US President Donald Trump said on Friday morning that he plans to bring back a set of tariffs he first put in place in April. He had paused them for 90 days to try and make deals with different countries, but most of those deals haven’t materialised yet. Now, US businesses don’t know what tariffs they’ll have to pay on many imported goods.Some of the new tariffs might be even higher than the original ones.Trump spoke briefly to reporters at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from a rally in Iowa on Thursday.“So we’re going to start sending letters out to various countries starting tomorrow,” he said, just hours after the House passed a major domestic policy bill. “They’ll range in value from maybe 60 or 70 per cent tariffs to 10 and 20 percent tariffs.”He added his administration would keep sending more letters to countries each day until the 90-day pause ends on Wednesday. By then, he expects all the countries to be included. He added that smaller countries would be contacted last, and the US would start collecting the tariffs on August 1.“It’s a lot of money for the country, but we’re giving them a bargain,” Trump said. “We’ve done the final form, and it’s basically going to explain what the countries are going to be paying in tariffs.”The original set of “reciprocal” tariffs was placed on US trading partners and ranged from 11 per cent for the Democratic Republic of the Congo to 50 per cent for Lesotho. These tariffs were calculated using a formula based on how much each country buys from the US, even if the country was very small and didn’t trade much. These reciprocal tariffs were in addition to a 10 per cent “baseline” tariff that applied to all countries.A few days later, after the bond market reacted strongly to fears that global trade could come to a halt, President Trump changed his mind. The tariffs were lowered to 10 per cent for all countries, except China, which had its base tariff raised to 145 per cent.Since then, countries have been rushing to make deals with the White House to bring more stability to their trade ties with the US. China reached a temporary deal that brought its tariff down to 30 per cent. Britain made an agreement in early May to keep its duties at 10 per cent. And this week, Vietnam agreed to a plan that would set its tariffs at 20 per cent, along with higher taxes on Chinese goods passing through the country.However, talks with other countries, including Japan, Malaysia, India, and the European Union, haven’t led to much progress yet. Some of whom Trump has called out for what he calls “driving too hard of a bargain”, including the European Union and Japan.On Thursday, treasury secretary Scott Bessent said he thought about 100 countries would probably end up with at least a 10 per cent tariff rate, but more deals are still being worked out. “I think we’re going to see a lot of action over the coming days,” he said. Last week, Bessent mentioned that some of the talks could continue until September 1.
