Economics - Live Blogging Posted by Suzanne Nossel

  Lael Brainard argues that the Bush Admin is as unilateralist on trade as on everything else.  She's pointing out that while we've concluded a slew of bilateral trade agreements - Chile, Jordan, Singapore, etc. the multilateral initiatives - FTAA, DOHA, etc. are in tatters.  She says the temptation of the bilats is that we can pretty much get our way - if a Malaysia or Thailand won't play ball, they go to the back of the queue.  So its a kind of exceptionalism at work.

She's saying its unprecedented for a global hegemon to be a borrower to the degree we now are.   She pts out that much of what we've done in the development arena is also unilateralist - the creation of the Millennium Challenge Account was timed to win support for the Iraq invasion.

Tarullo is making the point that we have greater potential to include provisions like human rights, environmental and labor standards in bilateral agreements than in multilateral and - to Kuttner's point below - they have an advantage from that perspective.  She points out that we haven't tended to use our leverage to get human rights and labor standards so much as to cater to narrow corporate interests, like those of the pharma cos.