US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said restrictions the Biden administration is crafting on outbound investments to China wouldn’t significantly damage the nation’s ability to attract US investment.
(Bloomberg) — US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said restrictions the Biden administration is crafting on outbound investments to China wouldn’t significantly damage the nation’s ability to attract US investment.
The restrictions would be “narrowly targeted” and would focus on “a few sectors, in particular semiconductors, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence,” Yellen said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “These would not be broad controls that would affect US investment broadly in China, or in my opinion, have a fundamental impact on affecting the investment climate for China.”
Yellen spoke from Gandhinagar, India where she’s meeting with finance chiefs from the world’s largest economies. A senior Treasury official said separately that other countries at the meetings have also been eager to ask Yellen about the coming restrictions.
The Treasury chief emphasized once again that the steps being planned, as well as existing export controls, weren’t meant as retaliation for any specific actions from Beijing, or to curtail China’s overall growth.
“What we’re doing is not tit for tat,” she said. “What we’re doing is putting in place controls that are designed to protect US national security and in some cases to address fundamental human-rights abuses.”
Asked why it’s taken the Biden administration so long to propose the restrictions, she said officials “want to make sure if we do this, that we get it right, and we’ve been working on the details.”
She added there is a “good chance” they will deliver the proposed restrictions, but wouldn’t give a timeline.
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