00:00So James, the U.S. is investigating 16 countries, including Taiwan, for potentially discriminatory
00:06or unfair trade practices under a law known as Section 301. There's been a lot of sections
00:12thrown around recently in tariff law, Section 122, 232. How does Section 301 compare to these
00:19other tariff authorities? So of all the many tariff authorities that are being kicked around
00:24now, Section 301 probably comes the closest to the way that the Trump administration had
00:29conceived of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs sort of granting them very
00:38broad authority, very flexible authority. The difference really comes in the procedure leading
00:43up to those tariffs. Very broad standard, nonspecific, much like AIBA in that regard. But they still
00:51have to go through the process. They'll publish a report. The statute gives them a year to do
00:56so. They can move much faster. And the schedule they've announced suggests that they intend
01:02this to run no longer than that 150-day period that the current sort of, I guess, Band-Aid
01:10Section 122 tariffs are going to last. Just last month, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned
01:17the tariffs under an emergency law that you just mentioned, also known as AIEPA. Could we
01:22see that same thing here with Section 301? I don't think court cases are likely to be
01:27filed challenging the ability to impose tariffs pursuant to 301 because the statute's fairly
01:33explicit in that regard. So why have these 16 countries been singled out? And once these
01:38investigations are complete, do you expect all the countries will have tariffs imposed on
01:42them? So what these countries overlap with most, I guess, strikingly, is the list of countries
01:51that had some sort of reciprocal trade deal with the administration prior to the AIEPA tariffs being
01:59held unlawful by the Supreme Court. Question whether you include the People's Republic of China
02:07in that group, given that their deal was really more of a detente, my expectation would be that
02:13all of them are going to end up with a Section 301 tariff placed upon them. On the other hand,
02:19my expectation would be that the countries that had reciprocal trade deals going into the Section
02:25301 investigation are going to come out with a tariff arrangement that looks essentially identical
02:32or very close to identical to the deal rate that was negotiated previously. And so for a lot of
02:40countries, that actually looks better than the current Section 122 tariffs.
02:45You know, ever since the AIEPA tariffs were overturned last month, there's been a lot of debate in Taiwan
02:50about whether a recent trade deal struck with Washington was worth it. Now that Section 301 is on the
02:56table, does that change the picture for Taiwan?
02:59I think for a lot of people right now contemplating, you know, whether Taiwan acted correctly or wisely
03:07in sort of coming to a deal under the AIEPA tariffs would be to observe that, you know, tariff version
03:161.0 under AIEPA is likely to look very similar to tariff version 2.0 under Section 301. And so,
03:24although there's, you know, obviously this sort of transition period between 1.0 and 2.0,
03:30it seems like the ultimate landing place is going to be quite similar.
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