[Daily News | December 15, 2016 |Inside US Trade]
President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to meet on Wednesday with his pick to run the Commerce Department, Wilbur Ross, to discuss trade policy initiatives – including a new Chinese threat to penalize an unnamed automaker for alleged monopolistic behavior.
According to a report from Reuters, which cites the state-controlled China Daily newspaper, China is expected to slap a penalty on the automaker for allegedly instructing distributors to fix prices beginning in 2014, Zhang Handong, director of the National Development and Reform Commission’s price supervision bureau, was quoted as saying.
“I imagine this will be a topic of conversation when the president-elect and Mr. Ross get together later today,” said Sean Spicer, Republican National Committee chief strategist, during a press call on Dec. 14. “I think it’d be a little premature to get out and offer specific commentary on this. But I do think that the president-elect has made very clear that he stands out there and fight[s] for American companies and American jobs and that’s something he has not been shy about doing so far and it’s not something that we’re going to be shy about going forward.”
Ross is said by some to be Trump’s go-to person for trade policy, leaving open the question of how the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will be treated in the Trump administration.
