YCLOAK

The U.S. Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady at its meeting this week as it pauses to parse more economic data but may hint it is on track for an increase in June.

The central bank is scheduled to release its policy decision at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) on Wednesday at the conclusion of its two-day meeting. Fed Chair Janet Yellen is not due to hold a press conference.

Most policymakers have already made plain that in contrast to previous years, the Fed feels more confident in its forecast of two more rate increases this year.

“The bar to disrupting the Fed’s plans is higher now than it was in previous years,” said Michael Gapen, chief economist at Barclays in New York in a note to clients.

The Fed is in its first tightening cycle in more than a decade. A quarter percentage point increase last December was followed two meetings later by another hike in March.

Economists polled by Reuters see little chance of a move at this week’s meeting. Investors next see an interest rate rise in June, according to Fed futures data compiled by the CME Group.

The rate-setting committee also is still waiting to see to what extent Trump administration policies on tax, spending and regulation will be able to get through Congress. A stimulus package could speed up the pace of hikes.

LIKELY TO DOWNPLAY WEAKNESS Since the last meeting economic data has been mixed. The economy grew at a sluggish 0.7 percent annual pace in the first quarter as consumer spending almost stalled.

However, a surge in business investment and the fastest wage growth in a decade suggest activity will regain momentum as the year progresses.

Jobs growth also slowed sharply in March but the unemployment rate dropped to a near 10-year low of 4.5 percent.

Economists have largely attributed the weak first-quarter reading to perennial issues with the calculation of growth during the January-March period and the pullback in hiring in March to weather effects.

“There won’t be a lot of changes to the policy statement,” said Sam Bullard, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities. “I think they will downplay the soft first-quarter print and focus a little bit more on the labor market.”

The Fed will have two more employment growth reports to hand before its next meeting.

Policymakers are also gearing up to announce sometime this year when and how the Fed will begin shrinking its $4.5 trillion balance sheet, according to minutes from the March meeting.

An announcement this week on a concrete timeline is not expected but there could be tweaks to language in the statement to show the matter is an increasing priority for the Fed.
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Innkeepers, restaurateurs and landscapers around the U.S. say they’re struggling to find seasonal help and turning down business in some cases because the government tightened up on visas for temporary foreign workers.

At issue are H-2B visas, which are issued for seasonal, nonagricultural jobs.

The U.S. caps the number at 66,000 per fiscal year. Some workers return year after year, and Congress has allowed them to do so in the past without being counted toward the limit. No such exception was passed for 2017 after the presidential election.

Cape Cod restaurant owner Mac Hay has organized seasonal businesses to lobby Congress. He says many can’t function full time without these workers.

A government spending bill unveiled Monday would allow for more H-2B visas, but processing them would take weeks.
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Oystermen, pirates and police clashed violently more than a century ago over who could collect the Chesapeake Bay’s tasty and lucrative oysters. As the shellfish makes a comeback, a modern-day oyster war is brewing, this time between wealthy waterfront property owners and working-class fishermen.

Over the past five years, oyster production has doubled on the East Coast, driven by new farming methods, cleaner water and Americans’ growing taste for orders on the half shell. The resurgence has led to unprecedented resistance from coastal Virginians who want to maintain picturesque views from their waterfront homes and has fueled a debate over access to public waterways.

“These people can’t have it all,” said Chris Ludford, an oysterman in Virginia Beach who sells to nearby farm-to-table restaurants.  

 

Ludford said he faces fierce pushback along a Chesapeake Bay tributary from people with “a $2,000 painting in their house of some old bearded oysterman tonging oysters.

 

“But they don’t want to look out their window and see the real thing,” he said.

Views spoiled, privacy lost

 Homeowners say the growing number of oystermen — dressed in waders and often tending cages of shellfish — spoil their views and invade their privacy. Residents also worry about less access to the water and the safety of boaters and swimmers.

 

Low tides often expose oyster cages, usually accompanied by markers or warning signs that protrude from the surface. In some places, cages float.

 

“All of sudden you have people working in your backyard like it was some industrial area,” said John Korte, a retired NASA aerospace engineer in Virginia Beach who’s among residents concerned about oyster farming’s proliferation. “They may be a hundred feet away from someone’s yard.”

