IARN — President Trump’s top economic advisor says the phase one trade deal with China remains on track despite the possibility of more sanctions against the East Asian country by the administration.
Commodities broker Greg McBride with Allendale says the Trump Administration is considering two or three actions against China that could be taken within a matter of days, not weeks. One action is President Trump could announce sanctions against Chinese officials that the U.S. believes are responsible for the repression of minorities in Xinjiang. McBride notes that White House advisor Larry Kudlow last week said the phase one deal “is proceeding” despite the latest tension between the two countries.
“For right now, they continue to tell us that everything looks good and that we’re staying on task with that,” McBride said. “Larry Kudlow has come out and said we are on task and that we’re looking good there. Obviously, there is always a little trepidation when it comes to China. The concern is they will back out because of some of the issues with Hong Kong or some of the other issues that we have underlying. For right now, we are seeing them buy (from the U.S.) and that is going to continue to put some support under the markets and help us push a little bit higher as we head into the heat of summer here.”
McBride says China continues to show up in U.S. Weekly Export Sales.
“We’ll look for the soybeans to continue to be competitive and actually be lower priced than Brazil for all delivery periods for right now,” McBride said. “Corn is a little bit of a different story. We’re actually not as well priced when it comes to corn, but we are closing that gap a little bit as we move out of Brazil and Argentina’s time frame and we start to move towards harvest for our own.”
Private exporters last Friday reported the sales of 202,000 metric tons of corn for delivery to China during the 2020/2021 marketing year. They also reported 126,000 metric tons of soybeans to China during the 2020/2021 marketing year.
