President Donald Trump announced the framework for a commercial agreement with the United Kingdom on Thursday, marking the first agreement of this type with any nation since the White House suspended some of its “Liberation Day” rates of great reach last month.
The Trump administration will adjust the 25% tariffs in steel and aluminum, and will reduce automatic tariffs from 25% to 10% in the first 100,000 British vehicles sent to the United States, Trump said.
The agreement left 10% of tariffs that the United States slapped last month for goods imported from almost all foreign countries.
In return, the United Kingdom will relieve commercial barriers aimed at a set of products, including ethanol, beef and machinery, among other products, said Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. This additional access to the market amounts to a value worth $ 5 billion, said the White House.
The United States also obtained a purchase of $ 10 billion pieces of Boeing aircraft and a “safe supply chain” for pharmaceutical products, according to Trump information shared on social networks on Thursday.
The United Kingdom will accelerate US imports through customs inspection, Trump said.
The American-Rio-Referencia Agreement left some details to be resolved later, establishing the two countries on a road to a broader agreement, Trump said.
When addressing the reports in the Oval office on Thursday, Trump promoted the agreement.
“This agreement is working for both countries,” Trump said, noting that the “final details are writing.”
In the comments made about a speaker phone on Trump’s desktop, the United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that negotiations between the two parties moved to an agreement in recent weeks.
“This is a really important treatment,” said Starmer. “There are no two countries that are closer than our two countries.”
Starmer acknowledged that some details must still be “solved.”
The approximately $ 68 billion in goods imported from the United Kingdom last year represented approximately 2% of the imported goods of the USA, US data. presented. The United States exported almost $ 80 billion in products to the United Kingdom last year, which represented almost 4% of exports of US goods.
President Donald Trump makes a commercial ad with Britain at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on May 8, 2025.
Jim Watson/AFP through Getty Images
Dozens of nations face potential called “reciprocal rates”, but the United Kingdom is not among them, since the United Kingdom buys more than it sells to the US.
Tyling before a chamber subcommittee on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Besent said the Trump administration had begun negotiations with 17 of the 18 main commercial partners of the United States, excluding China. These countries represent the vast majority of foreign trade in the United States, said Besent.
Besent will travel to Geneva, Switzerland, for initial commercial negotiations with China on Saturday. Last month, the United States imposed 145% tariffs on Chinese products, which caused 125% retaliation tariffs on US products.
On Thursday, Trump said negotiations between the United States and China would be “very substantive,” expressing the will to reduce tariffs on Chinese products.
“I couldn’t go higher,” Trump said. “You know it’s going down.”
Trump’s tariff climbing last month to the markets and caused recession warnings on Wall Street.
Speaking at a press conference in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, the president of the Fed, Jerome Powell, warned that Trump’s tariff policy could cause greater inflation and economic slowdown.
“If the great increase in tariffs that have been announced are sustained, they are likely to generate an increase in inflation and a slowdown in economic growth,” Powell said Wednesday.
Even so, the key indicators suggest that the economy remains in “solid form,” Powell said.