 

Ben Stagg, chief engineer at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, said the state is poised to break its record of leased acreage for oyster growing. But nearly 30 percent of more than 400 new lease applications face opposition, an unprecedented number that’s led to a backlog of leases awaiting approval.

 

 “Occasionally I can resolve those by having the parties get together and adjust the area further offshore,” Stagg said. “But oftentimes, I can’t.”

Oysters make a comeback

There hasn’t been this much interest in oysters in Virginia since the early 1960s. Since then, disease and overfishing took hold and growers started to disappear.

 

Over the last few decades, breeding programs have produced more disease-resistant and faster-growing oysters. The water’s cleaner. American palettes have evolved, increasing demand.  

 

Farming techniques also changed. Traditionally, oysters are grown on the bottom of a calm and salty river or bay, then harvested with tongs or dredges that pull them onto boats.  

 

Now, fishermen are increasingly using cages to grow oysters over a two-to-three year period. The equipment keeps predators away and produces oysters with a more uniform shape and size, which restaurants prefer.

 

 But the cages are often placed in shallower water closer to shore — and people’s homes.  

 

Virginia Beach is perhaps ground zero for today’s oyster war. The state’s largest city sits at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. And oysters thrive in the city’s Lynnhaven River, a network of bays and creeks flowing past expensive homes. Lynnhaven oysters are well-known for their salty taste and size.

Solution is not easy to find

A state task force was formed to find compromise. It recommended giving residents more power to block nearby oyster leases. But the idea was rejected by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, with the majority of commissioners saying state lawmakers should step in.  

 

Proposals in the Statehouse have included raising the cost of an oyster farming lease from $1.50 an acre annually to $5,000. But legislators haven’t found a solution.  

 

Conflicts also have flared up along Maryland’s Patuxent River, the coastal lagoons of Rhode Island and on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.  

 

In Delaware, a group of people who mostly own vacation homes successfully blocked potential oyster farming along their part of an inland bay.

 

“Oftentimes, affluent and new members of the community have the point of view that they own the water in front of them, which is really not true,” said Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association. “We need to win back our social license to farm.”

 

Rheault said he’s seen these battles “up and down the East Coast” — even before the crop began to double five years ago.

 

 “The industry was there before the waterfront mansions were built,” Rheault added. “But it hasn’t been there for this generation.”

 

Ludford, who also works as a Virginia Beach firefighter, is relatively new to the business. He and other relatives started growing oysters in 2010 after leaving the crab industry.

Is zoning the answer?

On a recent morning, Ludford sorted through cages as he stood in the Lynnhaven River, hundreds of yards from the nearest home.  

 

He dragged cages into view as grass shrimp wriggled on the shells. He and two helpers retrieved more than 500 oysters, which he sold at 75 cents apiece to three restaurants — totaling about $375.

“Really, people haven’t seen an oysterman behind their houses in 50 to 60 years,” Ludford said.

 

Steven Corneliussen, who owns a waterfront home in Poquoson, Virginia, said he’s among a group that successfully protested new leases along his corner of the Chesapeake. He said waterways should be subject to zoning, like land.     

 

“That water out in front of me doesn’t belong to me,” he said. “But it doesn’t belong to them, either.” 
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With the U.S. economy on solid footing and unemployment at a near-decade low, the Federal Reserve remains in the midst of a campaign to gradually raise interest rates from ultra-lows. But this week, it’s all but sure to take a pause.

The Fed is widely expected to keep its key short-term rate unchanged after having raised it in March for the second time in three months. Most analysts foresee the Fed raising its key rate again at least twice more before year’s end, a testament to the durability of the U.S. economic recovery and a more stable global picture.

 

One reason for the Fed to stand pat this week is that even though the job market has shown steady strength, the economy itself is still growing in fits and starts. On Friday, the government estimated that the economy, as gauged by the gross domestic product, grew at a tepid 0.7 percent annual rate in the January-March quarter. It was the poorest quarterly performance in three years.

 

Though some temporary factors probably held back growth last quarter and may have overstated the weakness, the poor showing underscored that key pockets of the economy — consumer spending and manufacturing, for example — remain sluggish. On Monday, the government said U.S. consumer spending stalled in March for a second straight month. And the Institute for Supply Management reported a drop in factory activity.

