Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on April 24, 2025
1 min readLast updated: January 24, 2026
Germany's finance minister prefers a US-EU tariff agreement but backs EU countermeasures if talks fail, emphasizing tariff reduction.
BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany still hopes the European Union can find agreement with the United States to bring about a reduction in import tariffs but supports counter-measures if this fails, the country's finance minister said in a radio interview on Thursday.
"The position is very simple: Plan A is we want an agreement and the tariffs should go down instead of going up," Joerg Kukies told the Deutschlandfunk broadcaster, but said he backed the European Union's "plan B" if this doesn't work, which is to use countermeasures.
Kukies is in Washington currently attending the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
(Reporting by Christian Kraemer, Writing by Rachel More, editing by Kirsti Knolle)
The main topic is Germany's preference for a tariff agreement with the US and support for EU countermeasures if talks fail.
Germany's Plan A is to reach an agreement with the US to reduce tariffs.
The EU's Plan B involves implementing countermeasures if tariff talks with the US fail.
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