WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration is more concerned with the quality of trade agreements rather than their timing, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday ahead of an Aug. 1 deadline for securing a trade deal or facing steep tariffs.<\/p>\n
“We’re not going to rush for the sake of doing deals,” Bessent told CNBC in an interview.<\/p>\n
Asked whether the deadline could be extended for countries engaged in productive talks with Washington, Bessent said U.S. President Donald Trump would decide.<\/p>\n
“We’ll see what the president wants to do. But again, if we somehow boomerang back to the August 1 tariff, I would think that a higher tariff level will put more pressure on those countries to come with better agreements,” he said.<\/p>\n
On China, Bessent said there would be “talks in the very near future.”<\/p>\n
“I think trade is in a good place and, I think, now we can start talking about other things. The Chinese unfortunately … are very large purchasers of sanctioned Iranian oil, sanctioned Russian oil,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We could also discuss the elephant in the room, which is this great rebalancing that the Chinese need to do.”<\/p>\n
Bessent told CNBC he would encourage Europe to follow the United States if it implements secondary tariffs on Russia.<\/p>\n
On Japan, Bessent said the administration was less concerned with its domestic politics than with getting the best deal for Americans.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Andrea ShalalEditing by Bernadette Baum)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration is more concerned with the quality of trade agreements rather than their timing,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[105465,6202,7686,6862,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-280087","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-deadline","9":"tag-president-donald-trump","10":"tag-scott-bessent","11":"tag-trade-agreements","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114891538119368663","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}