Donald Trump has said his administration plans to start sending letters on Monday to US trade partners dictating new tariffs, amid confusion over when the new rates will come into effect.
“It could be 12, maybe 15 [letters],” the president told reporters, “and we’ve made deals also, so we’re going to have a combination of letters and some deals have been made.”
The Trump administration has said letters will go out notifying trading partners without a deal by 9 July of higher tariffs that would take effect on 1 August.
With his previously announced 90-day pause on tariffs set to end on 9 July, the president was asked if the new rates would come into effect this week or on 1 August, as some officials had suggested.
“No, there are going to be tariffs, the tariffs, the tariffs are going to be, the tariffs,” the president began uncertainly. “I think we’ll have most countries done by July 9, yeah. Either a letter or a deal.”
Sensing the confusion, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, jumped in to add: “But they go into effect on August 1. Tariffs go into effect August 1, but the president is setting the rates and the deals right now.”
In April, Trump announced a 10% base tariff rate on most countries and additional duties ranging up to 50%, although he later delayed the effective date for all but 10% duties until 9 July.
The new date of 1 August offers countries a further three-week reprieve but also plunges importers into an extended period of uncertainty because of the lack of clarity around the tariffs.
After the EU and US spent the weekend locked in talks to try to reach a deal before 9 July, hopes were high that the two sides were close to an “agreement in principle”.
The EU trade spokesperson Olof Gill said on Monday that Trump and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, had held a “good exchange” on Sunday, raising hopes that an agreement was imminent.
“We want to reach a deal with the US. We want to avoid tariffs. We believe they cause pain. We want to achieve win-win outcomes, not lose-lose outcomes,” Gill told reporters at a press briefing in Brussels.
In an update on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said the US would begin delivering “TARIFF Letters, and/or Deals” from noon ET on Monday.
He also threatened an extra 10% levy on the Brics nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) after the bloc’s leaders issued a joint statement on Sunday at a summit in Rio de Janeiro raising “serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff” measures, which they said risked hurting the global economy.
Trump wrote: “Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy.”
The Chinese government said in response that it opposed tariffs being used as a tool to coerce others. Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, said the use of tariffs served no one.
Stock markets slipped in Asia on Monday amid the confusion over the actual tariff cutoff point. Japan’s Nikkei lost 0.3%, while South Korean stocks fell 0.7%. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan eased 0.1%.
European stocks were mixed. In the UK, the blue chip FTSE 100 index slipped 0.3%, with Shell and BP the biggest fallers on the back of weaker oil prices. The German Dax index rose by 0.3%, while in France the Cac 40 was broadly flat. The Stoxx Europe 600, which tracks the biggest companies on the continent, was also flat.
Industrial metals dropped, with copper down by 0.6% to $9,808 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange. Aluminium fell by 1.1% to $2,561 a tonne on the exchange, where all major metals were trading lower on Monday morning.
Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, told CNN earlier on Sunday that several big announcements of trade agreements could come in the next days, noting that the EU had made good progress in its talks.
The EU is demanding immediate relief from tariffs on cars, which now stand at 29.5%, and reduction of tariffs in steel, as part of a UK-style framework deal that is being negotiated.
Bessent said Trump would also send out letters to 100 smaller countries with whom the US does not have much trade, notifying them that they would face higher tariff rates first set on 2 April and then suspended until 9 July.
