USMCA存续危机：北美贸易协定面临重谈

[music] This is a special edition of Wall Street Week devoted to the USMCA. I'm David Weston bringing you stories of capitalism. The agreement President Trump negotiated among the United States, Mexico, and Canada in his first term is up for renegotiation. as much as President Trump might have it otherwise.

We don't need anything that Canada has. We don't need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have.

Some $2 trillion of the North American economy depends on trade across borders with the US, Canada, and Mexico. But exactly what's at stake is different depending on the sector. American farmers are hurting badly. They're desperate for any help they can get to expand export markets hurt by other Trump trade policies, particularly with China. The energy industry doesn't need export markets as much as it needs to find power wherever it can for all those AI data centers coming online.

Power that right now flows to the United States from Canada and from the United States to Mexico. But we start with the poster child for North American trade, the auto industry. Since the USMCA's predecessor NAFTA came into effect over 30 years ago, autos have been at the center of negotiations. The reason is simple. The industry is tightly integrated across northern and southern US borders. Borders like the one between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. [music] This is the brand new GordyHow International Bridge that spans the Detroit River, separating the Motor City from Windsor. [music] It was named for the famed hockey player who was born in Canada, but crossed the border to lead the Detroit Red Wings [music] to four Stanley Cups.

Canada paid for the bridge, but now President Trump has put its opening on hold, which in itself is unlikely to divide the two cities economies.

Those are not really separate cities. There just happens to be a borderline through them.

Economist Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for his work on trade.

Stuff does go back and forth. There's tremendous amount of specialization, which is good for everybody. Reduces cost, increase efficiency. One of the companies benefiting from that back andforth trade is Linear, a manufacturer with headquarters outside of Toronto. Jim Gerald is its CEO.

So, we're 60 years old. And really, I think when you look at Linear, we're an advanced manufacturing and product design technology uh company with 37,000 uh people global, 87 uh facilities around the world. When we talk about the auto part of Linar's business, uh, how much of your production goes across either the Canadian US border or the US Mexican border or for that matter Canada Mexico?

Um, I would say a ton. There is so much interconnection integration uh between it and I think we've uh demonstrated this before. We have one part um that we do for an OEM customer uh two OEMs in the US and the original part that we uh get is a forging that comes into Mexico which goes into the US to get some further processing comes into Canada for further processing back to the US for further processing over to Canada where we do the sort of final assembly and then that gets distributed back into the US as well as Mexico and Canadian uh auto plants.

So again, you can see this full integration of this, you know, supply chain uh in the automotive North American area. And one thing we say is you can't unbake the omelette, right?

Manufacturing has become a regional game. Shannon O'Neal is the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, author of the book The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter, and a Bloomberg Opinion contributor.

The strength, frankly, of the US auto industry is really a North American auto industry. It is that because cars and car parts are produced across Mexico, Canada, and the United States, they are strong, they are competitive, and they're affordably priced. And it's that connection, those supply chains across North America. They're important for autos. They're important for all kinds of manufacturing.

Given how the I'll call it North American auto industry has evolved, is it even possible to cut off imports and exports of automobiles and auto parts between the United States and Canada andor Mexico?

There's a real question. If we didn't have NAFTA, if we didn't have USMCA, would we have a North American car industry at all? If we didn't have the economies of scale [music] of production that have now developed over North America, could we bring back just a US produced car? Sure, we could, but it would be a much more expensive car. It would likely be a less innovative car in terms of the parts that go into it, and it would be really hard to compete against imports from Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other places.

The US MCA may have been a winwin for auto industry companies like Linear and for American consumers, but it hasn't necessarily addressed President [music] Trump's underlying concerns about the balance of trade between the US and either Canada or Mexico. For 2025, the US trade [music] deficit with Mexico was nearly 200 billion, with Canada about $46 billion. [music] But O'Neal says regardless of the trade deficit, President Trump is underestimating [music] the extent to which the US needs trade both ways with both Canada and Mexico. [music]

What we see is a big influx of goods coming from Mexico to the United States is now the number one exporter to the United States or US importer. Um, in part that's replacing Chinese trade. In part that is just the strength of North American supply chains and the back and forth of goods and services that move there. Um, but we also need to remember that Mexico and Canada are the number one export markets for US companies, for US products that go out into the world.

So, we are very dependent on them as they are on us.

Another concern often expressed by [music] President Trump when it comes to trade, particularly in the auto industry, is the loss of jobs. Something Krookman admits is real, but not really the fault of the USMCA. What do you say uh to people from my home state of Michigan who hear President Trump say, "You know, that's such a good idea. We're going to actually have some barriers put up so that we have more of those plants in Michigan, in Ohio, so we have better jobs because we have lost a lot of those jobs.

We have lost a lot of jobs, but it's not mostly because of NAFTA, right? The I still call it NAFTA. Sorry, it's a lot easier given that Trump keeps changing the name, but anyway. Um, do we have fewer manufacturing jobs in the United Do we have fewer auto jobs in the United States because of the USMCA? I think that's highly doubtful. The idea that somehow turning our back on the world here is going to add jobs is probably wrong.

And then there's China. Not part of USMCA negotiations, but always a spectre in the room. China is looming over all of these negotiations and this real worry about China selling products into the United States using Mexico or Canada as a backdoor in right getting the benefits of free trade without actually being party to the negotiations and to the agreements. And so what we've seen is Mexico in particular push back against Chinese imports which have grown dramatically over the last 5 years into Mexico.

Some of this are cars and and car parts and the like. Some are other electronics and the like. So we've seen them push back to really support North America. And as we get into the USMCA negotiations, China and this idea of trans shshipment of shipping parts in through Mexico to the United States is a big part of the conversation and one can see and I think all parties are open to creating a real North America fortress visav China, visav other imports from around the world.

We're in a world now where as we've seen uh interdependence can be weaponized. We used to think that that was something we did to other countries, but now we find out that other countries do it to us too. So the idea

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