NAFTA and USMCA

A chat with international trade expert Bill Bryant regarding NAFTA and USMCA. What happened in the negotiation of NAFTA? What can we expect in the coming year? There's a lot of play in that area. We ended up with some things we needed to renegotiate because when we renegotiated NAFTA in the 1990s, there are a lot of sectors that didn't even exist biotechnology, genetic modification of certain foods and crops. The Internet did not exist. So any online commercial traffic was not something that was contemplated underneath. The pharmaceutical industry has changed a lot. The automobile industry has changed a lot. So we needed to update the agreement. I don't know that we needed to do it with so much bombast and drama. And at the end of the day, what we got was a slightly updated version of NAFTA with a lot of language from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, because there is a biotechnology chapter. There are some new chapters. But negotiating these chapters from scratch takes years, and the Trump administration wants to do it in between 12 and 18 months. Well, that wasn't going to happen. But everyone said, but you know what? We've got this biotechnology language and the Trans-Pacific Partnership that we did spend years negotiating. And that, by the way, since Canada and Mexico are already part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they've already agreed to it. We agreed to it when we negotiated the TPP. Let's just take that TPP language and stick it in NAFTA and call it USNA Creative Mind with a perspective on the past.