President Trump has given his administration and trade partners 90 days to work out trade deals before steeper reciprocal tariffs resume. It’s a short deadline that even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US is “not likely” to meet.
As Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk points out, trade negotiations are complex, and they tend to take much, much longer to complete. On average, it takes 18 months for the US to complete a trade deal. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.)
As the chart below shows, the duration of US trade negotiations has ranged from four months (Jordan) to 38 months (Panama) to put ink on paper. Actually implementing those agreements takes years.
“Why does it take so long?” Sløk wrote. “Because trade negotiations involve going through what is imported into each country line by line and then negotiating the tariff for each product category (t-shirts, pencils, cars, pharmaceuticals, lawnmowers, services, etc.). The negotiations also involve discussions about non-tariff barriers, tax differences, rules of origin discussions, IP rights, labor standards, environmental standards, anti-dumping, dispute resolution, digital trade and e-commerce, government procurement, and sometimes security and defense considerations.”
