President Donald Trump's administration caused an uproar of panic from traders when it appeared to apply new tariffs to the importation of gold bars — and is now scrambling to clarify there will be an exemption, Bloomberg News reported Friday.
"Industry figures had understood that bars would be exempt from President Donald Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, including a 39% on goods from Switzerland, a major exporter of the precious metal," reported Jennifer Dlouhy. However, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued an agency letter "rul[ing] that one-kilogram and 100-ounce gold bars are subject to the levies," in response to queries from a gold refiner, triggering immediate confusion and panic.
In response, Trump's White House "intends to post an executive order in the near future to clarify what an official called misinformation about the tariffing of gold and other specialty products," said the report.
Trump's reciprocal tariff scheme, which has imposed billions of dollars in new taxes on importing foreign goods from virtually every country in the world, is ostensibly a bargaining chip to force other countries to make trade deals with the United States. Trump has since bragged about securing a number of such deals, but has frequently misled about the nature and terms of these agreements, or at times, even pretended deals are in the works that aren't.
Meanwhile, experts have sounded the alarm that the tariffs are already starting to put upward pressure on inflation, after years of efforts to regain price stability following the pandemic and the global disruption of supply chains.
A federal court recently heard arguments that Trump does not have the unilateral authority to impose tariffs without approval by Congress, which has sent Trump into a fury over the possibility that one of the signature policies of his second term could be blown up.