 

“Given all the uncertainties they still face and especially with growth coming in so weak, the less the Fed says at this meeting, the better,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at DS Economics.

 

Most economists have expressed optimism that the economy is strengthening in the current April-June quarter, fueled by job growth, higher consumer confidence and stock-market records. Many think that annualized growth could accelerate to around 3 percent and that the Fed will feel more confident to resume raising rates at its June meeting.

 

“The Fed will probably say in their statement that they expect the economy to rebound in the second quarter,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at the Martin Smith School of Business at California State University.

 

It isn’t just the Fed’s short-term rate — a benchmark for other borrowing costs throughout the economy — that will likely occupy attention at this week’s meeting. Officials will also likely discuss how and when to start paring their extraordinary large $4.5 trillion portfolio of Treasurys and mortgage bonds. The Fed amassed its portfolio — commonly called its balance sheet — in the years after the financial crisis erupted in 2008, when it bought long-term bonds to help keep mortgage and other borrowing rates low and support a frail economy. At the time, the Fed had already cut its short-term rate to a record low.

 

The balance sheet is now about five times its size before the financial crisis hit. The Fed stopped buying new bonds in 2014 but has kept its balance sheet high by reinvesting the proceeds of maturing bonds. The Fed’s thinking has been that reducing the balance sheet could send long-term rates up and work against its goals of fortifying the economy.

 

Now, as the Fed becomes more watchful about inflation pressures, the time is nearing when it will need to shrink its balance sheet, a process that could have the effect of raising some borrowing rates, at least modestly. The Fed jolted investors when it released the minutes of its March meeting, which showed that most officials thought that process “would likely be appropriate later this year.” This was sooner than many investors expected.

 

Could the Fed clarify its timetable for paring its balance sheet in the statement it will issue when its policy meeting ends Wednesday? It may decide against doing so, given that this meeting won’t be accompanied by a news conference with Chair Janet Yellen to explain any shifts in the Fed’s policy or thinking.

 

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the more likely signal the Fed could send is to reinforce the markets’ view that it intends to raise its short-term rate again next month.

 

“I expect two more rate hikes — one in June and then one in September,” Zandi said. “Then I expect the Fed to begin allowing its balance sheet to run off.”

 

Some Fed officials have suggested that they would prefer not to be raising the short-term rate at the same time that they are beginning to reduce their balance sheet. Giving investors too much to digest at once risks unsettling financial markets. In 2013, the Fed triggered a brief storm in bond markets when then-Chairman Ben Bernanke raised the possibility that the Fed would start tapering its bond purchases later that year, catching investors by surprise.

 

“They learned their lesson with the taper tantrum of 2013 that they need to give the markets plenty of warning of changes in their bond policies,” Sohn said.

 

Some analysts say they think the Fed will reveal nothing this week about its timetable for reducing its balance sheet, in part because the policy committee has yet to reach a consensus on when or how to do so.

 

“I have a feeling we are going to get much less information than we want,” Swonk said. “The Fed wants to move slowly, but they don’t have a consensus yet on how to proceed.”

 
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A United Nations economic and social report released Monday warns Asia’s positive economic outlook “faces significant risk” from rising trade protectionism, especially concerns over U.S. trade policy with key partners such as China.

The U.N.’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) survey is largely positive for the region, which now accounts for some 30 percent of total global output. If sustained, the survey said this could reach 50 percent by 2050.

For more than 70 years, Asia’s export-led growth has helped lift millions out of poverty with such target markets as the U.S. and Europe.

But in more recent years the economies have come to rely more on domestic demand given the “prolonged weakness in external demand and global trade,” the survey said.

Regional growth is forecast by the U.N. economists at close to 5 percent, with China — a cornerstone of the region’s economies — expanding at 6.5 percent in 2017, and India growing by 7.1 percent.

China’s economic conditions are seen as ‘stable’ with rebalancing, restructuring and deleveraging [debt] leading to “new normal growth trends.” Russia, buoyed by higher oil prices, is also forecast to show positive growth in 2017.

