‘We are at an inflection point’: U.S. Trade Rep. on new Biden Admin tariffs on Chinese EVs

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai talks about the highwire balancing act between trade policy that helps consumers and hurts workers. With a growing, inexpensive EV market emerging from China, the U.S. has levied a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. “Things that look like they are artificially low priced have brought with them larger costs to America’s industrial strength and manufacturing economy.”



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#economy #worldtrade #ev

[jctai]

EV's aren't the only thing cheaper in China. So is food, daily material goods, electronics etc. So is everything state subsidized? How do you define that? The CHIPs act is a massive state subsidy but it's OK? The US also massively subsidizes Oil and the MIC. So really this all about US controlling everything not about fairness. It never was.

[JacobReynolds-tv]

The biggest lesson I learned in 2023 about the stock market is that nobody knows what will happen next, so practice some humility and low a strategy with a long-term edge.

[AB__AB]

Chinese factories are fully automated and the technology is already far ahead of US automakers. She's struggling to come up with the lies. Telling lies hurts America, not help it.

[ericcoskun]

When you generate more lawyers each year than engineers you lose the ability to compete, and when you cannot compete you use abuse the tariff system.

[jameskoh]

Does anyone in this universe believe that America DO NOT subsidise electric car production in the US ???

[woof]

Why we need to protect someone’s job who works only 30 hours per week while I have to work 50 hours to bring food on table.

[lyttlebee]

Tai is implying that BYD employees are exploited? What a joke!

[qtdcanada]

Personally, I don't believe that many American capitalists care one bit about American workers! Far from it, their main concern is short-term profitability. In the 'Shareholders Capitalism' model it is the shareholders that must be (overwhelmingly) rewarded, and everything else -- including workers' wage & benefit -- become liability and must be cut. Business executives who understand and implement this ideology will be handsomely rewarded. The incentive & pressure to fatten up the margin means businesses & capital will move by choice to lowest-cost, fewest-regulations places where workers will be paid dirt cheap, enjoy little/no benefits and have no rights to organize. This is where China excels! The 2 main flaws of this model of 'Shareholders Capitalism' are that: 1) it impoverishes the workers and simultaneously widens the wealth gap between the 0.1% and everyone else, 2) externally, it enables countries like China to prosper via trade to developed countries and build up their strengths (especially military) to challenge the US and allies. While 'greed is good' for capitalists, 'greed can/will be destructive' to society/country.
It is unfortunate that in the US the 'Consensus Capitalism' of the 1960s-1970s (when business executives had long-term vision, fairly rewarded for their jobs while workers had decent wages & benefits to build a middle-class lifestyle) has been completely displaced by the 'Greed Is Good Shareholders' Capitalism' since the 1980's.

[BrandyHeng]

When you cannot compete, you manufacture "lies, security threats" and whatnot

[lfish]

Nonsense. Anybody see their factories? More robots than humans. This is one of the reasons why their cars are cheaper.

[edwardwharf]

When a country (like the US) struggles with high costs, supply chain issues, a shortage of engineers, and low productivity, it often blames others for being “anti-competitive” and for providing heavy government subsidies. This leads to imposing tariffs or bans. Isn’t the US also heavily subsidizing its own industries? The US simply can’t compete with others, and instead of improving itself, it casts aspersions and blames others. Katherine, let’s not make excuses for ourselves.

[huanghermann]

Exploitation of workers in the most modernised digital BYD plants? Do you know how many workers are there in one plant? How do their salaries compare with the average salaries in China?

[hoffrun]

The US pumps as much largesse $$$$ as China, and pretty much the same way, except that China is strategic, while the US throws money at companies and hopes for the best.

[samvan]

She sounds wonderful on the screen but with little or no substance behind the message. First, US is so consumed with wars around or supporting certain countries that the President has no time to plan strategically key industries such as auto, semiconductor, high speed train, until it is too late and just has to react with no real solution to the problem. 2nd, the chaos from the last administration and all the courts battles, supreme court judges issues, consumed so much energy which could have been used to deploy to something more social benefits. 3rd, companies are too focused, perhaps rightly so, on short term profit with secondary priority in R&D. This Tai's solution with defence and offence strategy will 1) hurt the consumers at large and 2) only delaying the inevitable the demise of the industry instead of focusing to transfer the industry. Thoughts from the Anchor?

[Paul-yhkm]

Wow, so many lies in that intro!
American economy open, yeah sure.
The Chinese government is not subsidising Chinese manufacturers by 100% so there is no justification for tariffs that high.
The reality is US car manufacturers have lost the plot and did so years ago, meanwhile China is very quickly innovating it's way into the future and understands what the world economies need for road vehicles.
The EU is taking a far more pragmatic stance on the whole issue.

[wjliz]

if I am US government, I will desperately import such vehicles into US to introduce competition to force the Us auto makers to do better job in innovation, cost control and quality management. Period!

[punlam]

If they subsidize so much, bankrupt them by buying more, see how they can subtain over long term.

[baljiangusa]

One word to the official and the host, bull. Totally unhinged.

[thomastang]

It should be renamed as "U.S. Anti-Trade" department! When you do not have the competitive advantage, you use all kinds of tariffs. When you do not want some countries to succeed, you use sanctions. Nothing that she has been doing is pro-trade!

[hoffrun]

For the sake of a rounding different, China supplies 100% of iPhones, 100% of pharmaceuticals, 100% of chemicals for lithium batteries.