Good Riddance, Trans-Pacific Partnership!

Trump just signed an executive order beginning the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Good riddance. I’ve been fighting this for a long time. As I noted five years ago, when this thing was just beginning, the omens were never good, and Obama should have known better. After the failed promises of NAFTA,…

Ross pledges to design ‘model trade agreement,’ calls for systematic re-examination of deals

President-elect Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, said on Wednesday that he wants to overhaul how the U.S. negotiates free trade agreements, urging a “systematic re-examination” process that would assess where a deal falls short and listing reciprocity and simultaneity of concessions as two of the principles he wants to include in his model.…

Eric Schmidt and other tech execs want government protection from China, and it sounds a bit like Trump

  President-elect Donald Trump and the tech industry may have more in common than they realized. [Eugene Kim| January 9, 2017 |Business Insider] Though Trump was almost universally unpopular in Silicon Valley during the campaign, a new proposal from a group of high-profile tech leaders doesn’t sound so different from some of Trump’s protectionist language on trade.…