But the general positive outlook is being overshadowed by concerns of trade protectionism impacting employment and economic growth.

“The most significant risk to the broadly positive economic outlook is rising trade protectionism,” the survey said.

It noted recent shifts in U.S. policies concerning trade, currency and immigration along with negotiations over Britain’s exit from the European Union, “have increased global policy uncertainty and could have negative impacts on the region, including for China’s goods exports and India’s services exports.”

US new stance

U.S. President Donald Trump adopted an aggressive stance over China’s trade and currency policies ahead of the U.S. presidential election. But Trump has recently toned down his comments as Washington has looked to Beijing to back measures to curb North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons.

Shamshad Akhtar, UNESCAP executive secretary, said the debate over protectionism and “distrust of globalization” needs to be addressed.

“The region now accounts for nearly one-third of the world output. Yet there is growing distrust of globalization and emerging protectionist tendencies that have created global uncertainty,” she said.

“If not addressed, [it] has implications for growth prospects in [the] Asia and Pacific region that has traditionally been dependent on its exports for jobs and prosperity,” Akhtar said.

The UNESCAP said growing global trade has led to wide-ranging regional economic benefits over decades. But the debate is being challenged by opposition to globalization, especially in the U.S. and Europe.

But Akhtar said it was difficult to “arrest globalization because of labor mobility, capital mobility and so on, [that] have been instituted now for years”.

“So I want to be rightly understood that distrust [of globalization] is really [a] public and politicians’ gimmick more than anything else — but of course we have to take appropriate policies,” she said.

The U.N. survey said projections show if trade protectionism and global uncertainty increase, growth for major developing countries could be lower by up to 1.2 percentage points.

The survey noted while the Asia Pacific region remains “the engine of global growth,” expansion was insufficient in the face of several challenges.

The commission pointed to rising income inequalities, with the expansion of decent employment also a challenge.

The region was also “falling behind the rest of the world in terms of social protection, financing and coverage” in contrast to levels of spending in developed economies.

Environment

Environmental damage was a key concern in the face of rapid economic expansion over several decades, with growth coming at a steep environmental cost.

“On average developing Asia–Pacific economies use twice as many resources per dollar of GDP as the rest of the world. Environmental degradation and carbon emissions not captured in GDP [growth data] undermine the sustainability of economies,” the survey said.

The survey called for improved governance and accountability, seen as a measure for improved economic outcomes.

Countries, it said, that perform better on governance measures, focusing on the rule of law, regulations and control corruption and government effectiveness also “tend to mobilize and spend their fiscal resources efficiently and effectively.”
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A mysterious decline in two of the most popular fishing worms is depriving fishermen of their favorite bait and threatening the livelihood of Maine’s so-called “wormers.” VOA’s Faith Lapidus reports.
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Protesters in the United States and around the world have marked International Workers Day, May Day, with rallies and demonstrations that turned violent in displays of anger against authoritarianism and right-wing politics from France to Turkey.

WATCH: Luis Ramirez video report on protests

 

May Day is traditionally a day of protest, and this one was no exception. Police fired tear gas on demonstrators rallying in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, the scene of past bloody May Day crackdowns.  

 

Tensions in Turkey have been high after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan narrowly won a referendum last month giving him sweeping new powers.

 

Police arrested more than 200 people Monday.

Moscow parade

Things were more jovial in Russia, on what turned out to be beautiful spring day with more than 100,000 marching in Moscow.

 “This shows people’s unity when so many people gather. This is the day of labor, peace and the weather is so beautiful. And we can see the people’s feelings by the smiles on their faces,” said Yuri, a march participant in Moscow.

The spirit was in sharp contrast to Saturday, when thousands of Russians lined up to present their grievances in letters at government offices. Organizers of the mass protest said police arrested demonstrators in cities across Russia, including 120 people in St. Petersburg.  

 

French election campaigning

France, which is still under a state of emergency and with elections less than a week away, was on high alert. The government deployed 9,000 police in various parts of the country to keep supporters of the two main candidates, centrist Emmanuel Macron and nationalist Marine Le Pen, apart.

 Le Pen, who wants to curb immigration by Muslims, get France out of the EU, and bring back jobs for French factory workers, led a rally outside Paris, where she called Macron “the candidate of the caviar Left.”  

