6 days Ago By Qatar Tribune
Qatar tribune Agencies Recent exemptions to sweeping U.S. import tariffs may be short-lived, according to top officials, with President Donald Trump warning that no one was “getting off the hook,” and China urging the United States to simply abandon its aggressive trade levies policy altogether.
White House officials, including Trump himself, spent Sunday downplaying the significance of exemptions announced Friday that lessen but won’t eliminate the effect of U.S. tariffs on imports of smartphones, laptops, semiconductors and other electronic products for which China is a major source.
“They’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two,” Lutnick told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. Trump added to the confusion hours later, declaring on social media that there was no “exception” at all because the goods were “just moving to a different” bucket and would still face a 20% tariff as part of his administration’s move to punish China for its role in fentanyl trafficking. The world’s two largest economies have been locked in a fast-moving, high-stakes game of brinkmanship since Trump launched a global tariff assault that particularly targeted Chinese imports.
Tit-for-tat exchanges have seen U.S. levies imposed on China rise to 145%, and Beijing setting a retaliatory 125% band on U.
S. imports. The U.
S. side had appeared to dial down the pressure slightly late Friday, saying it would exclude electronics from broader so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, a move that could help keep the prices down for phones and other consumer products that aren’t usually made in the U.S.
But Trump asserted Sunday that there was “no Tariff ‘exception’” on those products, saying they remained subject to a 20% rate in “a different Tariff ‘bucket.’” In a post on his Truth Social platform, he said “Nobody is getting off the hook,” adding: “We will not be held hostage by other Countries, especially hostile trading Nations like China.” Beijing said Friday’s move only “represents a small step” and insisted that the Trump administration should “completely cancel” the whole tariff strategy.
Sparing electronics was expected to benefit big tech companies like Apple and Samsung and chip makers like Nvidia, though the uncertainty of future tariffs may rein in an anticipated tech stock rally on Monday. U.S.
Customs and Border Protection said items like smartphones, laptops, hard drives, flat-panel monitors and some chips would qualify for the exemption. Machines used to make semiconductors are excluded, too. That means they won’t be subject to most of the tariffs levied on China or the 10% baseline tariffs elsewhere.
Lutnick said Trump would enact “a special focus-type of tariff” on smartphones, computers and other electronics products in a month or two, alongside sectoral tariffs targeting semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. It was the latest tariff change by the Trump administration, which has made several U-turns in its massive plan to put tariffs in place on goods from most countries, which sent financial markets into a tailspin. Trump abruptly announced a 90-day pause for most of them last week.
China was excluded from the break. Trump’s back-and-forth on tariffs last week triggered the wildest swings on Wall Street since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index is down more than 10% since Trump took office.
White House officials sought to dismiss any suggestion of a reprieve as the weekend progressed. “It’s not really an exception. That’s not even the right word for it,” U.
S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “This type of supply chain moved from the tariff regime for the global tariff, the reciprocal tariff, and it moved to the national security tariff regime.
” Greer added that “the president decided that we’re not going to have exemptions. We can’t have a Swiss cheese solution to this universal problem that we’re facing.” On Air Force One Saturday night, President Donald Trump told reporters he would get into more specifics on exemptions on Monday.
In his post Sunday on TruthSocial, he promised the White House was “taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN.” Some had assumed the exemption filed Friday night reflected the president’s realization that his China tariffs are unlikely to shift more manufacturing of smartphones, computers and other gadgets to the U.S.
anytime soon, if ever. The administration has predicted that the trade war would prod Apple to make iPhones in the U.S.
for the first time, but that was an unlikely scenario after Apple spent decades building up a finely calibrated supply chain in China. It would take several years and cost billions of dollars to build new plants in the U.S.
, burdening Apple with economic forces that could triple the price of an iPhone and torpedo sales of its marquee product. The turmoil has battered the stocks of tech’s “Magnificent Seven” – Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, Google parent Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta Platforms. At one point, the Magnificent Seven’s combined market value had plunged by $2.
1 trillion, or 14%, from April 2 when Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs on a wide range of countries. When Trump paused the tariffs outside of China on Wednesday, the lost value in those companies was pared to $644 billion, or a 4% decline. An electronics exemption would fulfill the kind of friendly treatment that the industry was envisioning when Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos assembled behind the president during his Jan.
20 inauguration. That united display of fealty reflected Big Tech’s hopes that Trump would be more accommodating than former President Joe Biden’s administration. Apple won praise from Trump in late February when the Cupertino, California, company committed to investing $500 billion and adding 20,000 jobs in the U.
S. during the next four years. The pledge was an echo of a $350 billion investment commitment in the U.
S. that Apple made during Trump’s first term when the iPhone was exempted from China tariffs. An electronics exemption would remove “a huge black cloud overhang for now over the tech sector and the pressure facing U.
S. Big Tech,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a research note. Ives amended that note after Lutnick’s comments Sunday, saying the confusing news out of the White House “is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory and demand.
” Copy 15/04/2025 10.
