.jpg)
5 hours ago
1
Article content
US companies can petition the administration to add the goods they produce domestically to the 232 tariffs. Included on Trump’s list of steel and aluminum tariffs this year are gymnasium equipment, clothes hangers and door thresholds.
Article content
When the Court of International Trade last month ruled that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs — announced on April 2 — imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were illegal and had to be removed, companies and trading partners breathed a sigh of relief.
Article content
But that consolation might only be temporary, even if Trump’s IEEPA path is ultimately blocked by the courts.
Article content
The president’s 232 authority is designed to protect specific industries “but they can get pretty broad” under the current inclusions process, Marcus Eeman, a senior customs manager with digital freight company Flexport Inc., said during a webinar earlier this month.
Article content
“This may be kind of a slow-burn way that the president can keep ratcheting up tariffs,” he said. “Not quite the country-wide level he has been using” with his April 2 tariffs “but more the product-wide level instead.”
Article content
Article content
Trade Talks
Article content
Yet Trump’s ongoing 232 investigations have had an indirect effect on his wider trade strategy: They have injected uncertainty into negotiations between the US and other countries, aimed at forging deals to lower the higher tariffs Trump announced in April and then largely paused for 90 days.
Article content
Countries have expressed wariness about signing deals — even framework agreements — while those probes are still pending, because that could mean jettisoning any leverage to secure changes to the resulting sectoral tariffs later, said a person familiar with the matter.
Article content
Countries can’t know for sure how 232 levies might interact with Trump’s nation-by-nation rates, said Leland Miller, co-founder of the China Beige Book and a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission established by Congress to monitor bilateral relations. He described “a built-in uncertainty” tied to those Commerce investigations.
Article content
A key question for negotiating countries is whether those individual product levies would stack on top of country-based rates. “That’s very different than saying we’re taking whatever is the highest of the two rates,” Miller said. “And they don’t have to even announce that. Trump could change his mind down the line.”
Article content
Article content
Inflation Risks
Article content
Among the economists closely tracking the fallout of Trump’s 232 tariffs is Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State, one of the nation’s top-ranked schools for supply chain management.
Article content
Back in 2018, the main targets were upstream metals like raw aluminum and steel coils. “This time we’ve got a lot of finished consumer goods” such as metal furniture, kitchen knives, and cooking pots and pans,” said Miller, the professor. “The scope of the 232s this time is just so much broader.”
Article content
He worries that such an approach might be more inflationary this time around. One example he’s monitoring is the government’s Producer Price Index gauge of manufactured steel cans and tinware products, which has jumped 8.7% this year — and that was before the tariffs doubled earlier this month.
Article content
Tin plate — steel sheets coated with protective tin — wasn’t targeted in Trump’s first-term probes, but this time it is. Because American makers of metal cans are reliant on imports for the raw material, Miller of Michigan State sees three possible outcomes: less variety because importers will balk at foreign supplies, inflation or demand destruction.
Article content
“It’s way too early to make a call that there’s no inflation yet,” he said. “It’s going to take quite a while for some of these things to work their way through.”
Article content
—With assistance from Catherine Lucey and Josh Wingrove.
Article content
English (US)