We're turning to the, to the trade and economic portion of the alliance. I'm, my name's Ernie Bauer, I'm the chair for, Smetro chair for Southeast Asian Studies and the co-director of the Pacific Partners Initiative here at CSIS and this is the, this is the panel that I asked to, to chair because I think nothing connects countries and people like business opportunities, jobs and innovation and certainly that's got to be considered one of the strengths of the US-Australia relationship. A country, two countries who share a free trade agreement, two countries who are at the very heart of driving a new, a new trade, a new level of trade agreement around the Pacific and within the embodiment of the TPP or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which we'll talk about a lot today. We've got four fantastic panelists, two Americans and two eminent Australians, I'd like to introduce them. I'll ask them each to make some remarks and then we'll open the floor to questions. We'll start with Wendy Cutler, who's the acting deputy US trade representative. Many of you in Australia and the United States know Wendy well. She has, she has led the United States on its most effective trade negotiations with Asia. She leads those discussions now across Asia and Africa. I don't know when she would have time to sleep given, given the areas of her responsibilities, but she is leading the TPP negotiations, the US-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade, the APEC Forum, US India Trade Policy Forum and a handful of other engagements across Southeast Asia, as well as the African Growth and Opportunity Agoa Act efforts and overseeing GSP. So if you think Wendy is busy, you are right, she is. Next to her is Andrew Stoller. For those of you who are sort of inside trade, Andrew is one of the gurus. He is now a consultant on international trade issues and negotiations. You probably know him well from his time as deputy director general in Geneva of the WTO. He's had a long career, including working with Wendy at USTR in Washington and Geneva. He's very active now in dealing with China, Europe, and is a member of the advisory board of the U of our partner here, the US United States Study Center at Sydney. Next to him is Mark Johnson, who is our real private sector guru. He's been in corporate finance and the corporate sector for four very successful decades. Leadership positions in Macquarie. A member since 2002 from Australia of the APEC Business Advisory Council. He's chairman of the US Study Center Foundation at Sydney University, the real treat to have Mark with us today. And finally, a man who knows our two countries very well and ran that relationship as ambassador, one of the most active and proactive ambassadors we've had from Australia here in Washington from 2000 to 2005, Michael Thawley. He is now in the private sector and is vice president of capital research and management company and senior vice president and advisor, international advisor at Capital Strategy Research. So we've got a real fantastic panel for you here. I'm going to ask Wendy to kick us off. Wendy? Well, thank you very much, Ernie, for the kind introduction. I'm really thrilled to be here today and very honored to be on this panel with three such prominent officials. I can just, if I can just make a few remarks, I joined USTR when Andy Stoller was already at USTR. He taught me a lot about how to negotiate, but he also taught me how to make the job fun. And I've stayed at USTR for a long time and once in a while I look back and I remember jokes that Andy told or cartoons that he drew during boring negotiations and they keep me smiling. Ambassador Thawley, it's a real pleasure to be with you on this panel and I know you work very hard not only to negotiate, but also to work to get the US Australia FTA through Congress and that was no small feat. And finally, Mark Johnson, I've had the pleasure of working with him through my APEC affiliate job and Mark has been a prominent official of APEC, kind of pushing the governments to really think out of the box and to come up with big initiatives that would mean something practical for the business communities of the Asia Pacific region. It's a pleasure to be here today to discuss US Australia economic and trade relations. We are pleased that Australia is chairing the G20 this year, which really shows the leadership role that Australia plays on economic issues in the region. And we also look forward to continuing to work closely with Australia in the WTO and APEC. Our trade and investment relations are strong and we look forward to deepening them in the months and years ahead, particularly as we look to what's transpiring in the dynamic economies of the Asia Pacific region. Bilaterally, we have strong ties on the economic front with the FTA, which came into effect in 2005, being the cornerstone of our trade and investment relationship. Our FTA has been a success by any measure. I understand that it was being negotiated and implemented. There were some in Australia that really felt that it was an agreement that would just produce benefits for one side and that side was in Australia. I think that the statistics and time has proven this wrong. The deal is clearly delivering benefits for both sides, both with respect to exports of goods, exports of services, and as a result, our two-way bilateral goods and services trade reached $65 billion in 2012. The FTA has also seen large creases in investments flows between both countries, but aside from these numbers and statistics, there is a less tangible improvement in the quality of the relationship, which sometimes gets less attention and much of our trade and investment is now driven by high value added goods and services that rely on the complementarity of our intellectual capital in sectors such as aircraft, ICT, or the medical sector. There is a growing interconnectedness of value chains between our countries supported by the exchange of financial and human capital, technology, and the free flow of goods and services. Turning briefly to the multilateral front, the U.S. and Australia have been close partners in the multilateral trade arena, particularly in the WTO. My first interaction with Australian trade officials was in the WTO at that time, the GAP during the Uruguay round, when Australia was just a really active and constructive partner pressing for trade liberalization, mainly in agriculture, but in other sectors as well. Most recently, we worked very closely together at the Bali ministerial conference where we were able to conclude a trade facilitation agreement, the first multilateral agreement in the WTO's 20-year history. And that brings me to the area I want to focus on today in my remaining probably three minutes. And that is our joint efforts in the Asia-Pacific region. This dynamic region holds exciting prospects for both countries as we look ahead. I know it's been a longstanding theme in Australian foreign policy about whether Australia will need to choose between its historic alliance with the United States and relations with Asia. But from my perspective, I can say that's a false choice, not one Australia has to make. Maybe 30 or 40 years ago, that logic seemed to make sense. But nowadays, the situation is entirely different. The U.S. is deeply engaged and committed to the Asia-Pacific region, with the President having said America's future lies in deepening ties with the Asia-Pacific. The U.S., like Australia, is a Pacific power. We have shared goals for the Asia-Pacific region, certainly in the economic area, such as sustained growth, job creation, trade and investment liberalization, and shared prosperity and stability. We are working in tandem as we try to pursue these economic objectives through such venues as APEC and TPP. Australia was one of the driving forces behind the creation of APEC, where we have cooperated with our partners around the region to promote sustainable growth and prosperity, and to advance trade and investment liberalization and facilitation. I recall fondly Australia's host year in 2007, which put the important issue of regional economic integration squarely on APEC's agenda, which has remained on that agenda, and interestingly enough is a theme of China's host year. Regarding TPP, the United States and Australia are working together closely to advance the high standard comprehensive and state-of-the-art regional agreement since the first round of negotiations which were held in March 2010 in Melbourne. A successful TPP negotiation will result in significant economic and strategic benefits for the U.S., for Australia, and for the 10 other partners in terms of increased exports, job creation, and economic growth. With respect to Australia, a recent study by the Peterson Institute foresees annual Australian export gains of $11.3 billion to its 11 current TPP countries by 2020. Much of these gains would come from securing access to those TPP member markets where Australia currently does not have an FTA, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Peru. We are now in the endgame of the TPP negotiations, and momentum is building to close the remaining gaps and achieve agreement. Ministers held a very successful meeting in December in Singapore where they identified landing zones for the vast majority of outstanding issues. TPP countries also worked intensively on advancing their market access negotiation for goods, agriculture, and services. The TPP countries are now in the process of scheduling the next meeting of the TPP ministers, which is likely to take place next month. As you can imagine, trying to get 12 very busy officials in one venue for a few days is not easy to schedule. In the meantime, we are very, very busy engaging with our TPP counterparts at all levels. We have negotiating teams in Southeast Asia as we speak. Ambassador Froman is leaving for Davos tonight and will be meeting with a number of TPP ministers there. He has been on the phone with a number of TPP ministers this week, earlier this week with Minister Omari from Japan, and he plans to meet and communicate with other TPP ministers all in the lead-up to the next ministerial meeting. And we are also very busy engaging with Congress and our stakeholders on TPP but also on trade promotion authority. This is all in the lead-up to our next ministerial meeting where we look forward to working through the remaining outstanding issues with our TPP partners so we can conclude the TPP agreement as soon as possible. Once we reach agreement among the 12 members, the work of TPP will not be finished. The 12 countries will need to go through their domestic procedures and to get the agreement approved through their procedures at home. But looking ahead, and just back to the theme of this conference, I think that Australia and the US can work together to expand membership to the TPP and to encourage other countries like Korea, which recently expressed its interest in November to join and joining the TPP, to take the necessary steps. And for other countries in the region for whom TPP may not be a near-term prospect, we can also work together to bring them up to speed on what would be required to join this high-standard agreement. Looking ahead further, we have always viewed the TPP as a quote-unquote living agreement, and we believe we can work together to update the agreement as appropriate to address new issues that emerge in the future that are impacting trade and investment in the region. Let me conclude by suggesting that our two countries should give more thought to how we can deepen our bilateral cooperation and step up our engagement with respect to economic and trade issues affecting the dynamic Asia Pacific region, going beyond our APEC and TPP work. Our shared goals for the region and our work together on APEC and TPP and our bilateral FTA could give us a strong foundation for such increased collaboration. Thank you. Thank you very much, Wendy. Andrew. Thank you, Ernie, and good afternoon, everybody. It's a real pleasure to be on this panel. As the theme leader of the Alliance 21 Projects Trade and Investment work, I've been collaborating with Australian and American experts over the past couple of years, reviewing the bilateral and regional relationship, and we've got an overall sort of policy paper in preparation. It's really a work in progress, which hopefully will be finished by the time we get to the June meeting in Canberra. It's clear that to prosper in a 21st century Asia Pacific region, it's important for the U.S. and Australia to work together both to improve on the existing bilateral relationship and to improve our relations with our trading partners in the region. Much of the effort in the past decade has either been focused on APEC or on FTAs that both countries have been negotiating, either bilaterally or bilaterally with other partners. Now, in Australia, we're a very high percentage of foreign trade these days is with China, far more