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

WTO scholar Chad Bown, with the Peterson Institute, has been out in front in raising the specter that some of the policies on the Trump Administration/Republican agenda, in particular the current corporate tax reform plan, could lead to immense trade retaliation under WTO rules.  I'm somewhat less

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,

The Yukos case is among the most flamboyant investor-state arbitrations (Chevron v. Ecuador a close competitor).  Yukos reads like a paperback thriller-settling of scores between rogue oligarchs and the Putin regime with billions at stake.  Definitely worth a mini-series on HBO or Showtime. Last night at the

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

As I mentioned here last week, TransCanada's NAFTA Chapter 11 claim is now over, after the State Department issued a Presidential permit for building the Keystone XL pipeline.  The transcript of President Trump talking about this with TransCanada's CEO is here, and the ICSID web site

It is a well-known story that Big Pharma aggressively uses trade negotiations, political lobbying, and domestic and international litigation (and the threat thereof) to expand the monopoly rents it gains from patent protection, and defeat the effort of states to limit intellectual property rights in the public interest, whether