Barack Obama Quotes

What you do is you say, fine, you want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck. We wish you a lot of luck. But if you think you're going to make your air conditioners or your cars or your cookies or whatever you make and bring them into our country without a tax, you're wrong.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is a continuation of other disastrous trade agreements, like NAFTA, CAFTA, and permanent normal trade relations with China.

Using the greatest business people in the world, which America has, I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements.

Going on and getting good bilateral agreement is a better way [than Trans-Pacific Partnership agreements], and I'm fine with that strategy. I think that strategy can work as well.

What I keep telling people is, getting trade agreements that are good for America is good for everybody.

Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country or, frankly, any other country. Never, ever again.

I should also say that apart from the negotiations that are taking place within the WTO, we are ourselves involved in all manner of bilateral negotiations, or, if they are not bilateral, with the South African Customs Union and the European Union. All the member countries of the European Union have now ratified the agreement that we have with the EU and that opens up the EU market in various ways.

I am a firm believer in free but fair trade. However the United States should not be on the losing end of trade agreements that are not enforced. It is time that we make China play fairly.

The whole idea of having a free trade area when you have gyrating exchange rates doesn't make sense at all. It just spoils the effect of any kind of free trade agreement.

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.

These agreements should be free trade. They aren’t free trade.

Trade agreements are what you make of them.

Can you have a free trade agreement with a country that isn't free?

Trade is an integral part of our foreign policy.

We need to strike better trade deals, but we need to do it in a way that ensures that we are at the table on these deals.

It makes no sense to introduce an agreement with border restrictions or tariffs.

The message is NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) is there. NAFTA has helped both our countries enormously. We live up to the terms of NAFTA. We ask you, our best friend and most important trading partner to do the same thing.

I've said this when I pass the trade promotion authority law, which allows us to get trade agreements. If we write the rules of the global economy, we will succeed in the 21st century. But we have to write those rules, we have to engage, and I think the president [Donald Trump] said Trans-Pacific Partnership is not the way to do it.

What was really interesting in his speech, which, by the way, had (inaudible) footnotes - the written version of it - which might be a personal record for Donald Trump - the source of a lot of his numbers on the free trade section of the speech came from an organization called the Economic Policy Institute, which was a think tank or is a think tank that was founded by labor unions to promote the labor unions' point of view on free trade agreements.

Trade agreements are a net benefit for the world, and a net benefit for our foreign policy, and in the long run, given the dislocations, are a net benefit for us, too.

The Barack Obama administration had been negotiating with the Canadians to come up with a permanent solution on lumber tariff. And they failed. And so even though this is being portrayed as the first salvo by Donald Trump's tough trade regime, in fact, it's quite possible that, if Hillary Clinton were president, we would be in the same place.

That means we get other countries to play by our rules. You add up all the countries that we have trade agreements with, we have a surplus with them. You add up the countries we do not have a trade agreement with, that's where a massive trade deficit comes from. So our goal is to get free trade agreements, and that means we get other countries to play and live by our rules so we can level the playing field.

When they talk about raising your taxes, I think raise the taxes on some of these countries that are taking advantage of the United States.

I am very glad, Anderson, that secretary Clinton discovered religion on this issue but it's a little bit too late. Secretary Clinton supported virtually every one of the disastrous trade agreements written by corporate America.

I think it's incredibly basic: we have to now deliver all of the huge advantages of trading with the 92 per cent of people in the world who aren't in the EU, so for me that was the final deciding factor.