The top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee said Republican and Democratic staff on the committee "haven’t had extensive discussions on GSP and MTB, and won't, my sense is, as long as there’s an insistence on [linking them to renewing] Trade Adjustment Assistance."
Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Chris Coons, D-Del, laid out parameters of a trade package they hope to get passed in the next three weeks in Congress.
A readout of a Dec. 1 meeting between U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Mexican Economy Secretary Raquel Buenrostro, a new appointee, said Tai "reiterated the importance" of Mexico imposing a ban on the import of goods made with forced labor. Tai also said it's urgent consultations over what the U.S. sees as discriminatory investment policies in Mexico's energy sector make "meaningful progress."
After a vote to add sick leave days to the railroad workers' contract garnered a majority, but didn't reach the 60-vote threshold needed in the Senate, the Senate voted 81-15 to impose the previously negotiated contract on the 12 railroad unions. Four of those unions, including the largest one, had been threatening a strike on Dec. 9, which would have disrupted 40% of cargo transport. The other unions would have honored the picket lines.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a conference that Canada had to talk the U.S. out of structuring its Inflation Reduction Act electric vehicle incentives so that they were tied solely to U.S. production.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would impose the contract that eight rail unions approved but four rejected, a contract that protects health insurance benefits and increases pay 24% across four years, with more than half of those pay increases applied retroactively, since the last contract expired in mid-2020.
Nearly 60 agricultural trade groups, companies and ag services providing trade groups asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to schedule confirmation votes for the chief agricultural negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and for the undersecretary of agriculture for trade and foreign agricultural affairs at USDA.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., one of the primary movers behind the Chips Act, told an audience that more domains need policymakers' attention so that they don't wake up to find that China has become dominant in an important emerging technology. He noted that before becoming a politician, he "was in the telecommunication space," and said that realizing that China is dominating 5G with two heavily subsidized champion companies was the "final wake-up call" that engagement and deeper trade with China is not the right way to go.
The top trade official in the EU, Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, said that it's important that the upcoming U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting deliver "concrete and tangible results." He said Nov. 21 in Brussels: "I am hopeful that we will deliver some attractive results to facilitate trade. I am thinking notably of conformity assessment in specific sectors, and how to make better use of digital tools to ease trans-Atlantic trade.
If the U.S. position on calculating the regional content of automobiles prevails in a USMCA state-to-state dispute, Baker McKenzie associate Eunkyung Kim Shin predicted, companies would be likely to import more parts used to assemble the automobiles. Shin, who spoke at a Baker McKenzie webinar Nov. 15, said that when the entire value of a part counts toward the vehicle regional content threshold once that part meets its own rule of origin, it makes sense to build the part in Mexico, the U.S. or Canada. But if the non-local content of those parts is not disregarded when doing vehicle-level calculations, it might be cheaper just to import the parts from a lower-cost country, she said.