US President Donald Trump criticized Germany on trade this week, calling the country “very bad” for its trade policies during a meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on the eve of the G7 Summit.
“The Germans are bad, very bad,” Trump told the European Commission President. “Look at the millions of cars that they’re selling in the USA. Horrible. We’re gonna stop that.”
Early reports unfairly characterized Trump’s statements as being anti-German, according to White House Economic Adviser Gary Cohn. “He said they’re very bad on trade, but he doesn’t have a problem with Germany,” Cohn said. Reuters reports that German papers translated the English “bad” to the German “boese,” which can mean “evil.” That caused a stir when the German reports were translated back to English.
Jean-Claude Juncker expressed a similar sentiment. “It’s not true that the president took an aggressive approach when it came to the German trade surplus,” Juncker remarked. “He said, like others have, that [the US] has a problem with the German surplus. So he was not aggressive at all.”
Still, Trump seems keen on reducing the United States’ trade deficit with Germany, which last year reached a record $283 billion. In January, he reportedly threatened a tax of 35 percent on German auto imports, although he’s so far made no mention of German auto plants in the US, which employee American workers and actually help lower the trade deficit. Those plants include BMW’s South Carolina assembly plant, and Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant in Tennessee.
The president has embraced a more protectionist approach to the US economy than his recent predecessors, also blasting American carmakers like Ford and General Motors for their manufacturing investments in Mexico.
(Source: Autoblog)
Comment
Well Europe imposes a 25% tariff on US vehicles coming in, but the US has a 10% tariff on European vehicles coming here. Fair?
15 years ago when the US introduced the ‘cash for clunkers’ federal government program, it was said to mimic the same German program. One very big difference. The German program applied to German built replacement vehicles. The US program allowed any where in the world by any manufacture vehicles to qualify. KIA was the largest seller of replacement vehicles. At the time all KIA vehicles sold in the US were built in Korea. So our tax dollars went directly to a foreign company creating jobs in a foreign country.