US President-elect Donald Trump attends the AmericaFest Turning Point USA festival at the Phoenix Convention Center on December 22, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Rebecca Noble | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump is considering a plan that would continue to impose tariffs on all countries but would narrow the focus to a select set of goods and services, according to Washington Post report.
The new approach to tariffs would likely not be as effective as Trump's earlier ideas, but would still cause major changes in global trade, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with Trump's thinking.
Trump, however, disputed these reports in the post on the Social Truth website.
“The Washington Post article, citing so-called anonymous sources that do not exist, wrongly states that my tariff policy will be reduced. This is wrong,” he wrote.
The report comes amid concerns that the new president's insistence on imposing across-the-board tariffs of 10% or 20%, particularly on China and Mexico, will cause another rise in inflation.
During Trump's first term, tariffs on a wide range of imported goods did little to raise prices across the board and actually remained unchanged when Joe Biden took over as president. However, economists fear that conditions are different now and aggressive tariffs will have a greater impact.
The Post report says it is still unclear which sectors these plans will impact, although initial discussions focus on a variety of industrial metals, medical materials and energy.
The US has a $74 billion monthly trade deficit that has exploded during the Covid pandemic.