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The biggest trade deal of all time is being negotiated and nobody’s paying attention.By Matthew Yglesias|Posted Tuesday, June 18, 2013, at 4:21 PM




You may not be interested in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but TTIP is interested in you. And you may not recall the moment in Barack Obama’s State of the Union address when he called for a free trade pact with the European Union, but policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have continued to grind forward with the process. Last Friday, the European Union’s trade ministers delivered an official mandate to the European Commission to begin negotiating an agreement.

No matter how dull it sounds, if it happens, it’s going to be a really big deal.

TTIP would be the biggest trade pact of all time, by far. It creates a trading bloc far larger than NAFTA—extending from California to Romania, and encompassing almost half the world’s total economic output. It would reach much deeper “behind the border” into public policy areas people don’t think of as pertaining to trade. The $2.8 trillion of GDP generated by our NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada is swamped by the European Union’s $16 trillion economy. TTIP would rework virtually every federal regulatory scheme, providing opportunities for huge new economic efficiencies but also for dramatic levels of malfeasance if, for example, banks use it as a pretext to undermine post-crisis financial regulations.

http://www.slate.com/articles/.....ate_the_biggest.html