LOS ANGELES () The U.S. and China have signed an agreement on trade, President Donald Trump said, adding he expects to soon have a deal with India.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Bloomberg TV that the deal was signed earlier this week. Neither Lutnick nor Trump provided any details about the agreement.
“We just signed with China the other day,” Trump said late Thursday.
Lutnick said the deal was “signed and sealed” two days earlier.
It was unclear if the latest agreement was different from the one Trump announced two weeks earlier that he said would make it easier for American industries to obtain much-needed magnets and rare earth minerals. That pact cleared the way for the trade talks to continue, while the U.S. agreed to stop trying to revoke visas of Chinese nationals on U.S. college campuses.
China’s Commerce Ministry said Friday that the two sides had “further confirmed the details of the framework.” But its statement did not explicitly mention U.S. access to rare earths, minerals used in high-tech applications that have been at the center of the negotiations.
The agreement follows initial talks in Geneva in early May that led both sides to postpone massive tariff hikes that were threatening to freeze much trade between the two countries. Later talks in London set a framework for negotiations, and the deal mentioned by Trump appeared to formalize that agreement.
The tariff war, however, has led to a huge drop in volume at the Port of Los Angeles.
The port’s executive director, Gene Seroka, told that overall volume is still down by more than 10% for this time of the year. He predicts the unpredictable tariff situation will likely impact back-to-school shopping season, Halloween and even potentially Christmas.
“The port’s really slow. Cargo volume in the month of May was the lowest it’s been in more than two years,” he said. “And even though we’ve seen a bit of an uptick in June picking up some of the cargo that was completed over in Asia, it’s still lower than what June should look like for us. So that means fewer jobs by the dock workers, the truckers and the warehouse people.”
But despite the uncertainty, China remains one of America’s biggest trade partners, and word of a new U.S.-China trade deal should bring more traffic for the time being.
