Trade officials from the G20, a group of twenty major economies, began meetings in the United States this week under the shadow of President Trump's tariffs.
The US government has been raising import taxes on goods from Canada and India, then offering to lower them in exchange for concessions unrelated to trade.
Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank (which sets interest rates for countries using the euro), told a Geneva business forum on 19 August that Europe's decades-old growth formula of open trade, cheap energy and US military protection is breaking down for good, not just going through a rough patch.
The US and Canada have been in stalled trade talks, with Washington threatening to raise tariffs (taxes on imported goods) on Canadian products to 50%.
A U.S. trade court ruled that the government must refund tariffs to every company that paid them, not just the business that brought the case. The Trump administration is now appealing to stop those refunds while it fights over whether the tariffs were legal in the first place. Because the U.S. has used tariffs as pressure in trade talks with other countries, the outcome could affect that leverage too. It is still unclear whether the appeal will pause the refunds, or whether the case will reach the Supreme Court.
BMW reported a clear drop in profit, and several other German carmakers released similarly bad results in the same week, according to Tagesschau.
A short news report says Burnham, a British politician, has said he wants the UK to work more closely with the European Union (EU) as the government rethinks its relationship after Brexit, the UK's departure from the EU.
Belgium's approval of an import ban on goods from Israeli settlements is a national decision, not an EU one — and that legal fact is exactly what makes it a signal of where European pressure is heading.
The European Commission has circulated three options for restricting imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The real fight is not over which option, but over which legal basis — and whether that basis lets opponents like Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic veto the whole thing.
At the NATO summit in Ankara, Donald Trump declared Spain 'a wasted cause' and threatened to end all US trade with the country. Because trade policy is an exclusive EU competence, any real confrontation would be with the entire single market — at a moment when the IMF is already trimming global growth forecasts.