1974

(TPA has been evolutionary. 1974 seems to be the date of the ‘modern’ variation that is basically a license to steal because Congress doesn't even bother to read the agreements.

Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority

Succinctly, fast track TPA gives the president the virtually unlimited power of attorney to negotiate trade agreements.  In simple terms, this is like giving your neighbor the power of attorney over all of your assets without a clause saying who gets the proceeds from the sale of your assets. DOH! Theoretically, after the president negotiates the agreements, the Congress reads them and then votes - but we know they don’t read anything - they just vote.  After all, it’s not their businesses and property that’s being sold.

“Background: Fast track is the traditional trade negotiating authority granted by Congress that allows the President to negotiate international trade agreements. Under fast track procedures, the President submits the legislation to Congress for approval or rejection. No amendments are allowed. Congress has ninety legislative days to approve or reject. While congressional and private sector leaders are consulted throughout the negotiations, the final agreement presented as a package assures our trading partners that any solutions they strike with U.S. trade negotiators will not be renegotiated by Congress.”

Extracts from the above articles:

U.S. Constitution gives exclusive authority to the Congress to regulate commerce and trade.

 The Executive Branch has exclusive authority for relations with foreign nations. 

•  Prior to 1934, Congress retained tight control over every detail on international agreements - delegating to the President only the authority to sign agreements with foreign sovereigns setting tariff and quota rates approved by congress.
   

• 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act delegated to the Executive Branch multi-year authority to set tariff and quota levels within a specified range without requiring further approval from Congress.  This authority was called ‘tariff proclamation authority’.  It was the basis for the next five rounds of negotiations for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
   

• 1960’s Kennedy Round of GATT.  The Executive Branch had not gotten additional authority from Congress to commit the U.S. to terms beyond changes to tariff and quota levels but they did so anyway.  The change pertained to domestic laws that designated how goods were to be classified in tariff categories.     This caused a turf battle between Congress & the Executive Branch.
   

• 1974 - Nixon proposed that Congress grant the Executive Branch a proclamation authority to simply declare changes in U.S. federals law agreed to in international commercial negotiations without requiring congressional approval.  This was unconstitutional and fortunately - unacceptable to congress. 
   

• 1979 - Tokyo Round of GATT was pending - Congress agreed to delegate half of the requested power through a mechanism called Fast Track.  Under this new delegation mechanism, the Executive Branch  could negotiate terms that would require changes in domestic law.  The Executive Branch would write the amendments to change U.S. law to conform to the negotiated agreement and the Congress would vote up or down with no amendments. 
   

• The first couple of times this authority was used, they were careful not to abuse it. 
   

• 1988 - U.S. - Canada Free Trade Agreement trade talks moved into new areas.  This trade agreement included changes to domestic law in agriculture, banking, investment, food inspection and other policies. 
   

• 1993 NAFTA and 1994 GATT Uruguay exploded the boundaries of what was included in trade pacts.  NAFTA, GATT-WTO rewrote huge swaths of U.S. law.  Reshaping domestic laws on service industries and investments. 

 

1987

Black Monday - Stock Market Crash

“OWEN ULLMANN: Not quite with a Fed Chairman, but if you go back to 1987, the stock market crash then, it was triggered by comments that then Treasury Secretary James Baker made about the value of the dollar versus the mark. And a lot of people thought that that statement--“

“In the stock market, the top fifteen sellers on October 19 accounted for 20 percent of the total sales, or $25 billion. Index arbitrage involved about $1.7 billion worth of stock. In the futures market, the concentration of trading among big players was even more significant. Portfolio insurers sold $4 billion worth of stock index futures contracts, which was about 40 percent of the public volume. The top ten sellers accounted for 50 percent of the volume.

“Following the 1987 stock market crash, President Reagan called on Mr. [Nicholas] Brady to serve as chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms. The Brady Commission recommended reforms that were subsequently adopted.

The commission recommended the Federal Reserve Board become a ''supercop" overseeing financial market regulation and coordinating ''circuit breakers" such as trading halts on stock and price limits on futures.

1988

Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was authorized to review sales of U.S. assets to foreign entities

HISTORY
"The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency committee chaired by the Department of Treasury, was authorized through the Exon-Florio Amendment to the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act (1988) to review and potentially block foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies that threaten to impair U.S. national security. Exon-Florio was not adopted to halt or slow foreign investment; rather, the Amendment solely focused on those transactions that implicate U.S. national security interests. "National security" was deliberately left undefined as to allow for the greatest presidential control and discretion when determining whether to block a transaction.

CFIUS includes the following 12 members: the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, Secretaries of Treasury (Chair), State, Defense, Homeland Security and Commerce, the Attorney General, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers."

The Brady Plan

“The Brady Plan, the principles of which were first articulated by U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady in March 1989, was designed to address the so-called LDC debt crisis of the 1980's. The debt crisis began in 1982, when a number of countries, primarily in Latin America, confronted by high interest rates and low commodities prices, admitted their inability to service hundreds of billions of dollars of their commercial bank loans. Because many of these countries' economies were then dependent on commercial bank financing, continued debt reschedulings and the resulting perception of uncreditworthiness led to a "lost decade" of economic stagnation, during which voluntary international credit and capital flows to these nations and their private sectors all but halted.

The Brady Plan was very successful in several important respects. First, it allowed the participating countries to negotiate substantial reductions in their overall levels of debt and debt service. Second, it succeeded in diversifying sovereign risk away from commercial bank portfolios more widely throughout the financial and investment communities. Third, it encouraged many Emerging Markets countries to adopt and pursue ambitious economic reform programs. Finally, the Brady Plan has enabled many Emerging Market countries to regain access to the international capital markets for their financing needs.”

“Structural adjustment was the centerpiece of the Baker Plan, which the Reagan administration proclaimed during the IMF-World Bank meeting in Seoul in 1985. World Bank and IMF funds to assist the indebted countries make their interest payments were promised on condition that they adopted 'economic policies along Reaganomic lines - privatization of state enterprises, an end to subsidies, opening the economies to foreign investment.' In the debtors' view, notes Lissakers, 'the proposed reforms ... went much further than the standard IMF nostrums on devaluation, reductions in public-sector borrowing requirement and control over the money supply, and decontrol of wages and prices, ' and were tantamount to 'putting the national patrimony on the block.' They realized that structural adjustment was, as Sheahan describes it, a program that 'was more extreme than anything that could have been seriously considered at the beginning of the 1960s.'”  [1]

Curriculum Vitae - Nicholas Brady

Source:   Office of the United States Trade Representative, Press Release, June 1, 2001 Announcing U.S.T.R. Zoellick to Attend APEC Meeting in Shanghai, June 6-7