Simon Lester

There was this: President Trump on Wednesday said he would not label China a currency manipulator, contradicting one of the biggest economic promises he made on the campaign trail. And there was also this: COMMERCE TAKES ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ STEP IN TRADE CASE: The Trump administration flexed its enforcement muscles by taking

Carveouts for tobacco control measures are spreading. The carveout was first used in the TPP, then was brought over to the Australia-Singapore FTA update. Now there is one in the Canadian Free Trade Agreement: Article 806: Tobacco Control Measures This Agreement does not apply to any measure adopted or

Over the years, I've tried on this blog to get people interested in the Canadian Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), with little apparent success.  In part, that may have been because there just weren't enough cases (roughly 3 per year -- the list is here).  A couple

In a recent interview with the FT, President Trump had this to say about the existing U.S. trade relationship with China: How do you bring China’s trade surplus down quickly? By telling China that we cannot continue to trade if we are going to have an unfair deal

On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order for an "Omnibus Report on Significant Trade Deficits."  Here's how it starts: OMNIBUS REPORT ON SIGNIFICANT TRADE DEFICITS By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America,

Following-up on my earlier post about NAFTA, now there's this from White House spokesman Sean Spicer (from Inside US Trade): Asked at the White House about a Wall Street Journal report on the draft notice, which was published Wednesday night by Inside U.S. Trade, Spicer noted

Inside US Trade has a copy of the Trump administration's draft notice to Congress "that the President intends to initiate negotiations related to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its architecture," in which they set out "specific objectives for negotiation."  Not surprisingly,

BBC has the Article 50 withdrawal notification letter here.  Not surprisingly, it does not tell us much about how the withdrawal talks will go (the UK would like a "deep and special partnership" with the EU). The substance of the negotiations will become more clear as we move

Lots of people are asking about what the Trump administration will do with investment treaties and investment chapters of FTAs.  Will their sovereignty concerns mean they reject ISDS?  Or will their pro-business views mean they support ISDS? This from the LA Times is one of the first reports of

Compliance review in the DS461 dispute, Colombia - Textiles, is proceeding in the strangest order I can remember seeing.  Keep in mind that Panama was the complainant and Colombia was the respondent in the underlying dispute. Here's the timeline of the compliance part: February 9, 2017: Panama proposes suspension