At G20, Treasury Secretary Bessent said all members align on cheap exports, except for one

19 of the G20 members agreed to tackle cheap exports, but China was not one of them. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that 19 of the members of the G20 had agreed to address streams of “cheap exports” that cause global economic imbalances, but said China had dissented.Bessent made his comments at the end of a two-day meeting with finance ministers and central bankers where he tried to focus on growth, telling reporters he had urged some of his G20 counterparts to take a page from the Trump administration’s playbook of using tariffs and other measures to crack down on trade imbalances.“We believe that non-market-based economies pushing out a never-ending stream of cheap exports is not sustainable,” Bessent told reporters, describing the sentiment that all but one G20 member had agreed to.“It is clear that the country with the world’s largest and unsustainable current account surplus, the People’s Republic of China, was the dissenter,” Bessent said.The Trump administration, echoing many economists, has blamed China for trade imbalances that have left it with a large trade surplus while the U.S. has a sizable deficit. At the closing press conference Tuesday, Bessent also previewed the coming meeting between President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping.He told reporters he had warned other nations at the beginning of Trump’s second term that the new U.S. “tariff wall” would mean that Chinese goods would flood their markets.“And unfortunately, I was right,” Bessent said. “The rest of the world probably needs to take a hard look at what they should be doing to protect their citizens’ jobs, their manufacturing base, so that everything they do doesn’t get offshored.”