TradeLane

I used to live in the USA. I spent a year in Corvallis, Oregon when I was ten years old. I remember it as one of the happiest times in my life, except for being confused about my national identity. Most of my elementary school classmates thought that I was from North Korea. This is not surprising since the North Korea nuclear issue had been surfacing at that time during George H. W. Bush’s presidency. North Korea is still a frequent topic on the famous American TV show, Conan, to this day.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is gaining momentum. If “TPP” isn’t as popular as “lol”, it will be soon. That’s because the TPP is a big deal. We’ll be doing several blogs over the coming months as additional details regarding the Agreement become known so you can stay up to date. 

For now, let’s start with the basics. The original plan of a four-nation pact between Singapore, New Zealand, Chile, and Brunei has grown to be a 12 country partnership impacting 800 million consumers, and now includes the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Peru, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Australia. Together, this makes it the largest regional trade accord in history, with a combined GDP of 28 Trillion USD. To put that into perspective, that is 40% of all Global GDP, 33% of global trade, and accounts for 40% of US Imports and Exports. 

Recently I assisted a client with a particularly difficult and rarely used provision of the NAFTA agreement. It involved a tariff shift rule and list of exceptions that, when coupled with a specific production process, became problematic. 

Prior to contacting Tradewin, the client had a Free Trade ‘expert’ look at the provision of NAFTA and the challenge they were facing. The ‘expert’ came to a very detailed and long winded way of creating massive amounts of work for the client. While the analysis was technically correct for the issue, ultimately it did not fit the bill for the client. 

When you’re dealing with something as complicated as a Free Trade agreement you want the quickest, easiest, and most compliant solution. A company needs to have a level of confidence in whoever is performing the task. It’s necessary to know you have the right kind of expert who has actual experience with Free Trade qualification. These issues can and do involve trade secrets, material cost structures, manufacturing process, etc. Companies love “the bottom line” and the faster you get there with the least amount of legal exposure the better.

Contact our Free Trade experts today.

I have had better starts to the New Year. On the first Monday of the year, I don’t know who was tougher to get out of the house and off to school that first day, my wife (a teacher) or my toddler. Already this week, the Stock Market had dropped like a lead balloon, the Middle East was in shambles, China was giving signals of slowing down, North Korea supposedly tested an H-Bomb, and I spilled coffee on the tie I got for Christmas. Let’s hope next week goes much smoother. 

I imagine a lot of people are going to make predictions on Global Trade this year, from volume trends to new Free Trade Agreements, or whether the ACE deployment will be successful. While everyone else is making predictions, I am just going to pay special attention to these five events in 2016: 

How often does anyone really get free money? When you buy something at the store only to find out that you need to fill out the card and mail it in to get the rebate. Most people think about it on the way home and then leave the card on their desk. 

But, what is the risk? You may end up giving some information to a company that probably already has your information. You may end up actually getting the money back. It is a minor investment of time to recoup some cash. An interesting statistic says that the majority of people who take advantage of rebates live in households that have an annual income of $100,000 or are between the ages of 35 to 64 and are women. Most of the rebates that go unfiled because of a technicality, it is not completed properly, or the man that gets it can’t be bothered to send it in.

I read another statistic that 70% of companies do not fully utilize trade agreements. When your country enters into a trade agreement with a country that you do business with, or want to do business with. What are your options?