Energy prices are set to be lower under the current US administration than in the prior one, according to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

“Under President Trump’s leadership in the next four years we’ll almost certainly see lower average energy prices than we saw in the last four years of the previous administration,” Wright said at a briefing with reporters in Riyadh. He declined to comment on specific price targets.

The US under Biden frequently clashed with Saudi Arabia over energy policy after the US felt its entreaties to boost production and lower prices to deal with inflation were ignored. Crude averaged about $83 a barrel between 2017 and 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“I can’t comment about where oil prices are today or where they’re going, but if you reduce barriers to investment, reduce barriers to build infrastructure, you can lower the supply costs of energy,” Wright said.

Oil prices have been in decline recently after Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries pledged to boost output and Trump shook markets with broad tariffs. Crude fell to less than $65 a barrel, its lowest level since the coronavirus pandemic and well below the level at which Saudi Arabia balances its budget. That could threaten the kingdom’s ability to continue funding its vast economic transformation plans, according to Goldman Sachs.

Still, the US and Saudi Arabia are eye-to-eye on energy markets, Wright said. “President Trump — and I think the Kingdom — want to see increased demand for energy around the globe and we want to see increased supply.”

The US and Saudi Arabia are also working on a preliminary agreement to cooperate on civilian nuclear power production and expect to make progress on that this year, Wright said. The two countries are on a ‘pathway’ to an accord that would involve non-proliferation and control of nuclear technologies, he said. 

The kingdom would need to sign a so-called 123 agreement, which covers areas including nuclear proliferation issues and technology transfer, Wright said. The US also views it as “critical” that Saudi Arabia does not seek to partner with China on the development of its nuclear program. 

“That view is shared across the two nations and the fact that that may have been in doubt is probably indicative of unproductive relationships between the United States and Saudi Arabia over the last several years,” he said.

Saudi Arabia has previously sought bids from foreign developers including Russian and Chinese companies, along with French and South Korean ones, to build nuclear power reactors.

Under the Biden administration, US cooperation on Saudi Arabia’s nuclear power program had been mooted as part of a broader deal that would also see the two countries sign a defence pact and deepen trade relations. That would have also involved Saudi Arabia agreeing to normalize relations with Israel. However, it was derailed after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s military response.

Wright was in Riyadh as part of a tour of several Middle East countries and which had included meetings with Saudi Minister of Energy Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff campaign is creating doubts about the attractiveness and safety of US assets. But there are still some who believe the US will produce the best returns, despite an epic selloff and signs of a shifting world order. That’s due in part to America’s dominance in critical technologies.

The idea of “American exceptionalism” in the global economy and financial markets has rapidly lost favor this year as President Donald Trump embarks on an aggressive tariff campaign that is creating doubts about US assets.

Stocks have suffered an epic meltdown and only partially recouped their losses. The dollar and Treasury bonds are losing their safe haven status. The economy may slip into a recession, soaring debt may start to overwhelm the “exorbitant privilege” the US enjoys, and the world was already having trust issues with America.

In contrast, markets in China and Europe have been relative outperformers this year after years of lagging behind the US.

But there are still some market veterans who believe the US is the place to be, due in part to America’s dominance in critical innovations.

‘Tech Trumps Tariffs’

Nouriel Roubini, an economist and CEO of the consultancy Roubini Macro Associates, believes “tech trumps tariffs” in the short run and the medium term.

The US boasts leadership in key technologies and industries, so it doesn’t matter who the president is, he wrote in a post on X on Thursday. Meanwhile, China comes in a “close second,” and Europe is out of the picture completely.

Roubini estimates that tech innovations will increase US potential growth by 200 basis points from 2% to 4% by 2030, while tariffs would drag down growth by 50 basis points, even assuming a permanent average rate of 15% after negotiations.

“So Tech Trumps Tariffs even if Mickey Mouse or a clown were to run the US! It doesn’t matter and American exceptionalism will remain and be resilient regardless of Trump given the hyper dynamism and innovations of the US private sector,” he added.

A critical part of Roubini’s thesis is that the nature of innovation itself is shifting from producing an “initial growth spurt that fizzles out over time” to exponential growth that accelerates and gives first-movers enduring advantages versus followers.

He pointed to DeepSeek’s AI model that shocked Silicon Valley earlier this year, saying it’s not a revolution but an evolution that owes its existence to US companies like OpenAI and their years of massive investments.

“MAG-7, hyperscalers and tech firms (in Nasdaq) could not care less about tariffs,” he added. “They gotta continue and increase massive Ai capex to avoid becoming obsolete relative to each other.”

‘Stay Home’

Meanwhile, Ed Yardeni has said that if Trump’s tariffs cause a recession, the US will suffer less than international markets and economies would.

“While some allocation to key international markets might be warranted over a long-term time horizon, we are sticking with our Stay Home investment bias,” he wrote in a note early Wednesday.

That came before Trump put a 90-day pause on his “reciprocal tariffs” on Wednesday afternoon and Friday night’s exemptions on tech imports. But Trump also warned Sunday that tariffs will eventually hit the “whole electronic supply chain.”

Still, the US enjoys full employment, is a net energy exporter, and has a flexible services-driven economy, with productivity growth that’s strong enough to outweigh pressures from supply-chain realignment and less immigration, Yardeni explained.

On the other side, China’s export-driven growth strategy may not work without US demand, while Germany’s manufacturers are being crushed by China, he added.

‘The US has a lot positive going for it’

Then there’s Mark Delaney, chief investment officer at AustralianSuper, which manages $223 billion of assets.

