US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the country's authorities will not change their position on trade talks with China because of stock market volatility, CNBC writes. According to him, President Donald Trump "loves a high stock market" but believes that "growth is the result of good policy."

"We will not negotiate just because the stock market is going down. And we will not avoid taking strong measures against Beijing for that reason. We will negotiate based on U.S. economic interests," Bessent said.

The markets hardly reacted to the warning, maintaining the growth shown by futures: the S&P 500 index jumped 1% at the opening of trading, the Nasdaq 100 added 1.1% and the Dow Jones rose 0.7%.

Context

U.S. stocks fell sharply on October 10 after President Trump threatened to raise duties on goods from China, then announced that he intends to impose a new levy of 100% on imports from that country on top of those already in place. Trump accused Beijing of "becoming more and more hostile" because of the restrictions imposed on exports of rare earth metals, a key resource for the U.S. technology and defense sectors.

After the markets collapsed, the president softened his rhetoric, writing on the Truth Social platform that "everything will be fine" in relations with China. This brought growth back to the stock markets: by the end of October 13, the key indices recovered a significant part of their losses. However, by the end of October 14, the S&P 500 went into negative territory after Trump's new trade threats against China.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor

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