California businesses breathe sigh of relief over deal to update NAFTA trade pact

LOS ANGELES - There is little overall difference between the old North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trump administration's replacement. But California businesses are just relieved to finally have some certainty they can plan around.

Selwyn Joffe, chief executive of a Torrance auto parts manufacturer, had 3,000 workers in his Tijuana factories and was all set to add hundreds more this year. As he listened to President Trump, though, he got cold feet. Even as U.S. trade officials were renegotiating the 1994 agreement, which slashed tariffs among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Trump continued to excoriate NAFTA as "the worst trade deal" ever made, threatening to kill any new treaty that failed to give the U.S. a "fair deal."

"We felt it would be a bad thing to abandon NAFTA," said Joffe, whose company, Motorcar Parts of America, has $493 million in annual revenue. "We didn't know where things were going. So we slowed down our capital investments."

But now that the administration and congressional leaders have reached a deal on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement