Currency manipulation could kill Obama's big free trade deal

There weren’t many lines in President Obama’s State of the Union that Republicans applauded. But the GOP did get behind the President’s insistence that Congress countenance an expedited approval process for a free trade deal—called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—his administration is negotiating with 12 other Pacific Ocean nations, including Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

The TPP was supposed to be the one issue that the President and Congressional Republicans could agree upon, but the odds don’t look so great anymore. In recent weeks, Senate Republicans have expressed reservations about the deal, specifically its failure to address concerns that American trade partners are manipulating their currencies to boost exports.

In a paper released Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, economist Robert E. Scott quantified these concerns, estimating that the U.S. economy has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to countries like Mexico and South Korea because free trade agreements with those nations did not include provisions that prevented currency manipulation. Of the nations participating in the TPP negotiations, Japan is by far America’s biggest trading partner. And according to Scott’s analysis, the U.S. trade deficit with Japan has cost America $125.3 billion in GDP and “displaced 896,600 U.S. jobs” in 2013 alone.

More at link: http://fortune.com/2015/02/05/currency-manipulation-could-kill-obamas-big-free-trade-deal/