US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin on Thursday said he had no doubt that Washington and Beijing would sign a new partial trade agreement next month, marking a truce after nearly two years of conflict.
“I’m very confident,” Mnuchin told CNBC.
“It’s just going through what I would consider to be a technical legal scrub and we’ll be releasing the document and signing it in the beginning of January,” he said in an interview at the White House.
World stocks have rallied this month after US and Chinese officials announced a “phase one” deal involving the cancelation and reduction of some US tariffs on Chinese goods in exchange for pledges from Beijing to make some reforms and purchase more US goods and services in the next two years.
Details have yet to be released and other deals between the economic powers have evaporated before.
However, Mnuchin said that this time, Washington and Beijing were on the same page.
“It’s already on paper and it’s already translated,” he said. “It’s not that it’s open to renegotiation or that there are any open issues.”
The strength of the US dollar, which is a global reserve currency and a “safe haven,” is “a sign of the strength of the US economy,” Mnuchin said.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly railed against the strong US dollar and accused other countries of deliberating weakening their currencies to gain a competitive advantage over US firms.
He has urged the US Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero to weaken the greenback.
Mnuchin declined to comment on whether the US currency was too strong.
The US dollar index against a basket of global currencies has risen about 1.3 percent this year, but has retreated from its strongest point in late September.
“Agreement of the phase one deal between the US and China has removed quite a lot of the uncertainties in the outlook for 2020,” AxiTrader senior market analyst Stephen Innes said.
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