27 January 2017

Bring on the tequila and the guacamole?

Bloomberg resurrects a somewhat fanciful idea:
In 1998, the Canadian media tycoon Conrad Black, then owner of the Daily Telegraph, a conservative British newspaper, gave a keynote speech at the Centre for Policy Studies, a free-market think tank in London, entitled "Britain's Final Choice: Europe or America?" 
"None of the continental European countries has a particular affinity with the United States and Canada or anything slightly comparable to Britain's dramatic modern intimacy with North America," he said.
Black's argument was that the U.K. should leave the EU and join the North American Free Trade Agreement:
Such an expanding Nafta would have every commercial advantage over the EU. It is based on the Anglo-American free-market model of relatively restrained taxation and social spending, which is the principal reason the United States and Canada together have created net, an average of two million more new jobs per year than the European Union for the last 15 years. Nafta, as its name implies, is a free trade area only. The United States will not make any significant concessions of sovereignty and does not expect other countries to do so either.
Given Trump's current propensity to tear down NAFTA, I cannot really see this as a runner.  But with Trump, who knows?

 

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