Trade deals - the devil is in the details

In the April FlanaRant, I looked at the difference between the ambitions and timeframes for immense trade deals being demonstrated by the US, EU, South East Asia, Japan and China.

Looking at the extraordinarily slow recent history of such deals (America now takes an average of five and a half years from agreeing a new trade deal to getting its Senate to ratify it, while EU talks with Canada and India are still going nowhere, six years after they started) I concluded the ambitions and timeframes were hopelessly unrealistic