Asian countries in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and businesses that export to those countries had low expectations for IPEF, and trade experts said it will take years to see if IPEF will have any commercially meaningful outcomes.
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
A House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy and Regulatory Affairs hearing focused on the need for more domestic mining of critical minerals, but administration witnesses noted that imports -- and subsidizing processing of domestically mined minerals -- are just as essential to uninterrupted supply.
The top trade negotiator for the EU, Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, said the EU's political leadership sees "no prospect to agree on a concept" for a global arrangement on steel, to box out unfairly traded steel and privilege steel made with less carbon intensity.
An administration Council on Supply Chain Resilience, which includes the head of every Cabinet-level agency except the Education Department, held its first meeting, with the goal of maintaining resilient supply chains.
A parliamentary committee on trade in Ottawa says Canada should increase its efforts to reach a suspension agreement on U.S. antidumping and countervailing duty cases against its softwood lumber exports, including by appointing a specific "softwood lumber emissary" and by making the issue a high-level priority when the prime minister speaks to the U.S. president.
CBP has been threatening ports that it will reduce its presence or even pull out of ports if those ports don't upgrade work space, members of Congress say, and a recently introduced bipartisan bill aims to put a stop to it.
A spotlight on Uyghur forced labor in auto parts manufacturing that began a year ago (see 2212060054) has not yet resulted in much action from CBP (see 2309210025), but forced labor researchers say that may not continue to be the case.
The executive director of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat said the perspective of what purpose APEC serves has changed. "We used to say trade and investment are our bread and butter," Rebecca Sta Maria said, referring to the goals of the 21 countries in the forum.
The text of a recent letter sent to the White House by Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Bob Casey, D-Pa., suggests that they have been told there will be reductions in Section 301 tariffs, and they said in the letter that they have serious concerns that these reductions "will enable China and other global competitors to resume their anti-competitive activities without consequences. While not the subject of interagency review, we share similar concerns about reductions in 232 tariffs, as well as related actions that would undermine American steel and aluminum producers as a result of negotiations with the European Union on the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum."
An academic and journalists from England and Foreign Policy magazine agreed that President Joe Biden got more out of the meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping than Xi did.