(Reuters) -European Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic said Brussels wants to increase purchases of goods from United States by 50 billion euros ($56.46 billion) to address a “problem” in the trade relationship, adding the bloc is making “certain progress” towards striking a deal, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Sefcovic in an interview with the newspaper suggested the bloc would not accept Washington keeping in place 10% tariffs on its goods as a fair resolution to trade talks.<\/p>\n
The U.S. imposed 25% tariffs on EU cars, steel and aluminium in March and 20% tariffs on other EU goods in April. It then halved the 20% rate until July 8, setting a 90-day window for talks to reach a more comprehensive tariff deal.<\/p>\n
In response, the 27-nation EU suspended its own plans to impose retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. goods and proposed zero duties for all industrial goods on both sides.<\/p>\n
“If what we are looking at as a problem in the deficit is 50 billion euros, I believe that we can really . . . solve this problem very quickly through LNG purchases, through some agricultural products like soyabeans, or other areas,” Sefcovic said, according to the FT report.<\/p>\n
However, Sefcovic cautioned that it would be “very difficult” to reach a deal that was “clearly good and acceptable for our member states and our European parliament”.<\/p>\n
The European Commission negotiates trade measures on behalf of the EU\u2019s member states.<\/p>\n
EU was also willing to collaborate with the U.S. to help address the impact of China\u2019s export surge as a sweetener for a trade deal, the trade chief added.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8857 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Mrinmay Dey in Bengaluru, editing by Deepa Babington)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Reuters) -European Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic said Brussels wants to increase purchases of goods from United States by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,33849,1216,13128,33848],"class_list":{"0":"post-66597","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-industrial-goods","12":"tag-maros-sefcovic","13":"tag-trade-deal","14":"tag-trade-relationship"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114434507199650640","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66597","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=66597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}