to raise 600 billion in revenue to feed through to 600 billion in tax cuts. If we continue to get headlines of these tariff deals and negotiations, does that negate any chance of those tax cuts coming in? How are you thinking about that?
05:36 Greg Valliere
The prospects for a tax bill have dropped dramatically. Uh I think that uh Republicans were astonished and angry over the weekend when Donald Trump leaked out that he wants a tax increase on the wealthy. That’s not Republican ideology. And I think you’ve got that, you’ve got a lack of agreement on how much spending to cut, how much Medicaid spending to reduce. So the tax debate is going to gobble up an awful lot of time in these next 90 days.
06:26 Speaker B
Do you think especially knowing how some of what Trump in the first quarter essentially of his Trump 2.0 administration has really rattled some of the people who were closest to him as well along the way, whether they be CEOs that were really pushing for him and because they could anticipate perhaps to a certain extent, or at least they believed so, what a Trump 2.0 would look like. And now the the deck is kind of totally shifted here. So how does that change some of the calculus from the administration’s relationship with corporate America and some of the largest executives that are trying to have the ear of the president for their companies?
07:34 Greg Valliere
It’s a good question. I I do think though that there’s a positive angle, and that is that uh the the markets prevailed. Uh he Trump had to capitulate to the markets. He had to capitulate to big business. He had to capitulate to a lot of members of the House and Senate. The fact that they are now going to act as a moderating influence on Trump is not a bad story.