He told the Financial Times on Tuesday that the US is still the most attractive region for long-term investments, even as he acknowledged that Trump’s tariffs were a “significant volatility event.”

In fact, he hasn’t reduced his fund’s US exposure in recent weeks, and it remains more than half of AustralianSuper’s international holdings.

“The US has a lot positive going for it—strong economic performance (though it’s given a bit back), strong productivity growth, strong profit growth and, by any measure, many of the best companies in the world—all that makes it an attractive place to store capital,” Delaney told the FT. 

Even though global trade flows could be upended by tariffs, the companies he’s investing in will likely be affected less.

That’s because tariffs are targeting goods instead of services—for now—though any escalation in the trade war may eventually hit those too.

“Look at any investor’s major holdings,” Delaney said. “There aren’t that many goods, it’s mostly services, that’s the way the global economy has evolved.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump pledged he will still apply tariffs to phones, computers and popular consumer electronics, downplaying a weekend exemption as a procedural step in his overall push to remake US trade.

The late Friday reprieve — exempting a range of popular electronics from 125% tariffs on China and a 10% flat rate around the globe — is temporary and a procedural step in the longstanding plan to apply a different, specific levy to the sector. Trump doubled down on the plan Sunday.

“NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook,’” Trump said in a social media post Sunday, issued shortly after he finished his Sunday golf game. The exempted products are “just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket’” and the administration will be “taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN,” he added. 

Taken together, the comments from Trump and two of his top trade chiefs Sunday are a stark reminder of the scope of his planned tariff onslaught. Still, the maneuver means weeks, maybe months, without extra tariffs on the array of phones and computers before the specific sectoral tariff on electronics kicks in. It also opens a window for companies and lobbyists to push for different parameters and exclusions. 

The exemptions were published in a US Customs and Border Protection document late Friday, and are a step to shift those products ultimately to a different levy, which Trump has long threatened for semiconductors, without specifying the scope. Trump already carved out those sectors he plans to specifically target from being hit by both those levies and the across-the-board ones on countries he enacted this month in his “Liberation Day” announcement that triggered a market selloff.

The pause Friday was nonetheless a temporary victory for Apple Inc. and other manufacturers who rely on Chinese manufacturing in particular, and the country’s government had welcomed the exemptions and urged Trump to go further.

Read More: Apple Was on Brink of Crisis Before Tariff Concession From Trump

“This is a small step by the US toward correcting its wrongful action of unilateral ‘reciprocal tariffs’”, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement posted on its official WeChat account on Sunday. The ministry urged the US to “take a big stride in completely abolishing the wrongful action, and return to the correct path of resolving differences through equal dialog based on mutual respect.”

But US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other administration officials said Sunday it was only a pause before they’re shifted to different levies, though those will almost certainly be lower than the 125% rate on China that Trump set last week, and perhaps higher than the 10% rate charged on other countries.

“All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they’re going to have a special focus-type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored,” Lutnick said Sunday on ABC’s This Week,. “We can’t be relying on China for fundamental things that we need.”

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said the chaos would hurt investment in the US.

“Investors will not invest in the United States when Donald Trump is playing red light green light with tariffs and saying, ‘oh, and for my special donors, you get a special exception,’” she said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Trump’s latest exemptions cover almost $390 billion in US imports based on official US 2024 trade statistics, including more than $101 billion from China, according to data compiled by Gerard DiPippo, associate director of the Rand China Research Center.

Semiconductor Tariffs To Come

The White House had long said it would not apply its country tariffs — 125% on China, 10% on nearly every other nation — to sectors that were going to get their own specific levies. Trump has already enacted those sector-specific tariffs for steel, aluminum and autos, while teeing up addition ones on auto parts and copper and pledging yet others on semiconductor chips, pharmaceutical drugs, lumber and maybe critical minerals.

The semiconductor tariffs are “coming in probably a month or two,” Lutnick said. He said a notice will be published in the federal registry this week related to semiconductors, but he didn’t elaborate.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also pledged the products would face a different tariff.

“It’s not that they won’t be subject to tariffs geared at reshoring. They’ll just be under a different regime. It’s shifting from one bucket of tariffs to a different bucket of potential tariffs,” Greer said Sunday on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.

Trump on Saturday hinted at further developments on Monday.

“We’ll be very specific on Monday,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “We’re taking in a lot of money; as a country we’re taking in a lot of money.”

Friday’s exclusion was the first time that the Trump administration published a detailed list of what products it thinks fall under the umbrella of semiconductors, which are used in electronics products of all kinds. They are not required to apply the sectoral tariff to the same list but Lutnick indicated they would.

In some ways, Trump’s Friday exclusions were an announcement of the products that will be targeted be the sectoral tariff on “semiconductors,” which are used widely in all kinds of products. But the administration may yet adjust the scope.

It’s not clear what tariff rate the administration would apply semiconductors and products it covers under that tax, but they’ve been 25% so far on other industries. Those so-called Section 232 tariffs may prove more permanent than Trump’s country rates, which are based on a more vulnerable legal authority and which he’s said he will negotiate.

The tariff reprieve does not extend to a separate Trump levy on China — a 20% duty applied to pressure Beijing to crack down on fentanyl, including the shipment of precursor materials. Other previously existing levies, including those that predate Trump’s current term, also appear unaffected.

Trump, in his social media post Sunday, reiterated that the 20% rate still applies.

On China, “everyone pays at least the 20% and these particular components are being put through a separate process controlled by the Department of Commerce which is the 232,” Lutnick told ABC.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com