On What’d You Miss this Week, Scarlet Fu, Joe Weisenthal, Caroline Hyde, and Romaine Bostick spoke with Stefan Selig, former U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce and International Trade under President Obama, about President Trump’s new trade deal with Canada and Mexico. It got a new name and a new acronym.Selig said it was “a redo, not a do-over” but still a big win for the White House, businesses and workers, with additions that had been included in the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership, such as environmental standards, intellectual property and the digital economy. “We’ve avoided what would have been a big misstep if we would’ve exited NAFTA,” he said. “Look if we can do TPP again and call it the Trump Pacific Partnership, I’d be all for it.”
Adriano Bosoni, Senior Europe Analyst at Stratfor, also joined to discuss this week’s budget battle in Italy. Bosoni explained how even things as thin as rumors circulating in the Italian press were enough for Italian bond yields to go down. “Investors are trying to cling to whatever good news they can get,” he said. Bosoni stressed that the fundamental problems had not gone away. “The Italian economy still has a massive level of public debt, is not growing enough, and has an anti-establishment government,” he said. “The reasons to be afraid, or to be concerned at least, are still there.”
Beau Whitney, a senior economist at New Frontier Data, which bills itself as “the global authority in data, analytics and business intelligence on the cannabis industry,” came on to talk about the economics of the legalization. Whitney explained how the legal marijuana market in Oregon, where he is based, had become increasingly hyper-competitive and saturated. In order to break through in a rapidly consolidating market, “the key is differentiation,” Whitney said.
Then Bloomberg Opinion Columnist Shira Ovide came on to talk about why Amazon hiking their minimum wage for all workers in the U.S. and the U.K was a small price to pay for their reputation. Jeff Bezos had not only a business imperative, but a political and corporate one as well, Ovide said. “The unknown question is how much is Amazon doing this because the labor market is tight, and to attract the best workers it needed to raise wages, and how much of it is because it wants to avoid this reputation of it being a big, rich, bad boy of retailers.”
