Hello and welcome. My name is Sophia Bash and you're listening to the CER podcast.

Hello and welcome back to the CER podcast in 2017. Today I'll be talking to a recurring guest on the CEO podcast, Senior Research Fellow here at the

Center for European Reform, Rem Court.

Thanks for coming back.

Thank you for having me.

So in our last episode of the CEO podcast, we were looking back at the year 2016 and I

think everyone made quite an effort to find something positive to say, to remain optimistic

about the year 2017. If you haven't yet listened to that episode, you should. We want to make quite an effort to find something positive to say, to remain optimistic about

the year 2017.

If you haven't yet listened to that episode, you should.

It's on the CEO website.

So I was a bit hesitant initially to start off 2017 with a topic that many do not exactly

feel upbeat about, I'd say, this year.

Because Rem, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, what I hope we're going to talk about is the future of US trade policy under President

Trump and what this means for the prospect of the TTIP negotiations that have been going on

for the past three years, but which look very troubled

to use an understatement.

It was accepted wisdom, I think, by the end of last year that the election of Donald Trump

meant the death of TTIP, of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

But REM convinced me that there's more to talk about here, that in 2017,

there are more questions that we need to ask on this issue. And so I thought we'd bring back

...