While Chancellor Rachel Reeves meets her counterpart, the Secretary in the United States of the Treasury Scott Bessent to discuss an “economic agreement” between the two countries, the last commercial figures confirm three realities which should shape the negotiations.
The first is that the United States remains an essential customer for British companies, the largest unique export market for British products and the third import partner, criticism for the British automotive industry, already landed with a 25%rate, and pharmaceutical products, which could still be.
In 2024, the United States was the largest export market in the United Kingdom for cars, worth 9 billion pounds to companies like Jaguar Land Rover, Bentley and Aston Martin, and representing more than 27% of British automobile exports.
It is not surprising that the national industry fears a heavy and immediate impact on sales and jobs should price stay.
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US car exports to the United Kingdom, however, are only 1 billion sterling pounds, which may explain why the chancellor can be willing to reduce the current rate from 10% to 2.5%.
For British drugs and pharmaceutical producers, the United States was a market of more than 6 billion pounds sterling in 2024. Currently exempt from prices, while Mr. Trump and his advisers are thinking about how to treat an industry that he has long criticized at high prices, he remains vulnerable.
The second point is that the United States is even larger for the service industry. British advice, public relations, financial services and other professional services to America were worth 131 billion pounds Sterling last year.
This represents more than double the total value of the goods exchanged in the same direction, but the services fortunately are much more difficult to hammer with the blunt tool of the prices, but not safe from the regulations and other “non -pricing barriers”.
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The third point is that, if Donald Trump respected his initial justification for prices, British exporters should not face a penny with additional cost to do business with the United States.
The president says that he slapped the general prices on each nation prohibits Russia to “rebalance” the American economy and reverse the trade in “deficits” of goods – in which the United States imports more than it exports it to a given country.
This highly disputed argument could apply to Mexico, Canada, China and many other manufacturing countries, but it does not apply significantly to Great Britain.
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The figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the United States has executed a trade deficit of small products with the United Kingdom in 2024 of 2.2 billion pounds Sterling, significant 59.3 billion pounds sterling of goods against exports of 57.1 billion sterling pounds.
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Add the service of services, in which the United Kingdom exports more than double what it is important to the United States, and the surplus of the United Kingdom-and therefore the American “deficit”-inflates nearly 78 billion pounds Sterling.
This could be a problem if it is not for the United States’s own accounts on the trade in goods and services with Great Britain, which, according to her, actually show a surplus of $ 15 billion (11.8 billion pounds sterling) with the United Kingdom.
You might think they can’t both be right, but the ons don’t agree. The disparity is caused by the way in which the American office of economic analysis explains the services, as well as by a range of statistical hypotheses.
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“The presence of commercial asymmetries does not indicate that one or the other country is inaccurate in their estimate,” said the ons.
This could be encouraging if Mr. Trump had not ignored his own arguments and won the United Kingdom, like everyone in the world, with a 10% covered price on all goods.
The trade agreements are notoriously complex and prolonged, which helps to explain why after nine years of testing, the United Kingdom still does not have it with the United States, and the Brexit agreement which it concluded with the EU against a self-imposed deadline has proven very disadvantageous.