Sparks Fly Over Wall: Mexican President Cancels Meeting With Trump

“If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting,” tweeted Trump Thursday morning.

In response, Meeting Cancelled said Mexican President Peña Nieto.

Trump Moves Shake Deep U.S.-Mexico Relationship

The Wall Street Journal reports Trump Moves Shake Deep U.S.-Mexico Relationship.

“I want to emphasize that we will be working in partnership with our friends in Mexico to improve safety and economic opportunity on both sides of the border,” Mr. Trump said after announcing plans to build a border wall and crack down on immigration—pledges that have provoked widespread anger in Mexico.

Yet Mr. Trump followed his comments by reading a roll of Americans he said were killed by illegal immigrants.

And his actions are starting to reverse a quarter-century of bipartisan policies aimed at fostering greater integration between the two neighbors.

The new policies are prompting a backlash in Mexico, where officials are threatening retaliation, and where the new U.S. stance is stoking a volatility in Mexican politics that could fuel a counter-Trump populist movement of its own, injecting still more uncertainty into the bilateral relationship.

“President Trump: your wall assaults us, and leaves the Statue of Liberty as a relic,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador, head of the leftist Morena party, who leads in the polls for the 2018 Mexican presidential election, said on Twitter.

Regional trade has more than tripled to more than $1.1 trillion—with some industrial components crossing back and forth over the border as part of the regional supply chain—while U.S. foreign direct investment has grown sevenfold to more than $100 billion, the report said. The U.S. is Mexico’s largest trading partner, while Mexico is No. 3 for the U.S., behind Canada and China.

Railroads Union Pacific Corp. and Kansas City Southern have spent billions of dollars upgrading cross-border infrastructure in recent years, while a million square feet of industrial real estate is under construction around Laredo, according to Colliers International, a real-estate brokerage, and industrial construction activity hit its highest level since 2008 in Tijuana, Mexico last year, according to CBRE Group Inc., another brokerage. Most of these projects were planned before the election.

The above article is from yesterday. The word for today is “cancelled”.

Collapsing trade is not a good thing, for anyone.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock