Last week, the Trump trade agenda finally took off as the Commerce Department, now officially led by billionaire Wilbur Ross, finalized new carbon and alloy steel plate anti-dumping duties and President Donald Trump had some choice words as he signed two new executive orders he says will level the international trade playing field for U.S. manufacturers. Ross said during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News with Sandra Smith:
There’s never been a systematic examination, country by country and major product by major product, of why do we have the deficit. There’s a lot that’s due to cheating, there’s a lot due to dumping, there’s a lot that’s due to subsidies that are illegal, lot to do with a lot of things that are not inherent in free trade.
Ross cited entities, many of which were created purely to facilitate exports, that go out of business before duties are collected as one situation that leads to lax enforcement of existing anti-dumping and countervailing duties orders, what the other executive order instructed commerce to accomplish.
The new executive orders come just as President Trump will meet this week with Chinese President Xi Jinging at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It’ll be Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with Xi, after a campaign that was highly critical of U.S. trade with China.
Carbon and Alloy Steel Plate Duties
Commerce had a busy week, announcing affirmative final determinations that steel producers in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), and Taiwan are dumping imports of carbon and alloy steel plate in the U.S.