US families set to pay more for Chinese goods as Washington targets fridges, bikes and handbags
Latest tariff proposal covers US$200 billion worth of products from China, many of them intended for sale on the high street
American families could find themselves worst hit if a new round of US tariffs targeting US$200 billion worth of Chinese imports comes into force later this year.
After Washington and Beijing imposed tit-for-tat tariffs of 25 per cent on US$34 billion of each other’s goods on Friday, and threatened extra duties on a further US$16 billion, the US Trade Representative’s office said on Tuesday it had begun a process to levy 10 per cent tariffs on a raft of other products, many of them consumer goods.
If all of the proposed US duties come into play – the latest are subject to a public consultation period, which ends on August 30 – the combined value of Chinese goods affected would be about half the total it sold to the US in 2017.
While the tariffs introduced on Friday apply mostly to industrial and agricultural goods, such as farm ploughs, machine tools and communications satellites, the new ones are likely to have a significant impact on regular consumers.
Here are some of the day-to-day items included on the list: