Trump, Xi Chew Over Trade War At High-stakes Dinner

Buenos Aires, Dec 1 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 2nd Dec, 2018 ) :US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping had the future of their trade dispute -- and broader rivalry between the world's two top economies -- on the menu at a high-stakes dinner Saturday.

The two were meeting in Buenos Aires, just before Trump was due to board Air Force One for Washington after attending the summit of G20 countries.

The meeting, brought forward by an hour from its original time, may have been tacked on to the end of two days of world diplomacy, but it was in many ways the main event.

"We'll be talking about a thing called trade," Trump said shortly before the dinner in a show of understatement. "It's a very important meeting." Trump has already imposed tariffs on more than $250 billion in Chinese goods -- about half of the total imported into the United States each year -- in an attempt to pressure Beijing to change its trade rules.

Duties of 10 percent currently on most of those goods are shortly set to rise to a whopping 25 percent if a deal isn't reached.

And that's not all.

As Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow said ahead of the dinner: "If things don't work out in this US-China summit meeting, he will invoke another 267 some odd billion Dollars in tariffs." With US-Chinese disagreements on Trump's demands for better market access and intellectual property protections so profound, any real breakthrough is considered unlikely.

But financial markets, spooked by the potential impact on the world economy, hope thatat least some kind of truce can be declared.