ZURICH, Feb 23 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s weekend announcement that he would increase a temporary tariff on U.S. imports from all \u200ccountries to 15% from 10% has created more chaos, and the \u200cglobal uncertainty is dampening investment activity, Swiss industry association Swissmem said on Monday.<\/p>\n
Switzerland was subject to \u200bthe highest U.S. tariffs in Europe when Trump imposed a 39% import duty on its exports in August. In November, Bern secured an initial deal that cut those levies to 15%, mirroring the rate for the European Union.<\/p>\n
Switzerland has since \u200cbegun talks to formalise \u2060that accord, which Washington wants to conclude by the end of March.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Swissmem urged the government to keep \u2060pushing for a deal with the U.S. to create legal certainty, and it criticised the new tariffs.<\/p>\n
“U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will increase the additional \u200btariff imposed \u200bon Friday from 10% to 15% is \u200bexacerbating the current chaos,” Swissmem \u200csaid. “Global uncertainty is huge. This is dampening investment activity.”<\/p>\n
Trump on Friday imposed a 10% temporary tariff after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his previous tariff programme, and on Saturday he lifted the duty to 15%.<\/p>\n
Swissmem said it looks as though the additional U.S. tariffs will not be added to the \u200c15% tariff previously agreed between Switzerland and the \u200bUnited States.<\/p>\n
Still, when added to a pre-existing \u200b5% duty on industrial goods \u200bbefore Trump began rolling out his global tariffs last year, \u200cthat would make for a rate of \u200baround 20% for \u200bSwitzerland, Swissmem said.<\/p>\n
“This will significantly increase prices for American customers,” Swissmem said, noting that the only positive aspect for the mechanical and electrical \u200bengineering sector is that the \u200csame or similar tariffs are likely to apply to foreign rivals.<\/p>\n
Switzerland \u200beliminated its own industrial tariffs in 2024.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Dave Graham; \u200bEditing by Linda Pasquini and Hugh Lawson)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ZURICH, Feb 23 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s weekend announcement that he would increase a temporary tariff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,14477,41,17,4876],"class_list":["post-22293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-donald-trump","tag-investment-activity","tag-swiss","tag-switzerland","tag-tariff"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}