 

Macron also campaigned Monday, but his supporters were generally not visible among the May Day demonstrators.   

 

Thousands, including labor union activists, marched in central Paris, many of them protesting Le Pen.

“We have to block Marine Le Pen, we all agree about that, and we have to do it while stopping further increases in the vote and percentage of Marine Le Pen which would cost us in the future,” said Jean-Claude Mailly, leader of Force Ouvrière, one of France’s main labor union conglomerations.

Demonstrators in Paris threw firebombs and clashed with police.

 

With elections so near and the issues so divisive, the battle lines could not be clearer on this day of protest.

In the U.S., May Day’s rallying point has shifted from workers to immigrants.  Tens of thousands of people are expected to mark the day from New York to Los Angeles to protest against President Donald Trump’s focus on boosting deportations.  Organizations have called for immigrant strikes in some cities to show Americans what a day without immigrants would look like.  

 
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Once they acclimate to their new environment, overcoming language, social and cultural barriers, refugees in the U.S. often thrive. Some translate their experiences into assets that are valuable to their new community, as did Parvin and Yadollah Jamalreza. VOA’s June Soh visited their popular tailoring shop in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Growth in China’s manufacturing sector slowed in April, official data showed Sunday, pointing to an unsteady recovery in the world’s second-largest economy. 

 

The monthly purchasing managers’ index by the Chinese Federation of Logistics and Purchasing fell to 51.2 in April, lower than the 51.8 recorded in March. 

 

The index is based on a 100-point scale on which numbers above 50 indicate expansion.

 

National Bureau of Statistics statistician Zhao Qinghe said in the release that April’s figure was affected by sluggish growth in market demand and supply, and slower expansion in imports and exports.

 

April’s index still represented a ninth consecutive month of expansion. 

 

China saw its slowest growth in nearly three decades in 2016. China’s huge manufacturing sector is seen as an important indicator for the wider Chinese economy. It has cooled gradually over the past six years as Beijing tries to pivot it away from heavy reliance on export-based manufacturing and investment toward consumer spending.

 

The official full-year economic growth target for 2017 is 6.5 percent. 
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His birthplace in a small village outside Mumbai, India, in a home with no running water or electricity, is a far cry from the technology-filled cubicles Pete Tapaskar has come to know well as an information technology (IT) worker.

Tapaskar’s journey from India to the United States through Canada came courtesy of an H1B immigrant visa.

“H1B has been a great contributor for the innovation of America,” Tapaskar told VOA.

Now an American citizen who lives in suburban Chicago, Tapaskar has spent the past 15 years working for the IT company ProSoft as a manager in their immigration program.

Lengthy process

Most of the people Tapaskar has hired have come from India, but he said hiring those workers has not always been ideal.

“It would be cheaper for us to hire Americans where they are available,” he said, “because bringing them from outside, we have to go through the lengthy H1B process and then wait for (a) longer time, and by that time, demand would have changed.”

But Tapaskar says there aren’t enough Americans with experience to fill the jobs.

“We are not able to employ Americans fast enough into the job market to meet the challenges,” he said.

1.4 million jobs unfilled

Richard Burke is CEO of Chicago-based Envoy Global, which sells services to U.S. companies looking to hire foreign workers.

“The U.S. Department of Labor has said 1.4 million unfilled software development — software development alone — 1.4 million unfilled jobs by 2020. So the skills gap is real,” Burke said.

“Envoy helps companies with their visa and immigration needs,” he told VOA from his desk situated in the same workspace as many of his employees. “What we do is help companies bring talented foreign nationals into the country, we help companies deploy their own employees overseas to pursue opportunity, and we provide software that makes reporting and compliance much easier.”

Burke said the skills gap that drives the demand for foreign workers exists because not enough Americans are receiving education or training in high demand jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, also called STEM fields, and many foreign students educated in the U.S. aren’t staying to work.

“Every year American universities graduate over 300,000 foreign nationals with STEM degrees. We don’t give them any opportunities to stay,” he said. “So what is the wisdom of a policy when we know we have a skills gap, when we know we are graduating the best and brightest — 300,000 — and sending them home to compete with us.”

