Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said his desire to give Congress more power to determine when national security tariffs are warranted is stymied by a lack of votes in his committee.
Mexico's Economy Minister Luz de la Mora said that the uniform regulations that pertain to issues outside the auto industry will be ready by July 1 -- but strongly suggested that the uniform regulations will not be ready by the date of entry into force of the U.S.‐Mexico‐Canada Agreement. “There has been great progress on non-auto URs, and they will be ready by July 1, as for the auto rules of origin, we expect to advance substantially in coming weeks,” she said during a Cato Institute interview May 27. She said that Mexico wants “to make sure the transition to the new regime is effective, efficient.”
Although China, the U.S. and the European Union have taken actions during the COVID-19 pandemic that are damaging to the goal of free trade, Canadian diplomats and scholars at the Peterson Institute for International Economics said that doesn't mean we're headed for a new round of sphere-of-influence-style trading chains rather than global integration.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said its negotiators will seek to make things easier for express shippers in Kenya, will seek to get Kenya to agree to basing its phytosanitary rules on science, and “secure comprehensive duty-free market access for U.S. industrial goods” as it works towards a free-trade agreement with that country.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground,” in a statement May 27 to Congress that Hong Kong no longer warrants the same treatment under U.S. laws as it did before the handover to China in 1997.
While some are saying the disruption of COVID-19 is going to convince businesses to turn away from just-in-time approaches (see 2005190050), the chief economist at Flexport thinks those predictions are overblown. “Resiliency is a great thing if you can achieve it. The question is, at what cost,” Phil Levy said. Just-in-time inventory management “came from cost pressures. Businesses were facing cost pressures. I don’t think those pressures are going to abate.”
After years of complaints about the exclusion process for steel and aluminum tariffs, the Commerce Department is soliciting comments about how to improve it. Comments should include input on what should be on the request, objection and rebuttal forms; who should be allowed to request or object; the information published with the decisions and the factors for making a decision; how granular the product descriptions have to be; and whether there should be exclusions for downstream products.
Outsourcing wasn't about competitive advantage, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said during an interview with conservative lobbyist Matt Schlapp, in a video branded Conservative Political Action Conference/Live. He said that while the Trump administration believes in competitive advantage, classic economists “never thought of the notion they can create scale through economic nationalism and gain advantage over another country.”
The government is considering how quickly it can get through a legislative fix to U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement implementation provisions that allow for duty refunds on post-importation preference claims, but not a refund of merchandise processing fees, said Maya Kumar, director of textiles and trade agreements at CBP. She said on May 22 that CBP officials “do not think that was the intent of the law.” Kumar, who was speaking at the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones virtual conference, said that if it's at all possible, CBP would like to see that fixed by Congress before USMCA's entry into force July 1. “We’re trying to work with [the office of the U.S. Trade Representative] as well as Congress and see how quickly they can do that,” she said.
Last week, the chairman and top Republican of the House Ways and Means Committee said they would be nudging the administration to offer another round of tariff deferral to importers with sharp drops in revenue (see 2005150057 and 2005130028). But now that it's too late for May payments to be pushed off, the momentum seems to have slowed.