On May 17 and 18, 2018, a Chinese delegation led by State Council Vice Premier Liu He met with its U.S. counterpart in Washington D.C. and reached a broad consensus to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. Currently, the trade deficit stands at almost 4 to 1.
On April 6, 2018, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) announced new sanctions against Russia by adding seven Russian oligarchs and 12 companies they own or control, 17 senior Russian government officials, the primary state-owned Russian weapons trading company and its subsidiary, a Russian bank, to its list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (“SDN List”).
On May 8, 2018, President Trump terminated the U.S.’s participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (“JCPOA”) with Iran and will begin re-imposing, following a wind-down period, the U.S. nuclear-related sanctions lifted under the JCPOA.
In its latest salvo in the U.S.-China trade dispute, China has imposed a 178.6% tariff on sorghum imports from the U.S., claiming the U.S. is unfairly dumping sorghum on the Chinese market.
On March 22, 2018, CKR Law LLP (“CKR” or “we”) published our first article of an ongoing series of blog posts on proposed tariffs to be imposed by the United States (the “U.S.”), and their potential impact on the People’s Republic of China (“China”) and the rest of the world. In this second article, we aim to recap the sequential events detailing the tensions between the U.S. and China to assist our readers in understanding how both countries got to where they are, and to analyze the actions to date taken by both countries.