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Trump Says Tariffs Will Be Coming for Electronics

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Bloomberg Apr 14 08:16 · 36.9k Views

Trump Says Tariffs Will Be Coming for Electronics

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  • 00:00 The tariffs will be in place
  • 00:02 in the non distant future because as you know, like we did with steel, like we did with automobiles, like we did with aluminum,
  • 00:09 which are now fully on.
  • 00:10 We'll be doing that with
  • 00:11 semiconductors, with chips
  • 00:14 and numerous other things
  • 00:16 and that'll take place in the very
  • 00:18 near future.
  • 00:21 I'm going to be announcing it over the next week.
  • 00:25 President Trump speaking from Air Force One on Sunday, pledging US tariffs will be imposed on phones, computers and consumer electronics despite a temporary exemption announced on Friday.
  • 00:36 For more, we're joined by Bloomberg's executive editor for global tech, Peter Ehlstrom.
  • 00:41 Peter, their fields have been a lot of back and forth.
  • 00:43 Just catch us up on where we exactly stand with tariffs on electronics.
  • 00:49 It was a very dramatic weekend.
  • 00:51 So very late on Friday, we got notice in
  • 00:55 government filing that
  • 00:57 certain products, including
  • 00:59 smartphones, the iPhone, Apple's iPhone in particular,
  • 01:02 other products like the iPad, computers like the Macs,
  • 01:06 would be exempt from these very high tariffs on goods going from China into the United States.
  • 01:11 Those are 125% tariffs.
  • 01:13 That was seen as a very serious threat for Apple in particular.
  • 01:16 Some other companies too, but Apple in particular, because they make most of their products within China,
  • 01:22 they're shipping many of them into the United States too.
  • 01:25 So that was an exemption on Friday.
  • 01:26 As we saw over the weekend, though, the Trump administration walked back that exemption.
  • 01:30 They talked about how these goods are not going to be permanently exempted, that this was a temporary reprieve in in fact, so Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, first talked about this on the morning shows on Sunday.
  • 01:42 And then Trump, as you were mentioning, talked about how these tariffs are going to be implemented.
  • 01:46 They've talked about using something called Section 232 to do this.
  • 01:49 That's a process that's fairly long.
  • 01:51 It's pretty open.
  • 01:52 They get public commentary to try to figure out what those tariffs are going to be.
  • 01:56 He referred to Trump, referred to the tariffs on steel in particular.
  • 02:00 Those are about 25%.
  • 02:01 So you could see a pretty dramatic come down from 125% to about 25% for some of these products coming from China into the United States, although we don't have those specifics quite yet.