than in the case of the United States. I have to say, I think that the bilateral agreement with the United States tends to be undervalued by Australians. And there's also a perception in Australia that the U.S. got a better deal in the bilateral negotiation because of what happened in areas like intellectual property and what didn't happen in areas like sugar. Now, I think this negative perception is unfortunate for two reasons. First, because I think it might be contributing to some differences of view in the negotiations on the TPP between the U.S. and Australia where there should be a better cooperation, but more on that later. But secondly, I think that perception is very unjustified and you heard from Wendy just now how the bilateral trading relationship has grown since the auspice entered into effect. It's also important to realize that not only has the trade grown in gross terms, but these days it's important to look at the quality of the trade. And if you look at the quality of Australia's exports to the United States, for example, you'll see that about 16.2% of all of Australia's exports measured in value added terms went to the United States compared to only about 10% for Australia's exports to China. So in other words, Australia is sending rocks to China but high value products to the United States. That's a quality trade argument which I think is important to realize. Investment is also an important part of the picture. The stock of USFDI in Australia is about $136 billion now which is more than twice as much as US firms have invested in China. An American energy company investments like the $70 billion investment of Chevron and LNG projects have created the basis for Australia becoming a leading exporter of energy in Asia. Australian investment in the United States is also important. The stock is about $56 billion, which if you look at it on a per capita basis is more significant than American investment in Australia. So it's a very important relationship. Now in the future, I think that both countries need to build on what I think is a successful bilateral agreement in the wider region, which brings me to the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations that Wendy was just talking about. Everybody who's been involved in the Alliance 21 work on trade and investment agrees that the TPP negotiations are a key test for the United States and its allies at a central intersection of trade policy, diplomatic and security policy. It's more than a trade agreement. TPP failure would not only seriously undermine the American pivot to Asia, but it would leave Australia worse off in the future. And failure to conclude TPP or a TPP agreement that does not meet the test of a 21st century agreement could default to Asia-centric initiatives like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and that wouldn't be good for either Australia or the US. Now as Wendy just alluded to, I think a TPP concluded among the existing 12 participants would be an impressive accomplishment, but it will also necessarily be an incomplete agreement until the 12 are joined by countries like China, Taiwan and Korea. And here I think it's good news that the Chinese seem to have laid off the line that the TPP is somehow an attempt to contain China. Chinese officials apparently a bit expressing an interest in getting closer to the negotiations. A little bit about the economic importance of the TPP. We heard Minister Turnbull and Senator Brock both talk about the point that we're in a knowledge-based economy today. And I think that to be a 21st century agreement, we have to make sure that the TPP is geared to address the upcoming challenges and creates the basis for Australia and the US to benefit from the opportunities that we can take in that future. In Australia, the writing's on the wall. In a couple of years, we won't have an automotive sector. People wanna know where the jobs of the future will be. Here in America, the GFC seems to have had a lasting impact on manufacturing jobs and while the economy's growing again, unemployment remains high. So we can imagine in the Alliance 21 group, we can imagine how the TPP could respond to these concerns and personally I'm optimistic that the TPP can deliver on its promises. But we also see that there are a number of potential threats to that. Some of these threats are internal to the TPP to the extent we understand the negotiations and some are external. We're a little bit worried that the lack of transparency in the negotiations might possibly lead to a repeat of something like the unfortunate experience we had with the OECD MAI talks that blew up because the approach was too secretive. We also think that to make the TPP work, Washington and Canberra need to be on the same page and here we're a little bit concerned by reported disagreements on some of the 21st century issues like investor state dispute settlement, enhanced IP protection and rules for trans-border data flows. The political balance needed for this regional agreement also looks threatened by some old fashioned at the border protectionism affecting trade in some sectors that might be very important for some of the participants. And because of the greater economic, the greatest economic and political value of the TPP might come from a country like China, China's eventual participation we'd be interested in knowing how that would be managed if the 12 current parties have wrapped up the agreement this year. Before I close, I just want to mention two external threats. I can't help remarking that one of the external threats we see to completing the TPP might be the possibility that if the TPP is not wrapped up soon, Washington might be distracted by the nascent negotiations with the EU on the TTIP. The TTIP should be a critical element of U.S. trade policy but it certainly needs to take a back seat to the TPP for a number of reasons. And secondly, and perhaps more serious, external threat to the TPP is the possibility that Congress will either not provide the authorizing legislation the administration needs or that the legislation could be something that the TPP partners would find it hard to live with. I'll leave it there for now. Thank you. Thank you very much, Andrew. Mark, can we turn to you? Thank you very much, Ernie. Andy's put trade right at the center of the big plates that affect strategy, economic and security issues. I want to talk much more at the level of, I suppose, battlefield tactics almost from the viewpoint of the private sector but I think we may be evolving a little structure which is useful from the viewpoint of both our economies. I'm going to argue that it's consistent with our joint interests and it's also consistent with our mutual aspirations for the development and evolution of the region. And this is something that we have called the Asia-Pacific Financial Forum or APFF for short. This concept and our plans for an Asia-Pacific Financial Forum were endorsed by the APEC finance ministers in September last year at their meeting in Bali and it's a structure to be managed and coordinated by APEC, the APEC Business Advisory Council and to report back annually to the finance ministers with progress reports. It's a structure that is driven by the private sector but it includes government participation, the IFIs, regulators, academics and industry groups. And let me try and explain a little bit more about what it's doing by telling you about the six work streams that are now in existence post-Bali. There is one work stream working on insurance issues and retirement issues, the aggregation of long-term savings. There's another working group working on trade and supply chain finance. There's a group working on credit structures for small and medium sized enterprises. There is a group working on the development of capital markets. There is a group working on the market infrastructure. If you like the plumbing that just connects all the region's financial transactions and there is a group looking at larger market linkages. So how has this come about? It's been business driven because I would certainly argue that the financial crisis, the global financial crisis eroded, destroyed or set back many hard earned years of trade and investment liberalization. The kind of things that these people worked for decades on got blown up and set back very, very rapidly. So it became quite obvious to regional business that a sound and predictable and efficient and well-regulated financial system was a cornerstone to the benefits of closer economic integration. It's also obvious that there are serious shortcomings and structural deficiencies in financial systems across the region. There's multitudinous studies by the ADB, by the World Bank, by all the others. The Fung Global Institute a few months ago summarized that are saying that the region is dominated by short-term bank lending. It's got shallow capital markets. It's got a paucity of long-term investors and there's a lack of financial data and credit expertise. Many of you will know of Barry Eichengreen who is probably the guru for the financial structures in the region based in Berkeley and he said the question is not banks or markets, the region needs both. It may also not be quite as obvious but there is a strong regional view that the GFC was essentially a North Atlantic crisis. And the North Atlantic solutions that are being proposed and modified as they evolve may have unintended consequences for the underdeveloped financial systems in the region and the possibility of appropriate development within the global rules is something that is of concern to policy makers across the region. So what might come of this? It's very early days. We've only just got going and we're just taking the first steps. But there are now perhaps 100 people in those work streams that I referred to earlier. Think tanks and industry associations are deeply involved and there is very strong corporate support and participation in those working groups. If you're an optimist, it could over time become part of the regional architecture and perhaps broaden APEC into more of a trade and finance structure as its informal security agenda is probably subsumed into the East Asia Summit. I think that the US and Australia are uniquely placed to support this initiative. The US financial system is obviously the broadest and deepest in the world and is now recapitalized and can support growth. The Australian financial system is totally open, highly competitive, innovative, but its scale is often highly relevant to the requirements of the developing Asian markets. So I argue that there's a very important development priority. Developing the financial markets of the region is consistent with our objectives for growth in trade and for closer economic integration. It's a soft power opportunity for both of us and therefore something that I think fits very much within the possible priorities for the alliance that we're really discussing here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mark. Michael. Thanks, Ernie. It's great to be on a panel with my colleagues here. I'd like to mention particularly Wendy Cutler and USTR because many Australians seeing USTR mentioned so often probably don't know just what a small organization it is. It appears everywhere. It's unbelievably busy. It has extremely high quality people. It's the most extraordinary outfit and small as it is it's a terror to negotiate with as I know from my own experience. It's also great to be at a CSIS event. I've always thought CSIS the best of the think tanks and particularly I always used to appreciate its non-partisan approach and John Hamre who was deputy secretary of defense when I arrived has been a fantastic leader. And we, and US study center, I'd like to mention the great work that Bates Gill has done since he arrived not so long ago but it's great also to have Jeff Garrett here who was the US study center first CEO and who really put it on the map in Australia. And I'm very glad that we were able to hijack him back from the United States. On the, to talk on the FTA and it's so long ago now that I'm not sure I can remember that much about it. But so I thought what I'd try and do is mention some of the things which I thought were important and mention some of its context. And I think there's some implicit lessons perhaps for the bilateral relationship and for trade negotiations generally which I'll just leave implicit. But I think it's worth recalling when the Howard government first proposed the FTA in 2000 that was looking ahead to the 50th anniversary of ANZUS the next year. And the FTA was one element in what was a comprehensive strategy to strengthen the structures of the Alliance for future decades, thinking that here we were at the end of the coming up to the 50th anniversary. And the components of that framework were first to build closer strategic and operational relationships between the defense forces of the United States and