Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused China for flooding the world with its cheap exports.
Page F3From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 2 September 2026
Treasury chief accuses China of flooding markets with cheap exports as allies revolt against Trump's own tariffs.
As it ran on the front
I ran the transcript against the schedule, and I want to walk through what I found, because the numbers are plain enough on their own. At the G20, the Treasury Secretary stood up and said China is flooding the world with cheap exports. That's the accusation, on the record, and nobody's disputing the facts of it — cheap goods, sold wide, priced low. That part reconciles fine.
Where it stops reconciling is the next line in the same set of dispatches. At that same meeting, a number of U.S. allies pushed back — not on China's exports, hon, on the United States' own tariffs. Same summit. Same week. One delegation accusing the world's second-largest economy of underpricing goods, while a room full of allied delegations files formal objections to that same government's own pricing, through tariffs, on the way in.…
…(cont) I checked whether these were two separate meetings, in case the wires got crossed somewhere between the filing and the report. They were not. Same G20. The accusation and the pushback sit in the same set of dispatches, filed the same week, about the same general subject — the price of a good crossing a border — just pointed in opposite directions depending on which flag is on the boat.
Here's the part I keep coming back to, because it's the only part with a hard number attached to it, and hard numbers are the only ones I trust: nobody at that summit disputed that a tariff raises the price the buyer pays. That's not an opinion, that's how a tariff is built to function; it is a charge on the good, collected at the border, passed along to whoever's buying. So when allies object to the administration's economic approach, what they are objecting to, specifically, is a cost. A line item. Somebody's cost.
The accusation against China and the allied objection to the tariffs are, mechanically, complaints about the same thing — the price of a good moving across a line on a map — filed by the same government against one trading partner and received from several others in the same room. I'm not saying which complaint is correct. I'm saying the ledger has both entries, dated the same week, and a ledger with both entries dated the same week is not a ledger with one consistent position written in it. That's just where the two columns landed when I added them up.
“They stand at the G20 and call China's prices unfair, then a room full of allies calls our own tariffs unfair - same complaint, pointed both directions, and the cost lands on whoever's buying, not whoever's speaking. Somebody's paying more at checkout so somebody else can say the word 'flooding' at a podium.”
“Look, tariffs protect American industry, full stop - and if some of our closest allies have a problem with that, that just proves the policy's working, which is not the same thing as isolating ourselves economically at a summit meant to prevent exactly - hm, that one didn't land the way I wanted.”
The receipts
At a summit meant to showcase President Trump’s economic policies as a model for the world, Europeans complained about tariffs and the war with Iran.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.