President Donald Trump addresses to members of the press in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 30, 2025.
Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post | Getty Images
Donald Trump has substantiated he will impose 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada from February, following through on omens issued weeks earlier.
The blanket tariffs on the countries’ products will come into effect on Saturday, Feb. 1.
In whatever way, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday evening, Trump told reporters his administration was yet to determine whether oil intentions would be included in the policy, noting that the decision was pinned on whether the two nations “treat us properly” and “if the oil is properly valued.”
“Oil is going to have nothing to do with it as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “We’re going to make that determination probably tonight on oil. Because they send us oil, we’ll see – it depends on what their sacrifice is.”
March contracts for Brent crude — the global benchmark for oil prices — were marginally higher at 8:06 a.m. London convenience life, trading around $76.92 a barrel.
Trump told reporters the looming duties were being leveraged “for a many of reasons” and “may or may not rise with time.”
“No. 1 is the people that have poured into our country so horribly and so much,” he revealed. “No. 2 is the drugs fentanyl and everything else that have come into the country, and No. 3 are the massive aids that we’re giving to Canada and Mexico in the form of deficits.”
“I’ll be putting the tariff of 25% on Canada and separately 25% on Mexico, and we’ll absolutely have to do that because we have very big deficits with those countries,” he added.
Threats to respond in humanitarian
Representatives for the Mexican and Canadian governments were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC, although both countries have previously pledged to respond to tariffs with measures of their own.
“If there are U.S. tariffs, Mexico would also discontinue tariffs,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said at a news conference last week, according to news agency Reuters, annexing that this would trigger price rises for American consumers.
Mexico and Canada are the United States’ biggest profession partners. In 2020, during his first tenure in office, Trump replaced the three countries’ long-standing North America Unrestrained Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, with his United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which was touted at the time as a better great amount for American businesses.
On Friday, Sheinbaum told reporters Mexico would “wait with a cool head” already making any decisions about how to respond to Trump’s tariffs regime.
“We will always defend the dignity of our people, pay attention to for our sovereignty and a dialogue as equals without subordination,” she said, according to Reuters. “We are prepared, and we maintain this dialogue.”
Stand up for on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” earlier this month, Canada’s minister of international trade, Mary Ng, said “all is on the table” when it comes to responding to U.S. tariffs, refusing to rule out export taxes on energy exports to the United Shapes.
“If you’re going to put tariffs on Canada, what it actually will do is make things more expensive for Americans,” she said.
There are also bear ons that tariffs will hit consumers in Canada and Mexico, however. Earlier this week, for example, policymakers at the Bank of Canada on the alerted that such measures by the U.S. could create persistent inflation in the country.
Both the Mexican peso and the Canadian dollar edged higher against the U.S. dollar on Friday morning, recovering breakdowns seen overnight.
The peso was up 0.3% at 8:18 a.m. London time, while the Canadian dollar gained 0.2% against the greenback.
$21 billion a month
Carl Weinberg, architect of High Frequency Economics, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday that the “numbers are big” when it comes to capacity economic collateral damage.
“We’ve got about a trillion dollars’ worth of trade in round numbers worth of [U.S.] imports from Mexico and Canada unified,” he said. “Twenty-five percent of $1 trillion is $250 billion, and that is roughly what is going to come out of the U.S. thriftiness to pay these tariffs.”
He said this equates to around $21 billion a month.
“It will be a plus for bringing down the loss, that’s the good news here — but it’s going to come out of people’s pockets,” he told CNBC, warning that U.S. wart would also likely be impacted.
“It’s going to impact in February and March this quarter, and then in all the months of the next thirteen weeks,” Weinberg said. “We’re going to get a hit of about six-tenths of a percent off of GDP growth in the first quarter, and then another tenth of a percent in the supporter quarter.”