Australia. Second to integrate our defense industries and ensure that there was mutual access to the technology on both sides although obviously Australia would benefit more than the US in that regard. To tighten the intelligence relationship which was already strong but needed to be if you'd like reconfigured for a new period. And the FTA was I'd say the fourth part of that program. What was the aim of the FTA? I would describe it sort of and I did at the time rather more broadly. It was I said to extend Australia's economic space. Looking at it from an Australian point of view I thought what it was really about was giving Australia's entrepreneurs access to the world's largest market the US and a sense of confidence in looking for opportunity there. And of course the separate visa legislation which we had to negotiate with the United States was very important because there's no point in having free movement of capital and free movement of goods if you don't have some at least movement of people. At that time people were not especially in Australia were not aware just how much Australian investment there was in the United States. And so the notion was that we would build on those investment flows to consolidate the competitiveness, the international competitiveness of the companies in both countries by encouraging effective partnerships. And in particular we had in mind energy sector and the agriculture sector. Of course extending access for exporters was very important. Although industrial tariffs were very low another four or five percent of most of them actually meant some money straight to the bottom line and encouragement to export. This was especially important for farmers where there'd been restrictions. Of course the key sector was the service sector which in both countries is about 80% of our economies. So harmonizing regulations and standards to make it easier for our companies to operate was also very important. And these are the things that all the two governments emphasized and what all governments emphasize when they talk about FTAs and trade negotiations. This is the rationale. And of course we've had some good experiences as Andy said and Wendy said the FTA actually has done, produced the goods and we haven't had the bad experiences that we used to have. I remember from my very early days the first problems Mr. Howard asked me to fix were leather car seats, restrictions on Australia's lamb exports and then overturning a tariff decision on steel. We haven't had those. But I would suggest that important though those things are the central value of an FTA is somewhat different, closely related but slightly different. The important thing for Australia from the FTA was the exposure of Australia's economy and our businesses to the forces of the most competitive economy in the world. What that meant was that it was encouragement to us to lift our game and perform at our best. Now of course governments are less keen to argue this and tend to emphasize access, better access to other markets rather than the benefits of competition for economic growth and I don't downplay access, it's very important but it's not actually the main story. The second great value I think of FTAs is that the obstacles that they create to any government which might want to take steps backwards from economic reform that it has introduced or steps towards protectionism and these are very important elements of locking in continuing progress to reform. So I might conclude by saying it may be helpful for governments to do more to explain to their public how this works and especially important in the present era when what's very important for growth, for most Western economies and emerging market economies that are dealing, negotiating in the TPP as structural reforms and difficult and productivity has been slowing down. So I'll conclude there. Thank you very much, I appreciate the great presentations. I want to open the floor to questions, first I'll pose one and that is I sort of want to reach in and connect the trade and economic discussion with the earlier discussion about this security relationship. If we look across Asia and our treaty allies, we have FTAs with only two of our allies. All right, Asian allies right now, Korea and Australia. Is there a linkage, I'd like to ask the panel, is there a linkage between where Australia and the United States are going with the broader relationship and trade? And it seems like there's some, you've all sort of connected that, but I'd like to hash it out a little bit because it appears from an observer of the US engagement in Asia that it's difficult, right? The president wasn't able to make his trip to the APEC and the EAS summits this November because of partisanship on the hill. Is Congress in the mood to pass TPA? Do the Americans have sort of the political alignment to hold up their piece of the, or their part of the alliance? And do you think that we'll be able to get our act together collectively, both the Australians and the Americans, to be able to invest in this alliance and get the TPP ratified? And I want to ask that question because we started this conference with an audience participation quiz where we asked the audience the question, when do you think the TPP would be ratified? And the overwhelming majority believed it would be 2015 or 2016 or beyond. I think the latter was the top vote getter, but most votes were in those two areas. So I'd appreciate your comments on that sort of reflections on practical capabilities. Where are we right now? I'll try first. I'm not writing on that. It's interesting that people who know the history of USTR know that President Kennedy created USTR because the Congress at the time thought that leaving the trade negotiations in the hands of the State Department would lead to them being more of a political exercise than an economic exercise. And he wanted to make sure that the economic interests of the United States were taken into account. Now, having said that, I think I would say that today the initial motivation for a large number of FTAs, certainly the US, Australian one and some of the others that we've negotiated is often political. And although that motivation may be the political motivation there's a trade aspect that then comes along with it which is also very important. And if you talk to people about their experience with concluded trade agreements you'll find that they are, Wendy referred to, living agreements. They are living agreements that bring people together in their implementation. You try to build on them for other things and it's all part of developing a system of rules and a framework on architecture. And I think that's why I think that the TPP is so centrally important because it's really about the overall architecture that we wanna be operating in the Asia Pacific at the 21st century. Okay, we'll open the floor. Jeff. Could I just ask the in-politic question that I presume is lurking behind a lot of these averings to geopolitics and trade. TPP, was Henry Kissinger right that this is a stalking horse of economic containment of China or is the vision for TPP something like WTO? That is, you create TPP and five years later, China joins because it's then in there they have a external reason to do some internal changes like market access and intellectual property that they probably wanna do but would otherwise find very difficult to do. You know, it's interesting when you, if you look back at TPP before TPP was TPP it was the P4 and the US was not part of the P4 and we like Australia had to talk to the other countries and to get their buy-in for us to join and so what brought these countries together was not, you know, a motivation towards economic containment of any country. It was more towards working with countries that had a similar vision of the region that wanted to conclude a high standard agreement that took on new trade issues which to date really hadn't been dealt with in our trade agreements. That's how we view TPP. We've always viewed it as an open platform agreement one where new members would join over time. Once again, the US and Australia joined, Vietnam then joined, Malaysia just last year we had Japan, Canada and Mexico joining and now on Thanksgiving Eve Korea put up their hand and announced that it is now possibly interested in joining and there are other countries that aren't as far along in terms of expressing that interest but are asking a lot of questions and seem very interested and part of it I think they recognize that this agreement is going somewhere and it's going to be completed and it's going to set the architecture in the economic sphere for the region. So we are very, very encouraged by that and we do see APEC as not only a living agreement to include new issues over time but definitely one that will include new members as long as the members are really committed to living up to these high standards of the agreement that all of their TPP countries agreed to when they joined. I'd just like to pass on a piece of low level late at night gossip from Bali at the APEC meeting when this was obviously an issue that was discussed and where the Chinese delegations were informally expressing the possibility that they might want to become much more deeply involved and one of the explanations advanced and I can't tell you whether this is true or not was that the fact that Japan had become deeply engaged in the negotiations was seen as a positive by China because the negotiation would then not be a head-to-head US-China negotiation. There are now potentially two big guys at the table and they'd be joined by a third big guy and it becomes therefore a negotiation amongst people who have all got appropriate stakes in the game. I wondered if I could add a sort of economic dimension to the trade discussion we've been having and in particular I wanted to draw a distinction between mechanisms that ultimately increase free trade of goods and services which on any view of the world are welfare enhancing for everyone and intellectual property restrictions which are much more ambiguous. So if I look at the innovation and education stream that we've been running as part of this one of the things that came through it very strongly was that there's an increasing belief amongst US economists that the US intellectual property regime is in fact more protective than is optimal for the US economy, i.e. it's welfare destroying. How can that be? Because intellectual property is justified from an economic perspective only if it encourages the additional innovation that it encourages is greater than the amount of reproduction that it discourages because you're providing a monopoly rent. So there's a real economic argument that says that the US system has gone too far, perhaps not in pharmaceuticals but definitely in copyright. It's tough to believe that you need to protect copyright for 70 years after the death of the author in order to promote anyone to write anything or produce a film. It's also, there's also a growing concern that in the IT space, what it's the intellectual property regime particularly the way it's been interpreted by the US courts has started to restrain or delay people from innovation on innovation. So I don't take your idea and build on it, which after all is what's been kind of cornerstone of Western development for the last 2000 years, I get restrained from doing that. So there's a real distinction between those two things and I wondered if there is a danger that the characterization of those intellectual property rights as a 21st century agreement may endanger the very genuine welfare benefits that come from increasing free trade on any economic view of the world and also the strategic benefits that I think were alluded to in terms of an IT, of an agreement. And I guess that impression is reinforced by, we read the US papers about the domestic politics of the TPP and the conditions that are being put on it by various particularly Republican parties which are clearly not about enhancing welfare. They are clearly about enhancing the rent that certain US companies can extract. And for those of us who are allowed every so often to peek at the things that came out with Snowden, we might find that that impression was a little reinforced. Sorry, do you want to go first? Look, you always have to be very careful when you're talking about the balance between intellectual property, which is actually giving somebody a monopoly over something for some period of time and the value of free trade or the welfare effects of making it available publicly. And of course, the trade off is the one that you see in an area like patents, especially where after 20 years, that information gets distributed to anybody who wants to use it. One reason why the intellectual property issue comes up in FTA negotiations is because the WTO agreement on trade related aspects of intellectual property rights was negotiated in 1993. And we didn't have