CHAIRMAN: DR. KHALID BIN THANI AL THANI
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: DR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFI

Business / World Business

Finance & farming to be focus of UK- US trade talks

Published: 24 Jul 2017 - 12:30 am | Last Updated: 07 Nov 2021 - 03:57 am
Peninsula

Bloomberg

London:  Removing commercial barriers with the US could generate an additional £40bn ($52bn) in trade with the UK by 2030, Trade Secretary Liam Fox (pictured) said yesterday as he warned that reaching a deal won’t be easy.
Fox, in Washington for preliminary talks on a post-Brexit US trade agreement, said the projected economic gain is based on recent government calculations. Economists and trade specialists say any deal will be hard to deliver, since the Americans have more experience and could bulldoze the UK on issues such as agricultural and financial regulation.
“It will be a difficult discussion, but we’ve got great support from the United States and the administration,” Fox said. “Agriculture’s always a very difficult issue” but “we’ll want to look at a whole range of other things, on financial services for example, and other parts of the service economy,” he said.
The UK is already viewing a pact as a way for London-based banks to secure easy access to Wall Street, which might require the UK to accept weaker rules on financial services less than a decade after global financial markets collapsed. The US also could demand looser sanitary rules on food, such as allowing hormone-treated beef to be sold in Britain.
The UK can’t sign trade deals with other countries until it leaves the European Union in March 2019, but can prepare the groundwork for accords to be ratified soon after. Many of the same issues the EU and US experienced in attempting to negotiate a trade deal could resurface. Those transatlantic talks have been on hold since Donald Trump took power in January, amid differences over data privacy and the rolling back of financial regulation.
Meanwhile, opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn challenged the UK’s willingness to strike a US trade deal when Trump intends to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement on climate change.  The EU has said it won’t enter deals with governments that haven’t signed up to the accord.
While Fox said the agenda can be pushed forward with the US, the same can’t necessarily be said for negotiations with the EU.  Many businesses have urged the government to set a transition period to any new relationship once the allotted time for exit talks is completed in March 2019.