Future US government Biden: Swiss exports to US could be hampered – News

• The United States is Switzerland’s second most important trading partner after the EU.
• Under President Trump, exports abroad grew 10 percent a year.
• With the new president Biden, this growth could slow down, believes the director of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce.

Martin Naville has watched economic relations between the United States and Switzerland for many years. He is director of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce. Switzerland now exports the same amount of products to the United States as it does to Germany, Naville says.

What does Joe Biden’s electoral victory mean for the Swiss economy? “Above all, a lot of question marks,” Naville says. Biden barely ran a substantial election campaign, so little is known about his stance on world trade. “Biden held back a lot and waited for Donald Trump to shoot himself in the foot, which is what happened.”

All that is known so far is that Biden wants to set priorities in environmental and health policies. On the other hand, he hardly made any announcements on the subject of trade. It is also unclear who will be in Biden’s cabinet. “Question marks predominate,” Naville says.

What about Trump’s punitive tariffs?

It’s also wide open how Biden will deal with the punitive protectionist tariffs that Trump has inflated world trade with. Small, open economies like Switzerland suffer more from these taxes than economies with a large domestic market like the United States or China.

Naville doesn’t expect the trade war under Biden to ease. On the contrary, the new president of the United States could intensify protectionism, because after all it is about jobs in the United States.

Above all, Trump made a lot of noise

Also, protectionism was not really lived out under Trump, says the director of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce. “Above all, Trump made a lot of noise.”

Swiss exports to the US would have risen 10 percent every year under Trump. “That doesn’t sound like protectionism.” Therefore, it could well be that the Biden administration closed the United States economic area more tightly. That also depends on who Biden brings into government.

The possibilities of free trade agreements are diminishing

For the same reason, Naville does not believe that Switzerland can expect an early free trade agreement with the United States. Something like this has been talked about for many years. With Biden, the chances of a deal between Switzerland and the US have diminished, at least it is not at the top of the priority list of the future US government.

As vice president of Barack Obama, Joe Biden was twice at the World Economic Forum in Davos. His wife Jill studied the dual education system in Switzerland and made initial efforts to import it into the US – Affaire à suivre, you can assume.