the internet really in 1993 and a lot of things have changed in terms of the digital world since 1993. So a lot of the countries, for example, in the TPP, probably only have TRIPS obligations now. And the TRIPS obligations aren't good enough for the 21st century. I would not back extending copyright by another 20 years or something like that because then I think you'd be right, it would be too much to take. But there are reasons why we need to build on the existing intellectual property rights regimes because the one that was done 21 years ago is not up to date. But could I just do a two finger on that, which is if you talk to the people who are innovating in the digital field right now, they think that the language in the TPP right now in the current TPP negotiation is sort of stuck at 2003 and actually isn't updated into this decade. I mean, I don't know if anyone knows enough about it to comment on that. Wendy? Or wants to comment on that. I think the only person who's seen the text is Wendy. All right, she's not biting on that folks, but digital mavens, that's a shout out to you. Michael. Andy made a point that I would have started with, but there's another, and I don't know what's going on in TPP negotiations on this issue. And I think John makes a good point that there's a trade-off here and the balance has to be drawn very carefully. But one of the things that bothered me going back, whatever it is, 10 or 12 years, was this assumption that intellectual property was only something that the United States had and that the United States wanted to protect. And the fact is that most countries, and notably Australia, has quite a lot of intellectual property and it wants to get value for that property as well. So it's not, that's not the main issue, but I think it's just worth keeping in mind, especially when you're descending into the media for an argument over intellectual property that we certainly had plenty which we wanted to get full value for and protect. If I can just add that IPR is one of those issues that's being under intense negotiation still in the TPP. It's one of the remaining areas where ministers are working hard to find landing zones and in trying to find those landing zones, they're trying to balance a lot of the issues that people have raised here. The other comment I would make, just based on my experience at USTR and I think Ambassador Dolly kind of reminded me of this, when I first started at USTR, I mean Japan was one of the worst offenders with respect to IPR and now they're one of our closest allies. Korea, in the Korea Free Trade Agreement, we were able to really agree to landmark provisions with respect to IPR, not because we were forcing Korea, because Korea saw the benefit of strong IPR provisions. So I would just underscore what Ambassador Dolly said with respect to Australia's interest in protecting its intellectual property. This is not just a US issue, it's an issue that a lot of TPP and other countries around the world share. Right here. Thank you. Hi, it's John Keough from the Australian Financial Review here. We've heard a lot about the TPP being a 21st century agreement, which presumably would include the free flow of trade, goods and services across borders. Now our trade minister, Andrew Robb, has made it very clear that Australia will only sign on to the TPP if there's genuine market access, particularly for agriculture in Japan and also for sugar in the United States. Miss Cutler, could you envisage a scenario where the United States would be willing to give genuine market access for Australian sugar if there were reciprocal trade offs that Australia and other parties in the TPP were willing to share? I think Andy wants to answer that question. Let me respond by saying that all countries have sensitivities in the TPP and they're bringing these sensitivities to the table, whether it's Japan with respect to its five, sensitive agriculture products, the US, Vietnam and others. We are negotiating on these products in our market access and negotiations, mainly for the US on a bilateral basis. Those negotiations are continuing and it's very typical in any trade negotiation. I think Andy will back me up here and so will Ambassador Brock, that the most sensitive and difficult issues are the ones that are really worked out in the end game of the negotiation. Chris? You're not. Thanks very much, Chris Nelson, Nelson Report. Wendy, thanks so much. Great to see you over there. The landing zone, we're all really glad to hear about the landing zones on TPP but we're worried that we don't see landing zones on TPA, fast track. And those of us who do worry about this last week had a hell of a bad week because we had the Senate Majority Leader say, you know, I look around the Democratic Party and all I see is chaos, a mess. I can't even guarantee I'm gonna bring a bill to the floor if anybody presents me with one. That may explain why Ambassador Froman decided not to attend the finance hearing. Certainly that's how both Republicans and some Democrats interpreted that they had invited him. We still kind of need to know that. Is it fair to say that Ambassador Froman looked at the chaos that Reed sees and worried that maybe it's a bit premature to appear at a hearing and try to balance off issues but then that leads to my question. We have sort of a chicken and egg problem if you're looking for landing zones. What is the role of the USTR? What is the role of the president in developing the consensus? Are we getting to the point where we do need TPA sooner rather than later and are we at the point or getting to the point where the president and your boss, Ambassador Froman has to start saying, okay, here's what we need. We need the administration needs to see in TPA or are we just not near that point which means we're not near landing zones. Thanks. Always great to see you, Chris. TPA is a high priority for the administration. When the bill was introduced in Congress, both the White House and USTR came out. We welcomed the introduction of the bill. We made it clear that we wanna work with Congress to get TPA through Congress. We are now working intensively with Congress. Ambassador Froman is up on the hill night and day already working on this. And so we are, TPA is important and particularly as we enter the end game of TPP, our trading partners are asking about TPA. And so we are putting priority on both as well as with TTIP and we look forward to working with Congress to get this bill through and get the trade promotion authority which gives Congress the ability to help shape our trade agreements. In the spirit of the focus on the alliance, I might ask Ambassador Thaly to comment on whether, rather than Wendy's on a hot seat here with that set of questions, Chris, as you know. But is there anything Australia can do based on your experience here as ambassador to help us get in harness on these issues that we're obviously grappling with? Well, I don't think there's anything that's particularly novel that Australia can do. Basically it means actually helping explain what the benefits are to the public and to companies and associations and then helping pound the halls of Congress and the Senate. And I think, and I'm sure this is being done because everyone knows it, really it's explaining to every politician what the actual practical benefits are from these agreements and how they won't happen unless there's TPA because we're all countries are very wary of coming to a negotiated agreement with the United States when it's not going to be able to put the deal to the Congress for a straight up and down vote. And even if there is TPA, by the way, that's not the end of the story because Congress is intimately involved in the negotiations right up until the final stage of the signing of an agreement, that is before it's ratified because congressional committees are kept informed, they express their views vigorously and frequently. So the TPA is really only the final part of congressional involvement in trade agreements. It's an important one, but it's not the only one. Let me ask just a quick follow-up then. Let me ask Mark and Andy scenario. We fail to pass TPA. A TPA agreement is either negotiated and the U.S. can't ratify it or there's no TPA negotiated because we just can't get there. What does Asia look like? What does that mean to the alliance? Because that's what we're here to talk about. What does that mean to the U.S.-Australia alliance if we don't get the TPA done? I think that you saw in this morning's discussion that the TPP is seen as very central. It's really the next touchstone for deeper engagement with the region. And you saw a certain cynicism about the execution of the first stage. I think the failure of the TPP would be very serious and would encourage the ASEAN related on mainland Asia efforts. On the other hand, it may be some years before this actually plays out. And in that time, we'll see potentially the success or otherwise of the new financial and economic reforms proposed by the new Chinese administration, which will probably be the big dynamic in the region. Not really just to say that I agree with everything Mark just said. And I think that there would be very grave consequences if that's what we found ourselves. Hi, thanks. Well, to take it back to Ambassador Huller, a couple of questions for you. My name is Matt Schwul. I'm a reporter from Inside U.S. Trade. I wanted to follow up on a couple of points that you made on the TPP. You mentioned that TPP countries are in the process of scheduling the next ministerial meeting for February. And for a long time, TPP countries have had kind of an aspirational deadline of when they wanted to conclude the talks, which the most recent one was at the end of last year. And as Ambassador Froman has said, towards the end of last year, that was kind of a good sort of target that brought urgency to the negotiators. So I guess I was wondering, is this February meeting sort of a new aspirational target or could it be maybe the trip, President Obama's trip to Asia in April, because I think some, even some CSIS, Matt Goodman has suggested that that might be a deadline. And secondly, if you could give any more clarity, you mentioned that U.S. teams are in Southeast Asia this week to talk about the TPP. Is that the chief negotiator level or technical groups, and if so, which ones? Thank you. Okay, with respect to your latter question, our chief negotiator, Barbara Lisell, is in the region and so are a number of our negotiators leading various issue groups in our market access negotiations. Second, with respect to the upcoming TPP ministerial meeting, once again, I did not say it would happen in February. I said it's likely to happen next month. And I also said that we are very encouraged with the momentum coming out of the Singapore meetings. We're working hard now in the lead up to the next TPP ministerial meeting. And let me leave it at that. Okay. John, last question. Ernie, as a follow-up to your point, on the other hand, what if TPA does get passed, that the president is able to rally the Democrats? I saw a report that there are 145 negotiating objectives already in the bill, and we haven't heard yet from Sandy Levin. I think it was you and Andy Stoller who said the TPA may be something that the others may have a little trouble living with at some point. I wonder if you or the other panelists could elaborate on that. Assuming TPA does get passed, will there be too many restrictions? Well, I haven't actually seen the draft legislation or anything, and I'm not really up to speed on it, but what I meant when I, in my comments, was I could imagine that the legislation might put some very onerous requirements on the U.S. negotiators to achieve things that maybe some of the other partners weren't willing to give. On the other hand, it kind of depends how the legislation is framed. I can remember operating under past trade promotion authority bills that always directed us to get rid of the European border tax adjustments. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with a border tax adjustment for a value-added tax, but there were people in the Congress who hated the VAT and the border tax adjustments that went with it. And we just had to come back at the end of the day and say, look, that just wasn't a reasonable objective. We couldn't meet that, but look at all the good stuff we got on the other side. Well, I want to thank all of you and thank our panelists in particular for their comments. Obviously, there's a lot at stake in this negotiation. I think one finding we can certainly take away from this discussion is that the TPA is a core important, or the TPP is core importance to the Alliance. And so, Wendy, we wish you and your team the best, as well as our Australian negotiators. And thank you all for speaking with us today. Thank you. Thank you. If you could stick around. Our next panel is with Minister Malcolm Turnbull and looking at the...


