NEW US trade war tariffs announced yesterday imposed a 10 per cent tariff on 60 trading partners in the latest escalation of the trade war reignited by US President Donald Trump in April last year.
Citing concerns about ‘forced labour’ in China, Trump targeted, China, the UK, and the European Union, with a blanket tariff of 12.5% on all goods, accounting for almost all American imports, replacing previous tariffs which expired yesterday.
Willie Bain, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said the UK had lost its comparative advantage against the European Union as a result.
He said that the UK is facing 10% universal tariffs in addition to any existing duties imposed on individual goods.
China has previously said it opposed any form of unilateral tariff, and denied allegations of forced labour.
‘There is no so-called forced labour in China, and we oppose using this as an excuse for political manipulation,’ Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.
Debunking the bogus pretext of ‘forced labour’, a US trade expert Caroline Freund, Dean of UC San Diego School of Global Policy and strategy, said the move is ‘not about forced labour’ at all but that Trump is simply ‘looking for a legal reason to put the tariffs in’, even after the US Supreme Court had ruled earlier this year that many of the tariffs imposed globally under emergency powers were illegally enacted.
‘The new tariffs are a like-for-like swap with the tariffs that expired on Friday’ she said.
The spike in oil prices, up to $100 a barrel, due to Trump’s desperate and unhinged reignition of a full-scale war with Iran, reveals the depth of the economic debt crisis destabilising its economic foundations and forcing it into continuous foreign wars against former colonial countries, plus economic war against its imperialist rivals, and class war against the working class at home with super austerity.
Defeated by Iran’s courageous defence of its country, and now joined by its Houthi allies in Yemen to close both the Strait of Hormuz and the entrance to the Red Sea, the true scale of the oil crisis may rocket global oil prices to a catastrophic $200 a barrel – analysts are predicting.
Driving Trump’s unhinged fury to defeat Iran by ‘bombing it back to the stone age’ is the depletion of US and imperialist oil reserves internationally and the blockade of 15% per cent of the world’s oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea entrance.
A catastrophic crisis is seizing up the global oil market to practically zero.
Donald Trump launched the Iran war after failing to refill the US strategic petroleum reserves to a safe level.
The IATA jet fuel index for global airlines has hit $154 a barrel in Europe and $149 in North America, almost double the cost of underlying crude. In trade parlance, the ‘crack spread’ has gone mad.
It is arguably worse for diesel. The spread over crude has reached $80 in Rotterdam and $88 in New York, the highest since records began.
The whole global market is seizing up.
‘I’ve never seen an energy environment this stretched,’ said Jeff Currie, perhaps the world’s best-known oil guru.
‘The immediate risk as fighting returns to near-full-blown war is that Donald Trump will attack Iran’s energy plants, bridges and civil infrastructure, prompting Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to retaliate by hitting Saudi pipelines and port facilities.
The pro-Iran Houthis in Yemen have just upped the ante by declaring a ‘maritime embargo’ on Saudi shipping. The conflict is reaching the point where Trump must either accept de facto defeat and the worst US foreign policy humiliation of modern times or raise the strategic stakes in a fateful gamble.
It is time for the US-UK and EU workers to have their say by calling international general strike action to bring down US, UK and EU imperialism and go forward to world socialism!