Sixteen state attorneys general are asking the Security and Exchange Commission to block the listing of SHEIN -- or any other foreign-owned firm -- on a U.S. stock exchange unless a "truly independent" certification can be made that the company does not export goods made with forced labor.
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies expect the U.S. will get "a taste of its own medicine” when China appeals its loss over Section 232 retaliatory tariffs at the World Trade Organization, adding that China likely won't have to drop the tariffs since there is no appellate body to take that appeal.
Trade ministers from the G-20 nations reaffirmed the role of the World Trade Organization, pledged to promote resilient global value chains and said they will increase transparency of sanitary and phytosanitary measures and technical barriers to trade within the WTO.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's senior vice president for international policy said that when the trade ministers for the G-20 nations meet in India later this week, they should pledge not to hike tariffs, impose new export restraints or add digital trade barriers.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, responding to a question from Express Association of America Executive Director Mike Mullen, said he was exactly right when he said that while there's a long list of problems with China, the government also has to keep in mind "how important China is to our economy, and maintaining that into the future."
Former President Donald Trump is considering making hiking tariffs on all imports a plank of his reelection campaign, as he discussed recently on Fox Business. According to a Washington Post story, although Trump said on TV that he liked the idea of a 10% duty on all imports, he has not settled on a number yet. Trump's former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in January 2021 that all countries should have a 10% to 12% tariff on all imports, with higher tariffs for particularly important products (see 2101260048).
The U.S. is asking that a rapid response labor mechanism panel decide whether Grupo Mexico's decision to hire replacement workers after a strike is a violation of union rights covered by the USMCA. The treaty says that the panel must be formed in three days after a request, and that the panel has 30 days to make a determination. This is the first time Mexico and the U.S. have disagreed on remediation after the U.S. filed a rapid response labor complaint, and the first time the U.S. called for a panel.
An expert on China's electric vehicle manufacturing praised the Inflation Reduction Act's incentives to build U.S. advanced battery manufacturing capacity but told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission that completely cutting China out of that sector's supply chain is impractical. The Zero Emissions Transportation Association has made similar arguments (see 2208040045); the Treasury Department has not yet said how the "country of concern" restrictions for EV tax credits will be applied. However, Treasury allows leased cars to avoid all the localization rules.
A World Trade Organization dispute panel rejected China's claim that its retaliatory tariffs in response to Section 232 tariffs were justified because the U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs were a safeguard in disguise.
A former Mexican economy secretary, Ildefonso Guajardo, who oversaw the NAFTA renegotiation, said Mexico's current administration has not complied with the energy provisions in the trade agreement, and has "tried to disrupt trade in corn, using excuses of sanitary issues" and genetic modifications. He said in both cases, the trade disagreements "have become part of the full political negotiation" that includes migration and also includes fentanyl and security issues.