Word: blocs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...slowdown have not spread to Canada and Mexico, the U.S. partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement, but they are still evident. In South America, Argentina has been engulfed by a paralyzing financial crisis that threatens the cohesion and possibly the fate of the Southern Cone trading bloc known as Mercosur (which also includes Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay...
...Brazil already dominates its own Mercosur trading bloc, but it is smaller, weaker and much less sweeping in its free-trade arrangements than NAFTA. Accommodating to proposed FTAA rules that are similar to NAFTA's - the draft text mirrors the NAFTA agreement - is therefore seen as threatening. "Rightly or wrongly, the perception that much is expected from our side while little is offered in exchange is indeed widespread," Brazilian foreign minister Celso Lafer declared in Washington last month...
...Domingo Cavallo, a renowned free-marketeer, as his latest Finance Minister, with sweeping powers to dictate economic changes without legislative approval. One of Cavallo's proposed rescue measures would have slashed to zero the 14 percent Mercosur tariff that Argentina currently charges on capital goods from outside the trading bloc. Brazilian officials, at first sympathetic, erupted after reading the fine print, which included tariffs on imported cell phones, computer printers and high-technology items, all among Brazil's most lucrative exports to its neighbor. Argentina subsequently withdrew the idea...
...peddling an idea first raised by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan--whose seal of approval is to economic policy what Good Housekeeping's is to home appliances--the centrist bloc instantly seized the fiscal high ground. Bush insists that the surplus, projected to be $5.6 trillion over the next decade, can easily accommodate his $1.6 trillion tax cut. But while government number crunchers are fairly accurate when predicting revenues over the next year or two, they are notoriously unreliable six or more years down the line, when more than two-thirds of the Bush cuts would take effect...
...kind of poetic justice that when the first serious obstacle to Bush's tax cut emerged, it came from the year's first act of true bipartisanship. Five Senate Republicans and six Democrats--a potent bloc in the evenly divided Senate--announced they would support big tax cuts only if they include a "trigger" or "safety mechanism" that would prevent future rate reductions from kicking in if projected budget surpluses fail to materialize...