U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was interviewed by reporters.
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America prepares sanctions U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Monday that China’s banks and companies, as well as Beijing’s leadership, would help Russia’s armed forces invade Ukraine.
“We stand ready to take action if we find significant breaches, particularly by financial institutions,” Yellen told CNBC’s Sarah Eisen in an interview in Beijing. “Anything that involves helping Russian forces carry out their brutal war against Ukraine This is unacceptable to us and we have the ability to sanction it.”
President Biden issued a new executive order in December giving the Treasury secretary the authority to sanction financial institutions that aid Russia’s military-industrial complex.
Yellen said the Treasury Department “has not yet used this tool.”
She said China “has the right” to have relations with Russia, noting that the United States sees no problem with most trade between the two countries. But Beijing’s military aid to Moscow could trigger sanctions.
Yellen has been in China for several days, meeting with officials including Vice Prime Minister Ho Lifeng. The finance minister arrived in Guangzhou on Thursday and traveled to Beijing over the weekend. She is scheduled to leave for Washington on Tuesday.
Yellen will be tasked with delivering a tough economic message on the trip, putting U.S. interests first while seeking to stabilize fraught diplomatic relations between the world’s two remaining superpowers.
Yellen raised U.S. concerns about overcapacity in China’s green energy industries such as solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries.
Washington claims that Chinese government subsidies for these products far exceed domestic demand. If Chinese manufacturers cannot find buyers for their green energy infrastructure at home, they may choose to dump cheaper surplus products on global markets and squeeze out other companies with high prices.
Chinese official media Officials have publicly denied this, though Yellen said at her meeting officials “understood that this was very important to the United States.”
Yellen did not rule out the possibility of higher U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports if China failed to address those concerns.
The overcapacity issue is one of many trade tensions that have characterized Sino-US relations in recent years.
Former President Donald Trump’s first round of tariffs in 2017 effectively froze economic and trade cooperation for several years. Biden maintained many tariffs during his first term and threatened to raise some.
Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California in November last year, aiming to thaw relations between the two governments and reestablish high-level communication.
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Yellen said. “I feel like our relationship on the economic front is much better than it was a year ago,” she said.
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