In recent decades, free trade has been seen by neoliberals as an excellent way to ensure economic growth and development. Thus, in recent years, the United States and 11 other nations have negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an economic trade agreement that would promote economic progress and cooperation. Supporters of this trade pact argue that the TPP would boost economic growth, assert American influence over China, and help improve environmental and labor laws among participating countries. However, critics of this agreement believe that this will lead to American job losses and trade deficits, pharmaceutical monopolies on drugs and drug prices, and a lack of protection against the currency. The first provision of the TPP that would help promote economic growth is the vast reduction in trade barriers between participating nations. As of now, many countries impose large amounts of tariffs on goods when trading with the United States. For example, Malaysia imposes “40% tariffs on US poultry” (Krist, 2015), while other tariffs on American goods are as high as “59% on US machinery, up to 70% on automotive products” (Davidson, 2015) . ). But with the TPP, the 12 nations would eliminate virtually all of these trade barriers between each other, but with some small exceptions. Indeed, according to US Trade Representative, Michael Froman (2015), these trade tariffs “will be zero or much lower than current ones, creating more opportunities for American companies to compete and export products abroad.” This would represent a complete improvement over World Trade Organization (WTO) provisions, which instead “maintain tariffs that may be particularly high on some products” (Krist, 2015). With this trade deal, America can expect to ship more goods abroad due to the drastic lowering of trade tariffs, which in turn would help grow the economy. Furthermore, American producers would no longer be at a disadvantage compared to foreign producers because without this agreement, U.S. producers. Although some economic sectors in the United States were optimistic about the TPP, many sectors in the United States are still tired due to the ongoing practice of currency manipulation. . Currency manipulation occurs when “countries play currency games to make their products more accessible and US products more expensive” (Krist, 2015). The effects of this are mainly seen in trade between the United States, Japan and China. For years, China has kept the value of its yuan artificially low, to the point of “limiting the growth of US exports to China and widening the US trade gap” (Ip, 2015). Currency manipulation is still a concern for the American auto industry, which fears that Japan's continued currency manipulation could help “lower the cost of Japanese automotive imports” (Davidson, 2015). In fact, currency manipulation has had such a dramatic effect on the American economy that it “results in the loss of one to five million U.S. jobs and increases our trade deficit by $200 billion to $500 billion annually.” (Bergsten, 2015). Clearly, currency manipulation is a powerful economic weapon that some people believe must be disarmed before the TPP can be