China’s Commerce Ministry on Thursday announced that the country’s Vice Premier and chief trade negotiator Liu He has spoken with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and that both sides agreed to meet in Washington in October.
The two sides will continue talking before then, according to the Commerce Ministry.
A spokesperson for Lighthizer’s department confirmed the two sides talked and agreed to hold talks in the US capital “in the coming weeks.”
“Any sliver of optimism on the trade war front will be viewed in a very positive light,” said Stephen Innes, a market strategist for Asia Pacific at AxiTrader. “Surely both parties can’t be happy to move forward with their scorched earth policy.”
The gains will likely extend into Wall Street trading hours, said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at Asia Pacific for Oanda. But he said investors need to be cautious about what will happen in the long term.
“We will need to see some sort of concrete deal put in place and a winding back of tariffs before I will start getting excited about the global economic outlook for 2020,” Halley said.
