Twelve countries that border the Pacific Ocean signed up to the TPP in February 2016, representing roughly 40% of the world's economic output.

The pact aimed to deepen economic ties between these nations, slashing tariffs and fostering trade to boost growth. Members had also hoped to foster a closer relationship on economic policies and regulation.

The agreement was designed so that it could eventually create a new single market, something like that of the EU.

But all 12 nations needed to ratify it, before it could come into effect.

Once Donald Trump won last year's election, the writing was on the wall for the TPP.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, now generally known as TTIP, is primarily a deal to cut tariffs and regulatory barriers to trade between the US and EU countries, making it easier for companies on both sides of the Atlantic to access each other's markets. Industries it would affect include pharmaceuticals, cars, energy, finance, chemicals, clothing and food and drink.

David Cameron is meeting other EU leaders and industry bodies at CBI-hosted talks in Brussels hoping to inject fresh impetus into talks on a transatlantic trade deal. Supporters say it will boost economies - critics call it anti-democratic.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership will lead to a global race to the bottom

Unlike what President Obama claims, the agreement will only encourage a race to the bottom, in which a small percentage of people get ridiculously rich
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Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, we’ve seen the loss of nearly five million US manufacturing jobs, the closure of more than 57,000 factories, and stagnant wages. This deal won’t be any different.

"A trade war is a race to the bottom that makes us all poorer, leaves our citizens with less choice and fewer opportunities."

Mr Turnbull says the government is satisfied it has made a strong case for an Australian exemption.

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993, the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy. In fact, NAFTA has also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers’ collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits.

NAFTA is a free trade and investment agreement that provided investors with a unique set of guarantees designed to stimulate foreign direct investment and the movement of factories within the hemisphere, especially from the United States to Canada and Mexico. Furthermore, no protections were contained in the core of the agreement to maintain labor or environmental standards. As a result, NAFTA tilted the economic playing field in favor of investors, and against workers and the environment, resulting in a hemispheric “race to the bottom” in wages and environmental quality.

In 1970, more than a quarter of U.S. employees worked in manufacturing. By 2010, only one in 10 did.

The growth in imports from China had a role in that decline–contributing, perhaps, to as much as one-quarter of the employment drop-off from 1991 to 2007, according to an analysis by David Autor and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the U.S. jobs slide began well before China’s rise as a manufacturing power. And manufacturing employment is falling almost everywhere, including in China. The phenomenon is driven by technology

A decline in demand for middle-skilled work -- a phenomenon dubbed “job polarization,” because more positions are concentrated at the higher and lower ends -- has played a role in keeping prime-age men out of the job market, Didem Tuzemen, an economist at the Kansas City Fed, wrote in the paper released this week. Without job polarization, Tuzemen estimated that 1.9 million more prime-age men would have been employed in 2016

Middle-skilled jobs are those that often involve routine tasks and are procedural or rule-based, making them easier to automate. On the other hand, low-skilled jobs are mostly service-oriented and high-skilled jobs involve analytical or managerial skills -- both of which involve responsibilities that are more difficult to replace with a machine or computer, Tuzemen said.

International trade and weaker unions have also contributed to the departure of men from the labor force, particularly as manufacturing jobs have moved to countries with lower wages. The men who have left the work force are unlikely to return if labor conditions remain the same, possibly due to a lack of available jobs suitable for their skill set, according to the paper.

In a Thursday editorial, widely-read Chinese state-run tabloid the Global Times said the United States was trying to play the victim.

"If the US wants to reduce its trade deficit, it has to make Americans more hard-working and conduct reforms in accordance with international market demand, instead of asking the rest of the world to change," it wrote.

Lagarde Counters Trump, Calling Global Trade Wars ‘Unwinnable’

I'm going out on a limb here without evidence. Lagarde predicting that trade wars are unwinnable. Unlikely Lagarde ever traded anything in her life.

US President Donald Trump has signed a presidential memorandum that could impose tariffs on up to $US60 billion

The theft of intellectual property from the US is "unprecedented" and costing the nation an estimated $300bn (£200bn) each year, a report says.

The study, led by former top-ranking officials, said China was thought to be behind 50-80% of the theft.

Stronger deterrent measures that made IP theft unprofitable were needed, the report said.

These included banking sanctions and import or investment curbs on companies failing to protect IP rights.

The non-partisan private commission was co-chaired by Dennis Blair, Mr Obama's former director of national intelligence, and Jon Huntsman, former US ambassador to China and Republican presidential candidate.


Its report comes weeks before a summit of the US and Chinese presidents, set for 7 and 8 June, at which the issue of Chinese cyber espionage is likely to be raised.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon for the first time directly accused the Chinese government and military of targeting US government computers as part of a cyber espionage campaign aimed at collecting intelligence on US diplomatic, economic and defence sectors.

China called the report "groundless", saying it represented "US distrust".

How come it took until Trump to do anything real about this?

I believe Japan was accused of the same thing in the 50's and 60's. The US didn't do anything about that either. I wonder what has changed in the US that has made them sit up and notice now.

Japan wasn't making the network switches and routers that all information of any value is passing through (or accessible from) today.

The U.S. added 26,000 factory jobs in February and 11,000 in March. It's a contrast to the Obama years when most of the job gains came in the service sector -- tech, retail, business, health, etc

According to a recent survey by the National Association of Manufacturers, 93% of its 14,000 members have a positive outlook for U.S. manufacturing. It's the highest level of optimism in 20 years.

Specifically, between 2000 and 2007, growing trade deficits in manufactured goods led to the loss of 3.6 million manufacturing jobs in that period. Between 2007 and 2009, the massive collapse in overall U.S. output hit manufacturing particularly hard (real manufacturing output fell 10.3 percent between 2007 and 2009). This collapse was followed by the slowest recovery in domestic manufacturing output in more than 60 years. Reasonably strong GDP growth over the past five years has not been sufficient to counter these trends; only about 900,000 of the 2.3 million manufacturing jobs lost during the Great Recession have been recovered. In addition, resurgence of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods since 2009 has hurt the recovery of manufacturing output and employment

The leading cause of growing U.S. trade deficits is currency manipulation, which distorts trade flows by artificially lowering the cost of U.S. imports and raising the cost of U.S. exports. More than 20 countries, led by China, have been spending about $1 trillion per year buying foreign assets to artificially suppress the value of their currencies (Bergsten and Gagnon 2012). Ending currency manipulation can create between 2.3 million and 5.8 million jobs for working Americans, and about 40 percent of those jobs (between 891,500 and 2.3 million) would be in manufacturing (Scott 2014).

We also need to reform and aggressively enforce U.S. fair trade laws in order to reduce or eliminate the flood of illegally dumped and subsidized imports of steel and many other manufactured products (Stewart et al. 2014).