Welcome folks, we have the Dow investors trading up $29, NASDAQ up $113, S&P up $30, Gold contract up $0.70, trading at $2,040 an ounce, we have silver down $0.05, $0.24, $0.10 an ounce, late sweet fruit up $1.12, $0.72, $0.55, a barrel notes and bonds, a 10-year note down $0.05, trading $1.1207, the 30-year note down $0.18 and $1.2307 and Kingdolls, Kingdolls up $0.19, trading $1.02, $5.69, Euro at $1.09, Yen's trading $1.42, British Pounds at $1.26 to $1.00. We get over and take a look at the S&P's folks, a lot of mine, and now we're dealing with inside the S&P's as well as the NDX100, a large ABC structure is up on the weekly basis. We're already broken the highs, well no, the S&P hasn't broken the highs yet, but it's going to do a lot more than break the highs. What we did out here last week is that you can see this B point, you blew this B point away with volume, it's a monster ABC structure up and away we go. It's going to be amazing too because the bottom line is that it's not like we haven't been up and away. We're taking a look at the NDX100, same type of setup, in fact the NDX actually just came right to its high of $20.21 a few minutes ago. Weekly on the QQQ, same type of setup man, I mean blew this B point away, blew it away with volume, so that means the Qs are going to blow away that high out there of the 408.77, right now you're at 407.61, you had hit 407.99. Notes and bonds, they continue to want higher price. We go look at the 10 year first, the 10 years back and down, five ticks, you can see that it didn't even do a million contracts, folks. You're going up on the 10 year, 2. something million, 1.8 million, you're backed out at 956,000, higher we go, you're at 1207, that's an ABC structure up into the 14 area. We get into the gold contract, gold contracts, building cause once again for higher price. You had the wide price spread last week, accelerated volume, you know, we're at the 2040 right now. What we do have, you know, that big day that we had two weeks ago, that's a high volume day, so we're going up there first, my take is we're going to the 2,500 mark. Stay right there folks, come right back.


greetings warriors and welcome back to my channel and welcome to a Christmassy themed video. I am super excited to do this video. I first saw Beth over at Book's Nest do this video so I very much encourage you to check out her original video. I will be using mostly the same prompts that she did. It's not a tag or a challenge or anything like that. I just thought that this was such a fun creative video and I wanted to do it. I did have to change some prompts around because it is very much based off of her Christmas tree decorations and my Christmas tree has some different decorations so I was able to keep some of the prompts but for different decorations but for one or two of them I did have to change them around completely. So the first prompt that she has on her tree which also fits on my tree very well is a red bulb. This is our red bulb. A common book on people's shelves with a red cover and so I'm going to be keeping that prompt and the thing is is that I have books with red on the cover but not like a lot of red on the cover and especially not once they're like super popular so the book that I chose doesn't have that much red but it's still a red cover and I still think a lot of people have it on their shelves. It's very common and that would be Scythe by Neal Schusterman. You can see the bits of red on it. A lot of people I think have this at least the trilogy or at least Scythe if not the entire trilogy or at least have read Scythe just because it was such a big popular book when it came out a few years ago. I know I haven't and I haven't read the toly yet but I really I've been meaning to I will get there. Eventually it's just so big and scary. So the second prompt Beth has a little mouse decoration on her Christmas tree. While we don't have any mice on our tree I thought of something different that would kind of replace it but still work for the same prompt that she did and so my family Christmas tree the one that is behind me because I am back at my parents house. It's full of very unique and very personalized ornaments as every year my mom gets us ornaments that represent some event or something that happened in the past year of our life so if we joined a sport started learning musical instruments if we were in musical theater in a play or you know anything like that then you're gonna find a representation of it on our tree and so I think that just really any of the life-based ornaments on our tree works for the prompt that Beth chose with her little mouse and that was contemporary. On my first year of going to school when I was in preschool and then I got this one for my high school graduation. So for the book I have chosen for that I chose We Were Liars by E Lockhart and I talked about this book in my last video I chose this one because it is one of the first contemporary novels that I read and I still don't understand because it's got this element of mystery to it it's this girl and her group of friends go like her family goes on vacation and so something happened a few years back on that vacation and she is trying to unravel years later what exactly happened and why her and her friends are always lying about it. So it's one of the first contemporaries that I read and it's very life-based so life-based ornaments or contemporary makes sense right? There's our non-edible red candy cane that we hang on the tree normally we have many more but just this one for us this year. The next one is a candy cane and now we do have candy canes on our tree we used to have more in that past but we do have like one or two of them on our tree this year and the prompt for that one is a reliable book you know like a book that you know it's gonna be straightforward until there's that little part in the end it's got that little curve at the top but everyone knows a candy cane everyone likes the idea of a candy cane even if you don't actually like the taste of a candy cane so this is just a good reliable book with a little bit of a curve at the end which I thought was such an interesting prompt idea and for that one I chose The Miner's Lady by Tracy Peterson I read this last January and it's just a very like reliable like it is a forbidden love romance where you've got a family feud between two families in old old America and of course a girl from one family and a boy from the other family fall in love and oh that's not okay because the family is feuding it's a good reliable Romeo and Juliet retelling in the old Americas and so I thought it was a very candy cane like you know what's gonna happen you understand what's gonna go but you know the ending is slightly different than the rest of the book but like that's okay the next prompt up she had done and then I am also going to keep because we both have these on our tree are these big bulbs with the really pretty design around them so different from the red ones because the red ones are just a plain color but these have a really pretty design and these are some of my favorite ornaments to hang on the tree every year this one is my favorite I got it from my mom while I was living abroad and this one is also a very pretty one that we hang on the tree so the prompt for that one is a pretty big book you know very representation of the ornament and so the book I chose was my copy of the Grimm's fairy tales because this thing is a chunky book but it's absolutely gorgeous on the inside and the outside I love the outside because it has like the woods that are so commonly used in these fairy tales and it's full of like short stories obviously because it's a fairy tales so it's like not that hard to read just like the ornaments are not that hard to look at because they're just beautiful so beautiful the next one she talked about she has a couple of different mushrooms on her tree and I have actually never heard of putting mushrooms on a tree before but I thought that was such an interesting idea but I found that what we hang on our tree here when I think a lot of other people have hung on their tree that have different variations to it just like best mushrooms would be snowflakes I feel like there are a lot of there are quite a few different snowflakes on our tree and I'm sure there are some variation of snowflakes on other people's trees because winter snow it snows here in Michigan so we're why not have a snowflake on our tree to represent that there are a couple of the snowflakes that we have on our tree the first ones from school the second one is just pretty and so the recommendation based off of the snowflakes or a lot of YA books that readers have some variation of and for this I chose two different book series one of them being a throwback for those readers who have been reading for a long time I feel like this is on their shelves and one is a little bit more recent in the past few years as it was so big and I just I always see I saw so many people reading it when it came out so the first one the a little older one is the Mortal Instruments series I don't actually own these books myself but I have read them and I think so many YA readers have at least read them owned them for at least some chunk of time in their life so I feel like it's a pretty safe one and then the most recent one is when I have talked about so much in so many of my videos so I won't spend too much time on it and that's the airfolk trilogy by Holly Black the cruel prince the wicked king and the queen of nothing and yeah every book was huge when it came out right from the start and I've seen so many people talk about it that it's like I'm sure people have read at least the first one if not own all three books for sure that's just that's just how it is I'm sure I'm positive now this next one are these cute little red birds that she has on her tree and my family normally puts up on our tree this year we only have one on there we were trying not to overload the Christmas tree but in recent in past years we have put quite a few red birds we don't hang them they kind of just twist on to the tree so they look like they're perched on top of the tree rather than hanging from it like other regular ornaments and so the prompt for this one is a book that is eye-catching on your shelf because but these little birds were always trying to find them on our tree and I 100% agree with that because we always put our birds a little deeper into the tree like not right out on the edge because we don't want them to fall off so it's always so much fun to see how many birds you can find every day that was always something I liked to do as a young child this is the only bird have on the tree currently this year normally we would have more so they always tend to be one of the one of the ornaments that my eyes