The USMCA

I thought that was US Marine Corps of America.  Wrong.



I don't know why the word "closer" had to be taken out of that sentence, but there you have it.  No more NAFTA.  It's the USMCA.  Of course, the US had to come first.

Oh, yeah....

Canada will open its dairy market further to US producers, and Washington left unchanged the dispute settlement provisions which Ottawa demanded.

"That is going to be a win-win-win situation for all three countries, that's what we expect. The leaders of the three countries are saying they got the best deal that they could," Al Jazeera’s Daniel Lak, reporting from Toronto.

"We need to see the details and that will probably take some time. Some of those are emerging from sources from the Canadian government, which is probably being cherry-picked to make the Canadian argument look the best, so far."

This will allow them to sign the agreement before Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto leaves office December 1, the date that was the cause of the last minute flurry of activity.

  alJazeera

Because the US didn't want AMLO, a freaking socialist, and who can trust a socialist?, to put his signature on it.

Under US law, the White House is required to submit the text of the trade deal to Congress 60 days before signing - and officials barely made it by midnight.

So....technically, it's NOT done?

The Guardian reports:

The deal will preserve a trade dispute settlement mechanism that Canada fought hard to maintain to protect its lumber industry and other sectors from US anti-dumping tariffs, Canadian sources said.

But this came at a cost. Canada had agreed to provide US dairy farmers access to about 3.5% of its approximately $16bn annual domestic dairy market, the sources said, adding that the Canadian government was prepared to offer compensation to dairy farmers hurt by the deal.

The influential Dairy Farmers of Canada lobby group – which strongly opposes the idea – said in a statement that it insisted “any final Nafta deal should have no further negative impact on the dairy sector”.

Canada also agreed to a quota of 2.6m vehicles exported to the US in the event that Trump imposed 25% global autos tariffs on national security grounds, a side letter to the agreement showed.

[...]

But the deal failed to resolve US tariffs on Canada’s steel and aluminum exports, the Canadian sources said.

“We celebrate the trilateral agreement. The door is closed to the fragmentation of the region,” Jesus Seade, president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Nafta negotiator said on Twitter. “Nafta 2 will give certainty and stability to Mexican trade with its partners in North America.”

  The Guardian

Oh shit. Are the Mexicans going to call it Nafta 2? That'll piss off His Lardship.

The Canadian dollar and Mexican peso both rallied as word circulated that a trilateral deal had been hammered out. The loonie was up 0.6% versus the greenback while the peso gained 0.8%.

The loonie? Those Canadians are wild and crazy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.