The President also said Chinese President Xi Jinping had invited him to visit and reiterated that Washington would continue to admit Chinese students.
President Donald Trump warned on Monday that the U.S. could impose tariffs of up to 200% “or something” on China if the Asian country doesn’t send over magnets, casting critical minerals as the next flashpoint in trade relations.
“They have to give us magnets. If they don’t give us magnets, we have to charge them 200% tariffs or something,” Trump said during his bilateral meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, adding that Beijing “intelligently went and took a monopoly of the world’s magnets. It’ll probably take us a year to have them.”
He suggested the U.S. could quickly ramp up domestic capacity. “We’re going to have a lot of magnets in a pretty short period of time. In fact, we’ll have so many we won’t know what to do with them,” he said.
The President cast tariffs as Washington’s most powerful tool. “We have a much more powerful thing, that’s tariffs. If we want to put 100% or 200% tariffs on them, we wouldn’t do any business with China. And you know, that would be okay too, if we had to,” Trump said.
However, he stressed he was not seeking to escalate unnecessarily. “They have some cards. We have incredible cards. But I don’t want to play those cards. If I played those cards, it would destroy China. I’m not going to play those cards.”
Trump also said Chinese President Xi Jinping had invited him to visit and reiterated that Washington would continue to admit Chinese students. “I spoke to President Xi fairly recently, and at some point, during this year or shortly thereafter, we’ll go to China,” he told reporters.
U.S. markets were mixed during afternoon trade on Monday. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) was down 0.15%, the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA) slipped 0.60% and the Nasdaq-100 tracking Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) was in the green, up 0.04%. However, retail sentiment around SPY on Stocktwits trended in ‘bullish’ territory over the past day.
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