Room 350
Eisenhower Executive Office Building
10:22 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: I want to get back to the official business at hand. But I did want to stop by. First of all, I just want to say thanks to the PEC for the unbelievable work that you guys have done and the extraordinary leadership that you’ve provided to our team and the administration as we've tried to promote exports all around the world. And I'm glad to see that we've got a couple of our outstanding senators here as well who I know care deeply about exports because their states benefit from exports. We all do.
And I assume that part of these charts was Becky going over the progress that we've made over the last several years, so I won't reiterate it. The good news is we are well on our way to meeting a very ambitious goal that we set several years ago to double U.S. exports. And what we know is, is that a lot of the growth, a lot of the new jobs that we've seen during the course of this recovery, have been export-driven.
What's also encouraging is it's been coming from a whole variety of sectors. Obviously, our agricultural sector has always been strong and it's gotten even stronger. But what we've also seen is, is that our manufacturing base, our high-tech, our services across the board we're seeing significant increases. And the question now becomes how do we sustain this momentum?
Part of it is making sure that we get in place strong trade deals. And having ratified with the help of a number of our legislators the Panama, Colombia and, most significantly, South Korean trade deals, we've now been moving aggressively on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a high standards trade regime that we think can advantage U.S. companies and U.S. workers because it sets a bar that ensures that trade is fair and free. And for those of us who abide by high labor standards and high environmental standards, obviously being able to lock in those kinds of high standards in the fastest-growing region of the world and the most populous region of the world can yield enormous benefits and help to generate billions of dollars in trade and millions of jobs.
As I announced at the State of the Union address, we're also going to be launching an effort to lock in a EU-U.S. trade deal as well. And already, Europe is our largest trading partner — the EU as a whole — and we think that we can expand that even further. And some of this has to do with us being able to break down some existing barriers across the Atlantic to U.S. products and services, but some of it also has to do with smoothing out differences in regulatory approaches, just trade frictions that arise that are unnecessary that carries over from earlier periods. And we think just …read more
Source: White House Press Office