Key points
- Trump says he doesn’t think any of them is willing to pay that price
- BRICS was set up to hurt us: Trump
- Says the dollar is the king
- We don’t want an emperor, we are sovereign countries: Brazilian president
ISLAMABAD: United States (US) President Donald Trump has said that BRICS countries, including India, would face a 10 per cent additional tariff, alleging the bloc was set up to hurt the United States and to “degenerate” the dollar, which he called “king.”
“They (India) have to pay 10 per cent if they are in BRICS, because BRICS was set up to hurt us, to degenerate our dollar, to take it off as a standard. That is okay if they want to play their game, I can play their game too. So anybody that is in BRICS is getting a 10 per cent charge. If they (India), they’re gonna have to pay a 10 per cent tariff,” Trump told newsmen.
According to CNBC News, the bloc’s leaders appeared to take aim at Trump’s sweeping tariff policies in a joint statement on Sunday, warning against “unjustified unilateral protectionist measures, including the indiscriminate increase of reciprocal tariffs.”
Without calling out the US, the leaders voiced “serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules,” warning that the “proliferation of trade-restrictive actions” threaten to disrupt the global economy and worsen the existing economic disparities.
He added that countries seeking to challenge the dollar “are gonna have to pay a big price,” and said, “I don’t think any of them is willing to pay that price.”
According to Hindustan Times, Trump said he believed BRICS had “largely broke up,” adding, “I thought BRICS was, and I said it a year ago, that it largely broke up, but there are a couple of them hanging around.”
“BRICS is not, in my opinion, a serious threat, but what they try to do is to destroy the dollar so that another country can take over and be the standard, and we are not gonna lose the standard,” he said.
“The dollar is king”
He also criticised his predecessor, saying, “If you have a smart president, you will never lose the standard. If you have a stupid president like the last one, you would lose the standard. You wouldn’t have the dollars here. And if we lost the world standard dollar, that would be like losing a war, a major world war.” “We would not be the same country any longer. The dollar is king. We are gonna keep it that way,” Trump added.
Swift pushback from Lula
Trump’s threats drew swift pushback from Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who hosted the summit and called Trump’s comments reckless.
“We don’t want an emperor, we are sovereign countries,” Lula said during his closing remarks on Monday, adding: “It’s not right for a president of a country the size of the United States to threaten the world online.”
BRICS tread with caution
Other than Lula, BRICS officials kept their collective heads down as they awoke to an overnight threat by US President Donald Trump to penalise them for adopting policies he said were “anti-American,” according to Bloomberg.
Members of the ten-nation grouping of emerging-market economies were reluctant to engage with Trump’s warning of additional 10 per cent tariffs as they left their hotels in suddenly-rainy Rio de Janeiro for the concluding day of the BRICS summit.