try to specifically look for and so what's a book on your shelf that you always try to specifically look for or always stands out to you and for me this is the school of the so much anani and this book always catches my eye because of the color scheme and how busy it is but also like it's not overly busy I love the blue and the purple it's a really big book I don't have the rest of the series yet of course classic classic Laura don't have the series but I do like it a lot I love the imagery of the swans I love the colors and the castles and it's just it's an eye-catching book that I always find myself looking for on my shelf even though it is quite a bit of an older book and I read it forever ago I still love it there the next decoration that Beth had was a bee and we don't have any bees on our trees so I decided to go with some of the children's toys on our tree because as I said earlier so many ornaments are based off of moments in our life when me and my siblings were younger it was mostly based off of toys and things we liked to play with or look at as young children and so I've decided that for that one I completely changed the prompt for that one initially Beth was a bee that represents a series that doesn't match on your shelf and while I think that is a great prompt I just don't have anything similar to it so I decided to go with children's toys and just to recommend a great middle grade this is actually my older brother's little choo choo train from when he was really young he loved playing with trains my favorite middle grade I believe to this day still is the Septimus heaps series the first book is called magic spelled weirdly and that's one thing that drew me to it as a middle grade reader when I was very young um and this is by Angie Sage I own the first second and I believe last book of the series on my kindle even though it's like a seven book long series I love the magic system in this I love the characters in this I love the imagery the books have little illustrations in them along the chapters and so those were a lot of fun so if you like to read middle grade and you have never heard of septimus heap please read it it's definitely a seventh son of the seventh son type thing but it's not solely about the seventh son of the seventh son like there are other characters that are major and have other life events happening that are crucial to the story and then the last prompt on here I am keeping the same as Beth because she is so right a nutcracker is definitely a must-have decoration around Christmas time while we don't have any nutcrackers on our trees we do have them next to our tree kind of right in front of the fireplace a little bit this is my mom's collection she has quite a few of them I have one because every year it was a tradition for us to go to the nutcracker the ballet because we quite enjoy the ballet and for years my mom my aunt and even my cousin would buy a nutcracker every year I did not start partaking this tradition until last year where I bought my first nutcracker and I was so excited to like start my own collection I was like I moved out now I need to have my own nutcracker collection for my own place and then this year you know quarantine and pandemic and all that kind of made the nutcracker not happening so I'm very sad I won't be buying a nutcracker this year but you know see this is my mom's collection of nutcrackers and she has quite a few she hasn't gotten a nutcracker every time we've gone to the ballet but for the past six years she has and these are those nutcrackers pretty sad compared to my one and only nutcracker this is the nutcracker that I got last year at the ballet and I'm very proud of him and hopefully he won't be lonely for long at least I have one and I'm back at my mom's house and she has quite a few and so the problem for this one is a classic because nutcrackers are so classic the ballet is classic like everything about them so the book I chose to recommend for this one is I actually have two books for this one one I think a lot of people have read if you haven't please read it and the other one I haven't really heard people talk about so that's why I'm recommending it the first one is Little Women and I believe a lot of people have read it and then when the movie came out I believe a lot of people either reread it or read it for the first time but if you haven't read it seriously please read Little Women it is such a good book about these four sisters who are all very different from each other each other living in like old Victorian times and them dealing with you know having the life that women did but also having their very strong personalities that they have and it's oh it's so much fun so I have not yet seen the movie but I really want to because I adore Emma Watson 100% but the book first the book is very good and it's obviously by Luisa May Alcott then the second classic book that I want to recommend is Around the World in 80 Days this is a Jules Verne book and I read this in middle school it was like one of the first classics that I read in middle school and I liked it it's literally the book that I read and liked enough to keep reading classics to keep going to we had a classics club in middle school where we just talked about them so like yes I enjoy them and I really enjoyed Around the World in 80 Days I thought it was so much fun and because the nutcracker is so big around the world like the ballet is such a big thing I thought it was very fitting for the idea of the nutcracker yeah those are all the recommendations based off of Christmas tree decorations seriously I urge you once again please go and check out Beth's video out over at her channel Books Nest because her video was just absolutely beautiful and she has like a Christmas tree and then she's got like a fire on her TV in the background it's just such a cozy time and I would definitely just recommending checking out her channel anyway because oh I absolutely adore her videos so feel free to comment down below any books that you have that you think a lot of other people have or that fit the prompts or if you have any unique or really fun ornaments on your trees if you do decorate Christmas trees either for Christmas or New Year's I know a lot of people will decorate trees much like we do for Christmas but more so for New Year's so if you have any fun decorations for those please let me know down below and also recommend a book to go along with them because it's so much fun otherwise give this video a thumbs up feel free to subscribe I release videos every Thursday however yeah this video is not going up on a Thursday it's an extra bonus video but stick around for every video on Thursday that I will release and with that I'm going to wish you guys a happy reading


What's up guys and welcome to one take I'm gill and today we're talking about dark season 3 episode 6 titled light and shadow This video will of course have spoilers through episode 6 But I haven't watched episode 7 or 8 in the third season So no spoilers for those episodes Before we dive into it quick reminder to hit the like button hit the subscribe button And of course the bell icon so you get notified the next time we do a video with that Let's jump into the episode some overall thoughts on the episode before we go into the recap First I thought this was sort of a powerhouse episode for Lisa Vickari who plays Marta She had to show a range of emotions throughout the episode and Basically had tears in her eyes and every scene and I thought she killed it Also, we finally got to see adult Bartosz so that was pretty exciting and Adam and Eva's motivations seem to have become clear Eva wants to ensure the apocalypse occurs on both worlds and that the knot is sustained I think that she wants to do that really just to maintain her own existence and the existence of all her friends and family On the flip side Adam wants to destroy the knot Essentially as a mercy killing. I think he sees the world They've created as a sort of living hell But it's unclear to me if he's simply trying to erase the bubble of Him and all the family trees that are connected or if he's literally trying to destroy the whole world in either case We know that he is trying to wipe from existence all our favorite characters Now where Eva and Adam's plans overlap is that they both want to ensure that all the events in the cycle occur as they have Previously but for different reasons Eva wants them to repeat so she can maintain the existence of the knot Adam wants them to repeat so the timeline can get to the point where Adam himself exists He has the God particle and can take the dark matter to its final purpose using it to destroy Marta's unborn child and destroy the knot This was also I thought the most confusing episode yet It was pretty dense So as we go through the recap I'll try not to dwell too much on the simple stuff and get to the Complex stuff that we really need to hash out with that. Let's dive into the recap We start off and what looks like 2020 on the prime world We revisit the moment of the apocalypse right after Marta died When Jonas looks up and sees the other Marta there except this time he doesn't see in other Marta and instead Jonas runs downstairs to the basement and Seems to survive the apocalypse on his own Then we quickly realize this is a dream slash memory of the older Jonas who wakes up still in 1888 this was one of the first jaw-dropping moments of the episode because we finally Explicitly acknowledge the existence of two contradictory Jonas's with two unique timelines one that left with Marta and died and One that stayed behind to become older Jonas and ultimately Adam that of course gets explained later in the episode and we'll get to that in 1888 older Jonas reads Marta's letter and we finally get to see its contents It essentially says Jonas you will make everything right again Don't lose hope but you have to let the apocalypse happen You have to let me die so I can live and we are a perfect match Jonas burns the letter later in the episode We'll see Marta actually writing this letter and at that point we'll dive a little bit into why I think this letter was given To Jonas in the first place going over to the alternate world in 2019 We follow Charlotte and Ulrich in the hours leading up to the apocalypse Charlotte shows up at Hannah and Ulrich's place and shows Ulrich that a microscopic Investigation of the penny that was found in the bunker versus the penny that Helga has proves They are the same penny Charlotte begins to believe in time travel And I'll say that I think the show this season has mostly been firing on all cylinders I do have a couple of minor complaints one of them would be the affair between Ulrich and Charlotte on the alternate world I feel that it's been pretty underdeveloped and I Generally don't buy