Senior members of the Senate Republican leadership said Tuesday (Jan. 12) they believe the Senate can act soon to pass the pending compromise customs bill approved in the House last December, even as a top Senate Democrat threatened to try and derail the legislation. [Daily News| January, 13 2016 | Inside US Trade ] Sen. John…

China’s steel exports rose by a fifth in 2015 to an amount big enough to feed demand in Germany and Japan for a year and leave almost 9 million metric tons to spare. [Bloomberg News| January, 13 2016 | MineWeb ] Outbound shipments of the material used in everything from buildings to ships surged almost 20%…

Hillary Clinton recently asserted that Americans fare better economically under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. Campaign claims are always suspect. In this case, a lot depends on the definition of “better.” Beyond that, there is the issue of the economic conditions and programs that are passed on to future administrations, such as the gathering recession…

  This week we continue our examination of the impact of trade agreements on agriculture as well as the US balance of trade by looking at the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). This trade agreement includes the US, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic and Costa Rica.  [Harwood D. Schaffer & Daryll…

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) now awaiting ratification in the U.S. Congress may result in job losses and rising inequality, weakening rather than strengthening economic growth in the United States, according to a new GDAE Working Paper by GDAE Research Fellow Jeronim Capaldo, Alex Izurieta, and Jomo Kwame Sundaram. The authors also project employment losses and negligible…

WASHINGTON (January 13, 2016) – Like numerous trade deals that came before it, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will fail to deliver promised job, economic and trade growth, according to the nation’s second biggest agricultural organization. [National Farmers Union| January, 8 2016 |NFU.Org] National Farmers Union (NFU) President Roger Johnson testified before the U.S. International Trade…

Currency manipulation distorts trade flows by artificially lowering the cost of U.S. imports and raising the cost of U.S. exports, and is the leading cause of stubbornly high U.S. trade deficits over the past 15 years. More than 20 countries, led by China, have, together, been spending about $1 trillion per year buying foreign assets…

President Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Sen. Rand Paul don’t agree on much. [William Maulding| January, 12 2016 | Wall Street Journal] So it’s not a surprise that each is espousing totally different views on how a big Pacific trading agreement will affect China, which is not a member of the trade bloc. And as it turns out, each can…

President Barack Obama is expected to prioritize the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in his State of the Union address. The TPP text was finally released in November after seven years of secretive talks during which this Washington Post infographic shows 500 U.S. trade advisors representing corporate interests had special access.  Congress, the public and press were…

Two major United States manufacturers of titanium products are warning that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will open the floodgates to duty-free imports of the metal from Japan as well as from other major producers who are not party to the trade deal like China and Russia, which they say would cause “serious harm” to the…