This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, September 30th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement begins,

what are the opportunities and risks for expanding trade?

Cato Visiting Scholar Enumonock discusses

how American trading relationships might change. Trade is good, and the more of it we engage in, the more opportunities to create wealth we have.

Where are we right now with respect to quote unquote renegotiating NAFTA,

which Donald Trump pledged to do on the campaign trail.

At the moment, we're at the really early stages in the negotiations where each of the sides

has basically sort of felt out what the other sides are willing to negotiate

on.

So they're throwing out ideas about what they want to talk about without actually putting

forward a text which they're going to negotiate on.

Okay, so this is several rounds. Everybody has to take drafts back to their respective constituencies

and then sort of take a bunch of junk from their constituencies and try to get that sort

of shoehorned back into the agreement.

That's exactly right.

So there usually are an countable number of rounds that happen during these negotiations.

Right now, Lighthizer, Ambassador Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative, has basically said

that their goal is to complete most negotiations by the end of the year.

I think that that seems like a really ambitious goal.

That means they're going to have to do a lot of rounds really quickly.

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