AsianFin - U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday said it is “highly likely” for the Trump administration to "roll the date forward" with trading partners trying to strike a deal if the 90-day pause on U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs expires without a deal.
"It is highly likely that those countries - or trading blocs as is the case with the EU - who are negotiating in good faith, we will roll the date forward to continue the good-faith negotiations," Bessent told the House Ways and Means Committee. "If someone is not negotiating, then we will not."
With the expiration date, July 8, is only four weeks away, Bessent made the remarks in response to a question from a Democratic lawmaker, marking the first time a senior official has indicated some flexibility for the tariff pause. The U.S. has reached only one preliminary tariff agreement with Britain, a major trading partner affected by the pause.
A deal struck on Tuesday in London with China to defuse that bilateral trade war is proceeding on a separate track and timeline.
Trump announced the pause on April 9, a week after unveiling "Liberation Day" sweeping tariffs against nearly all American trading partners that had sent global financial markets into near panic.
The S&P 500 Index tumbled more than 12% in four days for its heftiest run of losses since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Investors were so worried that they bailed out of safe-haven U.S. Treasury securities, sending bond yields soaring. The dollar sank.
Markets started to rebound on April 9 when Trump unexpectedly announced the pause. A further recovery followed in early May when the Trump team reached a preliminary deal to suspend the triple-digit tariff rates it had slapped on imports from China. The developments have led to what some Wall Street observers have coined as the "TACO" trade - an acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out.
"The only time the market has reacted positively is when the administration is in retreat from key policy areas," Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia told Bessent before asking him about what should be expected at the end of the next deadline.
"As I have said repeatedly there are 18 important trading partners. We are working toward deals with those," Bessent said before going on to signal a willingness to offer extensions to those negotiating in good faith.
