(Reuters) – The U.S. government is doing the right thing by fully engaging with China, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in an interview with Sky News on Wednesday, adding that Beijing was a fierce competitor, but “not an enemy” of the Western world.
His comments came a day after President Joe Biden unveiled steep tariff increases on an array of Chinese imports, including electric vehicle batteries, computer chips and medical products.
China vowed retaliation, with its commerce ministry saying that Beijing was opposed to the tariff hikes and would take steps to defend its interests.
Dimon, the head of the biggest U.S. bank, said the Western world “had a good hand” in dealing with competition from Beijing, but tensions over the future of Taiwan would complicate relations.
A trade tiff could also potentially undo the efforts by Biden in recent months to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies through one-on-one talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Dimon also warned about the growing alliance between Russia and China. “As long as China is kind of on the side of Russia, we’re going to have a hard time,” he said, ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to China this week.
In an interview to China’s Xinhua news agency published on Wednesday, Putin said he backed China’s plan for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, saying Beijing had a full understanding of what lay behind the crisis.
Dimon also said he had met UK Labour leader Keir Starmer for the first time, and said both him and the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were “pro business.”
(Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
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