US trading partners grew increasingly restless over the slow pace of finalizing tariff-relief deals with Washington.
A mammoth agreement with the European Union — the outlines of which were announced last month — is being held up by American demands that Brussels water down its laws regulating Big Tech, the Financial Times reported, while officials in the EU, as well as Japan, South Korea, and the UK are still waiting for the White House to follow through on promises for reductions on existing levies, Bloomberg said.
For the US, meanwhile, the deals have not been as successful as announced, an economics writer argued in The Atlantic: Much-ballyhooed investment promises look unlikely to fully materialize, while other concessions “don’t add up to much.”