ECONOMIST & AUTHOR
Economist Ian Fletcher is one of America’s foremost experts on the problems of free trade. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work and the coauthor of  The Conservative Case Against Free Trade and Industrial Policy for the United States.
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He has been senior economist at the Coalition, a research fellow at the US Business and Industry Council, an economist in private practice, and an IT consultant. He was educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He lives in San Francisco.
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CPA Speakers Bureau Member: Ian Fletcher is available to speak to the topics of:
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the United States and China are considering lowering tariffs on “noncritical” items — the consumer goods that fill American shopping carts — as part of the package being assembled around this week’s Trump-Xi summit.
Ambassador Greer and his team at USTR deserve enormous credit. Rather than trading away the Section 232 protections American producers rely on, they strategically raised the tariff on downstream aluminum products, providing a necessary buffer to offset the difference in the cost of aluminum in Canada versus the United States.
A Sept. 2 House Ways & Means Committee hearing on critical minerals had both members and witnesses suggesting that countries the U.S. relies on for these hard-to-mine, harder-to-process minerals be granted trade preferences.
Late on Friday, August 21, the tentative U.S.–Canada trade agreement collapsed, shortly before new tariffs took effect. Market reporting centered on cutting the Section 232 tariff on Canadian primary aluminum to 25 percent, and the concession was poised to reach fabricated aluminum products as well.