it now It's been underdeveloped because there are so many other things going on that we care about a lot more than This affair in the alternate world So it's really just a minor quibble with this new evidence of time travel Ulrich goes to look at Mads body He notices the scar on his chin and finally becomes convinced that this is not just a boy who looks like Mads This is Mads himself who somehow time traveled Ulrich goes to see Helga and lock up sort of interrogates him a little bit and Ultimately lets Helga go so he can follow him into the caves To the metal doors and begin his time travel journey Then we jump over to the prime world in 2053 where Marta is hanging out with Adam and I had to keep straight which Marta's we're talking about in this episode because there are So many of them you of course have Eva the older Marta Then you have Middle-aged Marta, but there are actually three iterations of young Marta running around There's the youngest of the Marta's the one who just watched Jonas die and is now Scrambling a few hours before the apocalypse in 2019 Then there's the slightly older Marta and by slightly older I mean days or weeks the one that ditched older Jonas in 1888 she's the one that's currently on the prime world with Adam the one we're talking about here Then there's an even older Marta the one that has a scar over her eye The one that actually killed Jonas so sticking with the Marta that ditched older Jonas in 1888 She's now in 2053 with Adam Celia puts this Marta into a cage with no explanation Then Adam shows up ignores Marta's shouts about why she's locked up and Adam monologues about how old the townhouse thought that he could create a paradise Adam realized what paradise really is It is eternal darkness in which nothing exists But for that the apocalypse must happen in my world and in yours Adam leaves Marta and Marta yells after him But it always breaks my heart a little bit when Marta yells not Adam But Jonas because that reminds you of the tragedy that Jonas becomes this awful person So as I alluded to at the beginning of this video Adam is beginning to make his motivations clear Basically, we're living in hell and the only paradise we can ask for is eternal darkness where nothing exists Celia lets Marta out and then it makes her change clothes Marta asks Celia why she follows Adam and she just replies with rhetoric We the chosen few must fill the gaps so you can find your way here and Adam his and will finally find salvation So essentially Celia is saying that we need to fill the gaps We need to make sure that all of the events in the cycle occur as planned So you end up here Adam ends up here all the pieces fall into place so we can find salvation Though it's unclear if Celia and the other followers know that by salvation Adam means the absolute destruction of everything then we see Adam send it Francisca and Magnus into the God particle This is very similar to when we saw Agnes head into the God particle Then we saw Charlotte and Elizabeth head in there and now we're seeing Francisca and Magnus Seemingly they're all heading into various places of the time stream to as Celia said Ensure that everything in the cycle occurs as planned Now let's check in on the other Marta the youngest Marta the one that's in the alt world in 2019 Hours before the apocalypse she gets home after witnessing Jonas die And it does the manic hand scrubbing trying to get all the blood out of her hands She freaks out at the blood on her clothes in her hair Then Magnus shows up and he's very concerned about Marta But also angry about what Marta did to their mother because Catarina has been worried all day About where Marta has been Magnus does a good job of consoling her with a hug But then Marta tries to warn him about the apocalypse and everything that she went through and Magnus goes from a concerned brother doing a great job consoling her to I haven't got time for your psycho crap Then he leaves Marta looks at the blood in her hair and cuts it off taking one step closer to becoming the time traveling Marta We saw in the season 2 finale I liked that there was an in-story Explanation for why her hair gets shortened rather than just she wanted to change her hairstyles as she became more badass Then she has a heart-to-heart with her mom Catarina Marta asks Catarina if she believes in fate and Catarina says no We make our own choices and offers to be someone Marta can talk to then Marta leaves to stop the apocalypse I don't have too much to say about that scene besides Lisa Vicari kills it in that scene as she does throughout the episode Meanwhile, Alexander Tiananmen no idea that he has this role to play in the apocalypse is on the phone with Obendorf who helped to hide all the barrels of cesium Talking about those barrels then Bartos shows up and Alexander decides to come clean about his past He tells his son Bartos that I'm being blackmailed and I murdered someone my real name is Boris The murder was an accident. I am not a murderer Bartos asks if mom knew about this his mom Regina and Alexander says that Regina was the best thing that ever happened to him She saved him from his criminal past, but she didn't know the truth about what happened Bartos doesn't take the news well and he leaves in this scene both characters Alexander and Bartos gained some points for me I've always liked Alexander for some reason. He just seems like such a put-together Character and I've always kind of just glossed over his messy past But here I like the fact that he's decided to come clean and it seems he's going to take responsibility for everything I also love that Bartos's immediate concern was did mom know about this? That's awesome And I don't even need to praise the acting because the acting for everybody is top-notch on this show later Alexander looks at a picture of his wife And I think that tugs at his heartstrings a little bit and further moves him to come clean He calls Charlotte and asks her to come to the power plant So he can show her something and basically he plans to show her the barrels and come clean about the cover-up at the nuclear plant Marta while Alexander is out finds Bartos and tells him everything in detail about what she's been through recruits him to the cause of preventing the apocalypse. He tries to call Alexander, but Alexander is not picking up so Marta and Bartos get on their bike and Head to the power plant. They are trying to stop the impending apocalypse on their own But on their way there Bartos and Marta are stopped by an older Magnus and Francisca The ones that Adam sent through the God particle earlier in the episode They tell Marta that Eve and Middle-aged Marta are lying to you They don't want to stop the apocalypse. In fact, they're the ones who make it happen in the first place But we know how to change it. You have to come to our world and trust Jonas Now with Jonas if you want to manipulate him to get him to do what you want You need to dangle the carrot of we can save Marta in front of him with Marta It's the opposite at the mention of Jonas and the fact that he is still alive They win Marta over to their side They tell Marta you need to come with us and then you need to go save Jonas from the apocalypse right before it happens On his world now as a reminder Adam wants to ensure that events occur as they did before He needs to maintain the cycle up to the point that Adam himself exists He has the God particle. He has the machine and he can erase the knot so Magnus and Francisca here are taking this Marta and will send her to become the Marta that we saw in the Season 2 finale that rescues Jonas and brings him to her world back on the prime world in 2020 Claudia follows a map left to her by Claudia from the other world Following this map in the nuclear plant. She gets to the God particle, which is just a little baby God particle right now She slowly reaches for it before someone shouts stop looking over We see that that someone is young Jonas My jaw has dropped many times throughout the season, but this is probably the lowest It's dropped even though we saw that flashback at the beginning of the episode to the Jonas that Survived the apocalypse without being saved by Marta. It was still crazy to see this still alive Young Jonas he explains that the time tunnel no longer exists under the cave But if he can stabilize the God particle, he can go back in time and save everyone Then Jonas sees that Claudia still has a time machine, but she explains it's broken now in this situation Claudia knows she needs to manipulate Jonas and to following the events of the time cycle as they happened before She's been recruited to Eva's side So she wants to maintain the existence of the knot and sure that events repeat However, she doesn't yet have the finesse to manipulate yet So she makes a half-hearted attempt. She says to Jonas. Well, maybe you just need to wait 33 years You know go through the cycle again and then try again Jonas doesn't want to do that. He says I don't have time to wait 33 years And what am I supposed to do manipulate my younger self lie to my younger self again? But Claudia knows what to say I can help you save Marta and like that She has recruited Jonas to her cause. I went through a range of emotions in this scene It started with holy crap Jonas is back But ended with it's kind of sad to see a Jonas that hasn't learned the lessons that our Jonas did at the last few episodes Primarily trust no one Eva's lying to you. There is another world out there all those lessons all that knowledge gained The last few episodes is gone We rewind to a more naive Jonas and it was kind of sad to see that by the way before we continue It just wanted to quickly chime in to remind you if you're enjoying this video to please go ahead and hit that like button Hit the subscribe button and of course the bell icon so you get notified the next time we do a video or the next time We go live back to the show Meanwhile on the alternate world in 2052 We're in Eva's lair and we see Marta with the scar over her eye The one that killed Jonas middle-aged Marta tells younger Marta you two are wrong for each other in His world and in ours. You'll learn to let him go Later we see middle-aged Marta and Eva Looking over this younger Marta's shoulder while she writes the letter that Jonas receives from Marta Now why are they writing this letter? Everything Eva does is to maintain the existence of the knot meaning everything in the timeline that needs to be repeated in the Cycle I'm assuming this letter is something that Jonas needs to receive in order to give older Jonas Hope to keep going not realizing that everything he's doing all of the experiments with the God particle is Ultimately leading him on the path to the apocalypse and on the path to becoming Adam Then we get to the fun part younger Marta asks Eva why