“It’s 25 percent without exception,” says Trump when he signs the order in the White House late on Monday night Swedish time.
They will come into force on March 4, writes Bloomberg.
Customs will apply to all US imports of steel and aluminum, including from Canada and Mexico, the country’s two main foreign suppliers of the metals.
They also risk hitting hard on Swedish steel exporters, said Swedish Foreign Trade Minister Benjamin Dousa (M) earlier on Monday.
– But this type of tariff not least strikes American industry and American consumers, which will receive higher prices. We also know that customs are generally inflation -driven, Dousa said.
The EU is expected to respond
Trump states that he is considering an exception for Australia from the steel tariffs, citing that the United States has a trade surplus with the country.
Trump also signals that he will review additional customs on cars, drugs and microchip.
The EU is expected to respond to customs.
The previous trump government also introduced 25 percent customs duties on steel and 10 percent customs duties on aluminum in 2018. The EU then responded with customs tariffs such as juice, motorcycles, bourbon and juice.
Trump’s tariffs were later converted by the Biden government into a quota system in 2021, in exchange for the EU frozing its countermeasures. However, this agreement expires in March this year and the EU countermeasures will then start to apply again if no settlement will be made about anything else.
Sweden is for its economic size a relatively large steel exporter in the world market and about 8 percent of Swedish steel exports go to the United States.
In 2023, Sweden was the EU’s fourth largest steel exporter to the United States, with a total export of 191,000 tonnes. It was among the EU countries that year only Germany (531,000 tonnes), the Netherlands (388,000 tonnes) and Belgium (231,000 tonnes) that exported more steel to the United States, according to the industry organization Eurofer.