The top trade official in the British government and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said they want to do even more trade and investment between the two countries, even as a free-trade agreement is not the end goal. Secretary of State for International Trade Anne-Marie Trevelyan had hoped that the Biden administration would continue the free trade negotiations started during the Trump administration, but that has not happened. Marjorie Chorlins, who leads the U.S.-U.K. Business Council at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also spoke at the March 21 plenary in Baltimore, saying the business community strongly supports more U.S.-U.K. economic cooperation.

Almost half of the Senate's Republicans and a third of its Democrats are asking U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to open an exclusion process for all importers of Chinese goods covered by Section 301 tariffs, and to presumptively exclude any product of which nearly all the imports are coming from China. Lead authors Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., say that if importers haven't moved out of China after years of higher tariffs, that "suggests that moving these supply chains out of China is uniquely unlikely, and that our efforts to diversify production locales and reshore manufacturing would be better spent on other products."

The Commerce Department on Dec. 7 released its quarterly list of (i) completed antidumping and countervailing duty scope rulings and (ii) anti-circumvention determinations. The following list covers completed scope rulings for the period July 1, 2021, through Sept. 30, 2021:

Perth USAsia Centre, a think tank that focuses on relationships between Australia, the U.S. and Asian countries, and the Asia Society Policy Institute say that while the World Trade Organization is not well-equipped to combat trade coercion, there are international approaches that could make the tactic more costly for perpetrators and help injured companies that are hurt by the coercion.

Tech companies and trade associations favor working more closely with U.S. trade partners to diversify information and communications technology (ICT) supply chains and make them more resilient to disruption and bottlenecks, several commented Nov. 4 in BIS-2021-0021. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security sought comment to help the secretaries of Commerce and Homeland Security prepare a report to the White House on supply chain disruptions in the “critical sectors and subsectors” of the ICT “industrial base” by the one-year anniversary of President Joe Biden’s Feb. 24 executive order (see 2109170029).

Corruption, poor logistics and overly strict rules of origin are all barriers to Mexico benefiting from companies' decisions to diversify out of China, a panel of experts from Mexico and the U.S. said. Luis de la Calle, a former Mexican trade official who worked on implementing NAFTA and who represented Mexico at the World Trade Organization, said Mexican leaders have a lack of vision to take advantage of this moment, and he said they are also hobbled by what he called "ideological incompetence."

The National Association of Manufacturers CEO is calling on the Biden administration to "act as quickly as possible to finalize and publicize [its China] strategy. Such a clear, robust strategy on China, including U.S.-China trade, would be critical in bolstering manufacturers’ efforts to retain and hire American workers, invest in domestic operations and adjust supply chains, and providing meaningful opportunities for manufacturers to seek targeted relief from broad application of Section 301 tariffs."

The Commerce Department on Aug. 24 released its quarterly list of (i) completed antidumping and countervailing duty scope rulings and (ii) anti-circumvention determinations. The following list covers completed scope rulings for the period April 1, 2021, through June 30, 2021:

Although there were some specific complaints about how USMCA has gone in its first year -- especially what witnesses and senators said was an anemic effort to get Mexico to change its stance on genetically modified agricultural crops -- much of the hearing in the Senate Finance Committee on July 27 explored how USMCA should be seen as a model for future trade agreements.

The Commerce Department on July 2 finalized a scope ruling that self-drilling anchor bolt systems (SDABS) imported by Midwest Diversified Technologies are not subject to antidumping and countervailing duties on forged steel fittings from China (A-570-067/C-570-068). Just as it had in a preliminary scope ruling issued in May (see 2105200027), the agency found the fittings, used to improve the structural integrity of soil or rock to provide a stable foundation for construction, are not “forged” for the purposes of the order because they are not intended to hold high pressure and lack any pressure rating at all. Petitioners in the case raised the possibility that companies could circumvent AD duties by omitting a pressure rating from their pipe fittings (see 2106090057). In response, Commerce clarified “that the absence of a pressure rating or the lack of a pressure rating in this instance was only one characteristic among many that, taken together, led to our conclusion that MDT’s SDABS couplers are outside the scope of the Orders.”