No deal this week but 80% chance of a deal by May
The bad news for the Canadian dollar and Mexica peso is that there will be no NAFTA deal this week. The good news is that ministers are still confident it will get done.
Mexican economy minister Ildefonso Guajardo appeared on Televisa today and said the conditions weren't in place to announce a deal this week at the Summit of the Americas -- something that has been frequently cited as a goal of the White House.
However, he said there is an 80% of an agreement in principle by May.
"We are within weeks of knowing if the NAFTA talks close with success," he said.
The widely-cited deadline for a deal was May 1 because of the Mexican presidential election campaign and voted on July 1 but he seemed to push that by a week and said a deal must be reached in principle by "the first week of May."
The latest story isn't a big surprise, given that as markets opened for the week newswires reported (citing unnamed sources) that not enough progress was complete to make an announcement this week.
Initially, that helped boosted USD/CAD to as high as 1.2819 from 1.2770 but the confirmation from the economy minister has had nearly no effect and the pair has slowly slid down to 1.2789.
The other story that Canadian dollar traders are reading this morning is that Kinder Morgan has halted work on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion because it can't get permits in British Columbia. The pipeline has become a major battleground between BC and Alberta.
Canadian oil is trading at $17 discount because of pipeline bottlenecks. It plans to send 590,000 barrels per day to a terminal near Vancouver.
Trudeau wants the pipeline built.
