A five-year renewal of the Haiti HELP/HOPE trade preferences is the only tariff liberalization legislation that was attached to the federal spending bill that will keep the federal government open through mid-March.
Venable lawyers said no one knows whether President-elect Donald Trump will hike tariffs on China by 10 percentage points, by 60 percentage points, or bring current tariff levels to 60%. Nor does anyone know if the threat of 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican exports will become reality.
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
Congress has not yet finished the text of the government spending bill that needs to pass this week, but House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Adrian Smith, R-Neb., said in the early afternoon that several trade provisions he had hoped would hitch a ride weren't included. He said his understanding was that the African Growth and Opportunity Act wouldn't be attached, nor would the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program.
Donald Trump's return to the White House brings a "lack of predictability," Baker McKenzie attorneys said during a webinar last week on how threatened tariffs could affect countries around the globe.
The Commerce Department failed to consider whether U.S. Steel Corp. had the capacity to fill the aggregate of importer California Steel Industries' Section 232 steel tariff exclusion requests as opposed to just assessing whether U.S. Steel could fill all of them individually, the Court of International Trade held on Nov. 13. Judge M. Miller Baker added that Commerce didn't address its concession that it couldn't timely supply more slab than contracted for with California Steel.
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:
CBP authorized the release of most types of merchandise on or after Dec. 17 through Dec. 31 under Immediate Delivery (ID) procedures, it said in a CSMS message.
The National Marine Fisheries Service seeks to revise regulations to allow for the streamlining of electronic filing requirements pertaining to the import of fish or fish products, according to a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register.
A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit told the Court of International Trade that it has now twice wrongly told an importer that its first-sale price method to determine the duty level of its cookware was prohibited.