Jonas is still alive in his world Considering she shot and killed him last episode now I'm going to do my best to explain it to the best that I understand it Eva draws an Infinity symbol in front of Marta and she explains that either loop in the infinity symbol Represents both worlds both worlds have a time loop that meet in that middle point the middle of the infinity symbol When Marta goes to save Jonas that happens at this junction in time and at that point She can decide to either go to Jonas's world and rescue him or not either choice can be made And either choice is represented by the inside of the infinity symbol or the outside Whether or not she saves him just determines what side of that line you're on but in either case you're still following that loop Eva calls them overlapping realities Meaning Marta can choose to save Jonas or not however in this world both choices happen Simultaneously both realities exist Marta saves him He goes to her world and gets killed at the same time Marta doesn't save him The Jonas goes on to become older Jonas and eventually Adam the main takeaway is that when one universe interacts with the other and tries to Inflict some change on it. It's very difficult to do that because when you do it Essentially, you also don't do it and both realities overlap and exist Simultaneously to really boil it down to the main thing that we need to understand as an audience I think is that if you're trying to destroy something in the other world or something that exists in both world It's very difficult or impossible to do so that's relevant because that is the obstacle that Adam needs to overcome Adam wants to destroy the knot to do that He needs to kill Marta's unborn child. This unborn child is born of both worlds So if Adam attempts to kill it you get the Jonas problem where he both kills it and doesn't kill it Simultaneously and the loop continues So that is the obstacle that Adam needs to overcome as Eva says our worlds cannot be Separated from one another later We see that Eva has collected a bunch of people that play important roles in the time stream when it comes to keeping That cycle going at keeping the knot alive and she says to all of them Adam has moved each of his pieces into position It's time that we do the same this knot has given us all life and we are its keepers in both worlds He'll never be able to untie the knot then she places her hand on Marta's womb in all these years He hasn't understood how everything is really connected how everything ends and begins Not only in our world, but also in his we are destiny Then she goes one by one through everybody there and gives them some parting words regarding their Specific mission as they travel back in time and in some cases to our prime world She speaks to the Marta with a scar over her eye Middle-aged Marta adult Bartosz. Hey, we get to finally meet adult Bartosz She speaks to Claudia Egon by the way did not expect to see Egon in a 2052 here she speaks to Noah and she speaks to young Noah Each of them are being sent to different points like I said in the timeline on our world or hers To ensure that events occur such that the knot is preserved For example, we see Claudia from this alternate world Show up and meet Claudia prime in the same scene that we saw earlier in the season when they both meet for the first time One interesting one is Noah has to bring his younger self into the past So he and Elizabeth fall in love and I'm not sure exactly how he pulls that off Because we basically see him bring Elizabeth into the bunker What did he tell Elizabeth to get her down there and how does it go from I just brought you to the strange bunker and Now you're in love with this young guy that you just met and they need to fall in love So the two of them can't have a child who grows up to be Charlotte I'm assuming the reason it works is because it is sort of a destiny thing where they have an invisible bond between them So when they meet it'll sort of be love at first sight kind of like Alt Marta who met Jonas and within a few days They are in love to the point where she is willing to go to the ends of the earth to save him Meanwhile while Eva is enacting her endgame back on the prime world in 2053 we rejoin Adam where he is doing the same he has Marta tied up now changed into that white gown Wearing the st. Christopher necklace now. I'm not sure why she had to change into that clothes I think it may be a symbolic gesture or something from Adam where he wants her in her final moments To be a Marta that he recognizes from way back in the day what she's wearing Resembles what she wore in the Ariadne play So I think Adam just wants to see a vision of the Marta. He once knew Decades earlier Adam does his villain monologue and basically shares that Francisco and Magnus Charlotte and Elizabeth etc. They've all been sent through the God particle to complete their tasks and ensure the cycle occurs as Planned bringing us to this point Marta's baby needs to be killed so the knots can be destroyed However Adam explains we need to use this awesome machine I built which focuses the energy from both Apocalypses in order to destroy the matter which comprises the child that Marta will eventually give birth to so this goes back to the earlier point that Eva brought up if you want to destroy something in the other world or Something like this child that crosses between both world It is very difficult or in her mind impossible to do so However, Adam thinks he's found a way to do it by creating this machine that crosses time and space as he said Combining the power of both Apocalypses he says there is no hope no salvation no paradise We're wrong you and I in your world and in mine then Adam activates the machine And although he has his tough exterior we can see the way he closes his eyes he does feel something here and I think is preparing for the end This was probably the most on the edge of my seat I've been throughout the season and throughout this series I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest as he turned that machine on Because at this point I have no idea What comes next for all I know when I turn on episode 7? It's going to be an entirely different reality than we've seen before And I'm worried about all of our favorite characters is Adam going to succeed and destroy everything I honestly have no idea and I felt a wave of emotions watching this scene then back on the alternate world in 2052 as Eve sends everybody into the time stream into the portal between worlds We get an incredible split-screen montage Showing the lip-scar to trio Traveling to the nuclear plant in both worlds earlier in the episode We saw the older and younger version of the trio head into the God particle Then we saw the middle-aged version grab the spherical device which he uses to travel to our world So in the split-screen we see that all three of them have divvied up between worlds They go to the nuclear plant to do what needs to be done in both realities to ensure the Apocalypses both happen as planned. We also see the rest of Eve's folks going through the time stream to make sure Everything occurs as planned. We see Magnus show up in the alternate world Meeting his younger self. We see middle-aged Marta go to 1888 in our world She goes to leave the note from Marta and the four Charlotte pocket watch for older Jonas to find We see the swirling mass of energy in Gulf Marta Then Alexander opens the barrels to show Charlotte what he's covered up And this is of course part of triggering the apocalypse Older Egon visits Hannah in the alternate world and it looks like she's having a miscarriage And I wonder if this is an effect from the apocalypse being triggered similar to how what when people use the time tunnel We see birds and other animals die. I'm not sure what older Egon intends to do when he meets Hannah We know that Hannah needs to go back in time to procreate with the younger Egon and create Silia So my guess is that older Egon will sort of Promise her a better world and take her back in time to set those events in motion Then we end on a pretty beautiful moment earlier in the episode Magnus and Francisca on the alternate world we're talking about Marta's crazy ramblings where she thinks the apocalypse is coming and Francisca says to Magnus if the world ends will be together and we end on a shot of the two of them Sitting by the lake watching as the black Apocalyptic orb engulfs them so like I said a few times already in this episode I was more on the edge of my seat than I've ever been watching dark My jaw dropped more than it's ever dropped while watching dark So overall it was a pretty crazy pretty great episode I will say that the Jonas explanation for how he was able to be killed by Marta Yet still continue to exist in this sort of other Jonas iteration I didn't necessarily hate that explanation But I think I was hoping for something a little bit more intuitive where when you hear it you go.  I think I get what you're saying. Yeah, that kind of makes sense So minor quibble, but other than that thought it was a pretty fantastic episode now in the end moments here Did Adam destroy the world was he successful Eva seems pretty confident that Adam doesn't know what the hell he's doing She says that Adam has never truly understood the connection between worlds So a few possibilities here. Maybe Adam knows something that Eva doesn't maybe he's truly figured something out and Figured out how to ultimately destroy the knots or maybe Eva is right and Adam thinks he knows what he's doing but she knows something that he doesn't and What Adam is doing ultimately will fail or most likely as always It's something that I just don't see coming at all as I've been doing these reviews I've been forced to pace myself I finish an episode and then I stop do a review before I let myself watch the next episode So every time I do that it requires some willpower not to hit play next on Netflix And this time around it probably took the most willpower of all the episodes So I can't wait to see what happens in episode 7. I'm gonna go do that right now So make sure that if you enjoyed this video to please go ahead and hit that like button Hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon So you get notified when that episode 7 review is up a little bit later today And you get notified when we go live at this evening My plan is to watch episode 8 then go live shortly after to give immediate thoughts and reactions on The finale on the season as a whole we can hash it out We can comfort each other now that this amazing show is done And then this weekend after I've digested that finale I'll do a polished review for episode 8 with screenshots Like the other videos I've done for the rest of the season So with that thanks for watching and see you on the next one take