U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that China’s willingness to hold trade talks with the United States this week is a “good sign,” but he is not expecting any “enormous breakthrough.”
“I don’t expect some kind of enormous breakthrough today, what I expect is continued monitoring and checking in on the implementation of our agreement thus far,” Greer said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
His comments come as top officials from President Donald Trump’s administration meet in Sweden with their Chinese counterparts for the third round of trade talks since Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement earlier this year.
One of the chief questions looming over the talks is whether the two nations will extend their temporary pause on the sweeping tariffs that brought two of the world’s largest economies to the brink earlier this year.
The current 90-day pause on tariffs between the U.S. and China is currently set to expire on Aug. 12, an agreement that was reached after leaders from the two nations held talks in Switzerland in May.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested last week that an extension of such a pause was likely to come out of this week’s trade talks.
“We’ll be working out what is likely an extension,” he said last week in a Fox Business interview, adding that he thinks “trade is in a very good place with China.”
Still, as the world anxiously watches for signs of a detente in the trade war between the two nations, Greer down-played expectations of the talks, while insisting that the U.S. wants to “move forward in a positive way.”
“Our discussions with the Chinese are always cordial and constructive,” Greer said.
“This is the third round in the past three months, so just the fact that we’re talking and we want to move forward in a positive way, is its own good sign,” he continued.
With Trump’s Aug. 1 trade deadline just days away, the White House in recent days has announced a number of deals with major trading partners, including Japan and the European Union.
Greer said Monday that the White House doesn’t “feel under pressure to have more deals.”
“We’ll see how ambitious countries want to be, we don’t feel a necessary urgency for deals, we like to have deals, we want to have something that can help restructure trade,” he said.
“But we’ve all heard the president repeatedly say that he’s happy with the tariff, he’s happy to just send a letter and set a tariff, as opposed to having a deal.”
