Martin Hash wrote:Cancelled TPP, renegotiating NAFTA
This one bears some clarification: he didn't cancel TPP, he just pulled the US out of it.
Turns out the TPP is carrying on anyway, just with Canadian and Japanese leadership rather than American:
One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president was quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the nearly completed free-trade agreement between the U.S. and 11 other countries bordered by the Pacific Ocean.
It looked like the end. Barack Obama’s administration had been the driving force behind the negotiations, and U.S. ratification was necessary for the agreement to take effect. But to the surprise of many, the remaining 11 members of the TPP have so far stuck together even without U.S. participation. Unabashed free-traders stepped up to counter Trump’s protectionism: Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy, has assumed the leadership role. Canada, initially a reluctant member of the club, volunteered to host one of the first post-Trump meetings of the remaining TPP countries to work on a way forward — perhaps because research shows that Canadians will do better if they have preferential access that their American cousins lack. Smaller, poorer countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia wanted freer trade with the U.S. but agreed to consider improved access to countries such as Australia, Canada and Japan as a consolation prize for years of hard bargaining.
Ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam, there was talk that the remaining TPP members would use the venue to make an official agreement to proceed. Trump is attending that meeting during a five-country, 11-day trip to Asia that began last Friday. It could turn out to be the rare international summit at which the American president is sidelined from the main event.
Also, turns out those lumber tariffs don't actually hurt when successive major hurricane damage drives up your country's demand for said lumber:
Unlike China and Mexico, with whom America has large trade deficits, Canada is a country with which the U.S. ran a trade surplus in goods and services in 2015 and 2016. Yet in April, the Commerce Department announced that it had decided to tag Canadian lumber with duties of as much as 24 percent in response to what it deemed unfair subsidies from Canada’s provincial governments, which control access to much of the country’s forests. (Earlier this month, Commerce lowered the penalty slightly in its final determination.)
The tariff was meant to assuage U.S. lumber mills, which say provinces charge too little for permission to cut trees on government land. But Trump has no control over nature. The hurricanes that devastated Houston, other parts of the South, and American islands in the Caribbean this summer created unexpected demand for building materials, pushing lumber prices up and offsetting whatever pain Canada’s forestry industry would have felt from Trump’s border tax. Shares of Canfor, a major Canadian lumber company, increased by more than 40 percent in the six months between the time the original duties were applied and early November. Compare that with the performance of the America’s biggest owner of sawmills: Shares of Weyerhaeuser, one of the companies that complained to Commerce about Canadian forestry policy, were only 4 percent higher over the same period.
He's done a good job of securing Smitty's and StCapp's investment portfolio, at least. He's also helped proved that rather the the US not needing the world anymore, it's actually the world that doesn't really need the US. So, helping tear down the American Hegemony, that's a pro in my book.
"Old World Blues.' It refers to those so obsessed with the past they can't see the present, much less the future, for what it is. They stare into the what-was...as the realities of their world continue on around them." -Fallout New Vegas