Review process

During a recent visit to Wisconsin, President Donald Trump announced he was signing an Executive Order reviewing the H1B visa process. About 85,000 workers come to the United States annually through the program, far fewer than the number of jobs U.S.-based companies say they need experienced technology workers to fill.

Burke hopes the review will lead to an increase in the number of visas issued, to fill the skills gap before the jobs flee the U.S.

“Work is mobile,” Burke said. “Companies are telling us and they are saying to one another, ‘If I can’t get the work done here, I’ll just move it overseas.’”

Which is what happened to Tapaskar, the IT worker.

His employer, ProSoft, was sold to another company, which outsourced his specific job to India, Tapaskar said.

After 15 years, he’s starting over with a new company and works to help other IT workers as the president of the American Small and Medium IT Employers Association (ASMITEA).

Hope for review

Tapaskar said he supports Trump’s Executive Order, hoping it helps curb any misuse of the program. But he doesn’t want to see those visas only going to companies offering the highest salaries.

“It should be made available for all the sectors,” he told VOA. “(It) should be linked with training programs. America really lacks the training infrastructure at the moment.”

This year, U.S. Immigration officials report almost 200,000 petitions were filed for the 85,000 available H1B visas during the lottery period that ended in April.
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President Donald Trump will spend his 100th day in office talking tough on trade in one of the states that delivered his unlikely win.

 

The president is expected to sign an executive order Saturday that will direct his Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative to perform a comprehensive study of the nation’s trade agreements to determine whether America is being treated fairly by its trading partners and the 164-nation World Trade Organization.

It’s one of two executive orders the president will sign at a shovel factory in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland County, the kind of place that propelled his surprise victory.

Rally in Pennsylvania 

The last week has been a frenzy of activity at the White House as Trump and his team have tried to rack up accomplishments and make good on campaign promises before reaching the symbolic 100-day mark. In addition to the visit to the Ames tool factory, which has been manufacturing shovels since 1774, the president will hold one of his signature campaign rallies in Harrisburg to cap the occasion.

 

It’s a return to fundamentals for a president who has, in recent days, sounded wistful reflecting on his term so far.

 

Earlier this week, Trump announced his intention to work to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. He also said he would begin renegotiating a free trade deal with South Korea, with which the U.S. has a significant trade deficit.

Trade discussed every day

 

“There isn’t a day that goes by that the president doesn’t discuss some aspect of trade,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said at the White House Friday.

 

The executive orders signed Saturday will mark Trump’s 31st and 32nd since taking office, the most of any president in his first 100 days since World War II. It’s a jarring disconnect from Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign, when he railed against his predecessor’s use of the tool, which has the benefit of not needing congressional sign-off.

The more significant of the two orders will give the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative 180 days to identify violations and abuses under the country’s trade agreements and recommend solutions.

World Trade Organization outdated 

Ross said the WTO, the Geneva-based arbiter of world trade rules, is bureaucratic and outdated and needs an overhaul. Ross downplayed the possibility that the United States would consider leaving the organization but didn’t rule it out. 

“As any multilateral organization, there’s always the potential for modifying the rules,” he said.

 

The administration argues that unfair competition with China and other trade partners has wiped out millions of U.S. factory jobs. Ross said dissatisfaction with trade policy is one reason voters turned to Trump.

 

“They’re fed up with having their jobs go offshore. They’re fed up with some of the destructive practices,” he said. “So in effect, the country said in this last election: It’s about time to fix these things. And the president heard that message.”

 

Trump, who campaigned on a vow to crack down on China and other trading partners, has announced several other moves on trade in recent weeks. He ordered the Commerce Department to study the causes of the United States’ massive trade deficit in goods, $734 billion last year, $347 billion with China alone. The administration is also imposing duties on Canadian softwood timber and is investigating whether steel and aluminum imports pose a threat to national security.

 

Ross said Friday that the WTO is too narrowly focused on limiting traditional tariffs — taxes on imports — and does little to counter less conventional barriers to trade or to police violations of intellectual property rights.

 

Trump has pushed a model of “reciprocal trade” agreements in which the U.S. would raise or lower tariffs on a country’s imports depending on how that country treats the U.S.
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