The G7 has named and shamed China and moved closer to unfreezing Russian assets during an eventful meeting of some of the world’s leading finance ministers in Italy.
Western opposition to China’s trade policies and practices is hardening and spreading, with a meeting of finance ministers from some of the world’s biggest economies calling out China’s “comprehensive use of non-market policies” at the weekend.
On Friday the US announced that it would reimpose tariffs on nearly half the 400 products from China that had previously been exempt from duties. We will enhance co-operation to address non-market policies and practices and distortive policies, including those leading to overcapacity, through a wide range of policy tools and rules to ensure a global level playing field,” they said in the communiqué.
China has recently been signalling that it might impose a 25 per cent tariff of its own on imports of vehicles with large engines, which would impact German companies like BMW and Mercedes, while the potential to target imports of pork from Europe – about half the pork China imports comes from Europe, much of it from Spain – has been floated. There is already an anti-dumping investigation into imported brandy, which has unsettled France.
While the unusually assertive targeting of China’s trade policies was a key message from the finance minister’s summit, they also made progress towards tapping into Russia’s central bank assets held and frozen abroad. The fact that the assets concerned belong to a central bank amplifies concerns that their seizure could impact the credibility of the euro and destabilise Euroclear, a key component of Europe’s financial system infrastructure. The Europeans are also more vulnerable than the US to retaliation from Russia, which has threatened to seize US and European assets held within Russia if its reserves are touched.
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