Trump Made Promise to Swiss Just Hours Before Suspending Tariffs
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Donald Trump promised his Swiss counterpart to look again at levies inflicted on her country just hours before he suspended much of his tariff onslaught on the world.
That pledge by the US president was relayed by Karin Keller-Sutter, head of state and finance minister of Switzerland, in an interview with Bloomberg Television that offered insights into the tone and intensity of high-level diplomacy focused on the White House in recent days.
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“It was very constructive,” she told Oliver Crook at a gathering of European Union finance ministers in Warsaw on Friday, which she is attending on an ad-hoc capacity. “We both agreed to really find a solution and he promised to look at the situation — and then we would have a dialog again.”
While Keller-Sutter didn’t suggest her call to Washington on Wednesday was the clincher in the president’s decision to declare a 90-day tariff pause amid Treasury-market gyrations, her remarks point to the kind of reasoning Trump has been presented with by peers at the eye of the storm this week.
“Switzerland is a very important direct investor in the US — I mean, overall it’s No. 6 and when it comes down to manufacture, it’s No. 4, and R&D even No. 1 — so I could explain that to the US president, which was very helpful,” she said. “Swiss companies invest a lot and are planning to invest a lot, but they need a signal. I mean, they have to know how secure this investment will be in the next years.”
Trump had imposed levies on Swiss goods of 32%, far more than the 20% in the neighboring EU. Officials in Bern were taken aback, and in the interview Keller-Sutter described the tariff as “huge.”
The Swiss trade surplus with the US surged recently because of its role as a hub in refining gold as shipments to New York spiked in anticipation of tariffs. A paper from the Swiss National Bank this week insisted that bullion should be excluded in analysis of the trade relationship.
Switzerland is seeing fallout from market turmoil in other ways too, with the franc having touched its strongest in a decade against the dollar on Friday. Keller-Sutter said such spikes take place “whenever there is an international crisis.”
“Switzerland is a safe haven,” she said. “We have a strong currency, which on the one hand of course is quite a challenge for our exporting industry. On the other hand, it also shows that we have a stable and very solid economy, and that there is a lot of trust.”
Switzerland found itself in the cross hairs of the first Trump administration, when branded a currency manipulator in 2020 because of the SNB’s interventions to stem gains in the franc. The president isn’t worried about a repeat of that.
“It doesn’t concern me because it’s not true,” she said. “We’re not manipulating anything.”
As for Trump, Keller-Sutter — who is Switzerland’s president under the country’s rotating system of power sharing — hinted that she sees the prospect of an understanding, or perhaps even a deal, in due course.
“I would say we had a very good conversation, very open and constructive,” she said. “We would like to talk about how in fact we can come back to a normal basis of tariffs together. And we both agreed that we have to find a solution.”
–With assistance from Max Ramsay, Alessandra Migliaccio, William Horobin, Kamil Kowalcze, Jorge Valero, Jasmina Kuzmanovic, Agnieszka Barteczko and Ben Priechenfried.
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