Bessent sees ‘several large’ US trade deals in next few weeks

WASHINGTON – US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there could be “several large” trade deals announced in the next couple of weeks, adding that he expects Trump administration officials will meet with their Chinese counterparts again in-person to negotiate those tariffs.

“My sense is, over the next couple of weeks we’re going to have several large deals announced,” Mr Bessent said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s David Westin on May 23. Regarding China, he said “I expect that we will be negotiating in-person with them again.”

The remarks build on Mr Bessent’s comments earlier May 23 that he anticipates such deals will come ahead of the expiration of the 90-day pause on the steep “reciprocal” rates that President Donald Trump unveiled on April 2.

“These deals are moving quickly, and I think as we approach the end of the 90-day period, we’re going to see more and more of them announced,” Mr Bessent said in an earlier interview with Fox News. “Many of the Asian countries have come with very good deals.”

Mr Bessent said that most US trading partners have been negotiating “in very good faith,” and that the European Union is an “exception.” Mr Trump earlier on May 23

threatened a 50 per cent tariff on EU goods

starting on June 1, saying “our discussions with them are going nowhere.”

“I think this is in response just to the EU’s pace,” Mr Bessent said of Mr Trump’s threat. “I would hope that this would light a fire under the EU.”

The Treasury chief has been tapped by Mr Trump as point person for negotiations with a number of Asian trading partners, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has taken the lead on European talks.

Mr Bessent reiterated his view that the EU has a “collective action problem” in negotiating, because of the need to assemble a unified position among multiple member nations.

Mr Bessent declined to specify which nations the US is likely to announce deals with in the coming weeks. He did say in the Fox interview that “we’re far along with India.”

He also said that the so-called liberation day tariff rates that Mr Trump announced April 2 were “based on countries coming to us and negotiating in good faith.”

After that announcement, Mr Bessent had repeatedly said that those rates were a ceiling unless other nations retaliated. “If you don’t retaliate, that is the ceiling,” he said April 9 at an American Bankers Association event. The EU was assigned a 20 per cent rate last month, less than half the level of Mr Trump’s May 23 threat.

Asked about the

tax Bill that passed the House

earlier this week, the Treasury chief said that Senate Majority Leader John Thune is aiming “to take this up immediately, and I’m not expecting that there’s going to have to be that much change” in the legislation in that chamber. BLOOMBERG