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Latest — 14 Sep 2025

The Japan-U.S. Investment MOU: Centrally Planned Foreign Investment?

In the last post, Mona set out the basics of the Japan-U.S. MOU on "Strategic Investments" in the U.S. – or at least, a version of the MOU that was posted by the Japanese government online, although we don't know for sure if this is

Have the Japanese turned investment lemons into investment project lemonade?

Last week, the governments of the United States and Japan completed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to flesh out the details of a $550 billion pledge to invest in the United States made as part of the bargain to ‘buy down’ the tariffs imposed on Japanese traded products. For months,

EU Security Concerns and the U.S.-EU Trade Deal

A little while back, I asked the question "To What Extent Are the Trade Negotiations about Security?" At that time, we were starting to get hints about the relevance of the Ukraine war to the U.S.-EU trade negotiations. In the last week or two, we've been getting more clarity on this.

Jamieson Greer on Trade with China and the Iraq War

In a recent speech, U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer offered the following thoughts on past U.S. government efforts to bring market economics to China.

New IELP Blog Platform

As I mentioned last week, Typepad has announced they would be shutting down by the end of September and everyone had to get their content off or they would lose it forever. So that sucked. I had been wanting to get the IELP blog off Typepad anyway though, and this

Lessons from the First U.S. Win in a Trade and Labor Dispute: The USMCA RRM Atento Decision

For the first time, an arbitral panel has sided with the United States in a trade and labor dispute. On August 21, the United States and Mexico announced the publication of the second panel decision under the USMCA/T-MEC/CUSMA Facility-Specific Rapid Response Labor Mechanism (RRM).

IELP Blog Relocation

Just a quick note to readers that the platform on which the IELP blog is hosted is shutting down at the end of September. Bear with me over the next few weeks as I find a new platform. Blogging might be a bit light during this period.

U.S. State Capitalism as a Response to Chinese State Capitalism

In an interview last week, David Faber of CNBC pressed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on several Trump administration actions that could be characterized as "state capitalism": Faber: As somebody who's been around the capital markets for years, as you have been, I do wonder, how do

A Few Thoughts on Antitrust and Big Tech

I'm no antitrust expert, but I do have some opinions on it, and I'm going to offer a few of them in this post. As an intro, I want to mention a speech by Notre Dame law professor Roger Alford -- whose Opinio Juris blog posts

Wentong Zheng on Presidential Tariffs

University of Florida law professor Wentong Zheng has posted a new paper called "Presidential Tariffs," in which he argues that the IEEPA should not be interpreted to allow the President to proclaim tariff modifications for the purpose of entering into market-opening trade agreements, given that Congress allowed the