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Terence Corcoran: The economics of free trade are being lost in the fog of trade war

Let the market determine the future of Canada’s auto sector

In the wake of the unruly craziness of United States President Donald Trump’s nationalist trade theories, policies and actions, the economic world has been lost in endless analyses and posturings focused on trade as a form of war. We are therefore living in a dense fog of incoherent tariff-war theories — reciprocal tariffs, strategic tariffs, quotas, national strategies, export controls and restrictions, supply chain and trade diversification, re-shoring, international middle-power partnerships and shifting middle-power trade alliances based on government strategies and controls.

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Lost in the fog — more accurately, the smog — of today’s trade wars are the rock-solid economic principles of international free trade that have been abandoned and are now ignored. Maybe not totally, since a few........

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