Treasury Secretary Offers Some Clarity on April Tariffs, but Dodges on Details
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered some clarity on the promised April 2 tariffs but, when pressed, didn't elaborate on vital details. He said that reciprocal tariffs would take the form of a number that the Trump administration "believe[s] represents their tariffs," but said he wasn't sure if tariffs would layer on top of Section 232 tariffs.
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"What's going to happen on April 2, [is that] each country will receive a number that we believe that represents their tariffs. So, for some countries, it could be quite low. For some countries it could be quite high. So there's not an automatic 25 [percent] plus 25 [percent] that's going to happen," Bessent said, speaking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on March 18. She had asked him if the new reciprocal tariffs would stack with existing duties already levied by the Trump administration. When Bartiromo pressed him on the issue, saying "what I'm asking you is, are these [tariffs] stacked when it comes to aluminum and steel?," he replied: "That's being run by USTR and Commerce. I haven't seen the numbers. I will have a better sense as we get closer to April 2, so they could be stacked."
Bessent said that the single reciprocal tariff rate will be calculated based on how the Trump administration evaluates a host of economic issues, such as a country's "tariff levels ..., non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, unfair funding, labor suppression." If the offending country is willing to cease this behavior "we will not put up the tariff wall," he said. He described this situation as a "win-win" for the U.S. because "either the trade friction that these other countries have [will] come down, and we get fair trade, and if they don't follow President [Donald] Trump's lead, then he will raise the tariff wall, and ... we're going to take in substantial revenues" from tariffs.
However, he also referred to the tariffs as a tool to protect manufacturing for the long term.
Reciprocal tariffs are necessary, Bessent said, because Trump "wants to bring back manufacturing to the United States." There are "critical industries that we let get away from us," he said. "We have to have a steel industry. We have to have an aluminum industry."
Though Bessent seemed to indicate the tariffs would indeed take effect April 2, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently said that some tariffs might come out then and others could take months (see 2503050018).
Bessent defended the policy by saying that many countries that might be subject to reciprocal tariffs were already negotiating trade deals: "What I can tell you is, going into April 2, some of our worst trading partners in terms of the way they treat us have already come to President Trump offering substantial decreases in very unfair tariffs." He said that he is optimistic that some tariffs might not go into effect "because a deal is pre-negotiated," or that, upon seeing the April 2 tariff rate, "right after that, they will come to us and want to negotiate it down."
Bessent blamed Democrats for creating "consternation" to distract from the "unstoppable roll" Trump has been on since the election: "the Democrats are overwhelmed, so they've gone to their friends in the media ... [which] is creating these distortions that bear no resemblance to the truth of what's going to happen."
Bessent referenced a "dirty fifteen" percent of countries that have high tariffs and also high trading volume with the U.S. And he said, "as important as the tariffs are, some of these non-tariff barriers, where they have domestic content production, where they do testing on our, whether it's our food, our products, that bear no resemblance to safety, or anything that we do to their products." Trump and officials in his administration have specifically called out non-tariff barriers in the EU (see 2502130030 and 2503030031).
Bartiromo responded to this line of reasoning with the frustration felt by U.S. consumers and businesses, saying, "See, these are the things that people are really worried about, because they first thought it was just about trade, then they thought it was just about fentanyl. Then after that, we talked about, well, maybe it's currency manipulation, and maybe it's now you're talking about food testing. And when I bring up the issue of clarity, that's what I'm talking about, and that's what I'm hearing from corporate America, that we're not sure where this is going. But of course, we will get resolution on April 2."