US duties, a steep bill for Italian wines and spirits: 2.3 billion dollars

The framework is that of the dialogue between the US and the EU, centered on the free trade agreement between the two major economies of the world, after the final wreck of the Ttip, in which gigantic dynamics are moving, looking for a new balance of trade, fundamental for Trump, which Washington has every intention of achieving, including through an aggressive tariff policy, that a few months ago hit harshly steel and aluminum, and now it threaten the main sectors of Italian exports: wines and spirits, food and drink, fashion, building materials, metals, motorcycles, and cosmetics. The bill, finally, is very high for the Belpaese: as calculated by Michele Geraci, the undersecretary for Economic Development with authority over foreign trade, it amounts to 4.5 billion euros, for a total export to the United States of 54.7 billion euros. The wine and spirits sector, under these circumstances, would pay the highest price, 2.3 billion dollars, while the cost of duties on food and drink could reach 1.3 billion euros. Only France is more affected than us, as it will have to pay 8.1 billion euros in duties out of a total export that is even lower than the Italian one, equal to 52.4 billion euros. And it doesn’t end there, because French President Emmanuel Macron and his American counterpart are notoriously at loggerheads, so much that the latest threat to French “friends” was launched by Donald Trump less than 24 hours ago, obviously through a tweet, in which he answers the announcement of a real tax on technology, renamed in Paris “GAFA Tax”, where GAFA stands for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon: “France has just established a digital tax on our major American technology companies. If someone has to tax them, it should be their country of origin, the United States. We will soon announce substantial action in response to Macron’s madness. I’ve always said that American wine is better than French wine!”. A veiled message? Definitely not, also because there were a series of even less cryptic messages sent, again on Twitter, between November and December 2018, in which he complained about the difficulties of U.S. wine in France compared to the large numbers of French wine in the U.S. ...