Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
January 23, 2017 at 07:57 AM
President Trump today signed an executive order stating that the United States will withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.
The U.S. Congress has never ratified the pact, and the pact has had no practical effect on U.S. life insurers to date. But the official death of the TPP agreement effort would eliminate the result of years of negotiations by the American Council of Life Insurers.
The life insurers that belong to the ACLI have been supporting the TPP negotiating effort and other trade negotiations for years, in the hope that the agreement would improve their access to large, lucrative insurance markets in countries such as Japan.
Representatives from the Washington-based were not immediately available to comment on the news of Trump’s signing of the TPP withdrawal executive order.
In July, Dirk Kempthorne, the president of the ACLI, put out a statement encouraging Congress to approve the TPP as quickly as possible.
In the insurance sector, the TPP “addresses the importance of a level playing field, by establishing broad, as well as more specific, commitments with respect to state-owned enterprises, which often have an unfair advantage over the private sector in marketplace competition,” Kempthorne said at the time.
Kempthorne said putting the agreement into effect would help U.S. life insurers offer innovative life insurance and retirement security products to a large group of potential new customers.
Related: Insurers in U.S., world, form new global trade association
Critics of the TPP, and the process used to draft the pact, argued that the drafting process was too secretive, gave big corporations too much ability to shape the text, and led to the creation of a long, hard-to-understand document that might hurt the interests of the environment, U.S. workers and other U.S. interests.
