The damaging fallout from TPP

President Donald Trump has done as he promised he would, and withdrawn the US from the 12 nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal on his first full day in the White House. A president whose inauguration speech on Saturday luridly described trade deals as "ripping the wealth of the middle class out of their homes and re-distributing it around the world" was never going to do anything else.

But his act misleads on all the gains that Americans have got from trade and trade agreements. President Trump ignores how many workers have lost their jobs not because of imports, but because America's education system didn't equip them to adapt to new technologies or the service jobs that high-tech manufacturing supply chains create behind them. He robs American farmers and makers of the chance to join new supply chains across the Asia-Pacific region. He alters nothing in Washington's trade beef with China, which is not a member of the TPP. If anything, he has removed a headache for Beijing and made it more likely that as former President Barack Obama feared, China will write the ground rules for trade some time in the future.

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