00:00 Speaker A
as the president has ramped up deal making pressure on US trading partners in recent days. He said his August 1st deadline would not be extended. Joining us now, Wendy Cutler, Vice President at the Asia Society Policy Institute. She spent nearly three decades shaping US policy within the office of the US Trade Representative, and also with us for the morning reminder, Kevin Gordon, Director and Senior Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab. Um, Wendy, so we’ve got this latest tactic of the administration. The Wall Street Journal reporting this morning that part of the reason the administration pushed things back to August 1st was because Treasury Secretary Scott Beson had asked the president for more time. He said he was making some progress on these frameworks and that he needed a little extra time. What do you make of what we’ve seen so far in terms of some of these agreements between the US and other countries?
01:24 Wendy Cutler
Well, clearly, we haven’t seen 90 deals in 90 days. The 90-day period now is up. There are two deals that have been announced, one with the UK and one with Vietnam. And even with Vietnam, it seems that we’re still negotiating with them on many of the important details. Um, look, as a former trade negotiator, the minute I heard about their objectives here, I just thought they were totally unrealistic. Trade negotiations take time. And the notion you’re going to be simultaneously negotiating with dozens of countries just really limits the bandwidth of, um, of the negotiating teams. And so, yeah, I think more time is needed. And, you know, August 1 now is the next deadline. And even though the president is saying there’ll be no more further extensions, I think our trading partners are beginning to realize that this may go on and on and on.
03:08 Speaker A
When I mean from a from a non-professional trade negotiators seat here, it feels like the administration is content in many cases to just get sort of headlines, right, that they’ve agreed upon the very broadest outlines for these deals. What then is the risk that they get the outline and then as the negotiations go on to figure out those details that they’re not entirely favorable to the US?
04:08 Wendy Cutler
Well, I think the risk is going to be, as you have all these follow-on negotiations to hammer out details and important details, that we’re going to see more bumps in the road and probably more tariff threats, because I don’t think these follow-on negotiations are going to go smoothly either. And so what I keep telling people is we need just to be ready for living in a tariff world for the next three and a half years. And when you add on to that the the rollout now of these sectoral tariffs, starting with copper, but there’s there’s six other active section 232 investigations where other tariffs can be announced and rolled out, um, this is going to make these follow-on negotiations even more difficult.