NAFTA Talks Resume; Trump to Speak at Davos

Negotiators from Canada, Mexico and the United States will gather in Montreal this week to try to hammer out a reworked North American Free Trade Agreement before Mexico’s presidential election this summer. Mexico and Canada are expected to begin offering more counterproposals to the demands made by the United States, which the business community and Mexican and Canadian negotiators criticized as potentially harmful to the pact. In a Twitter post last week, President Donald Trump mentioned the United States’ trade deficit with Mexico and called NAFTA “a bad joke.”

— ANA SWANSON

Aid to Greece will be one of the main topics when eurozone finance ministers meet in Brussels on Monday. The ministers, collectively known as the Eurogroup, will receive an update on Greece’s progress in meeting conditions for the financial support it has received from other eurozone countries. The meeting will be the first under the Eurogroup’s new president, Mario Centeno of Portugal, who has promised to push for closer cooperation among eurozone countries on issues including dealing with troubled banks.

— JACK EWING

The Swiss bank UBS will report its fourth-quarter results on Monday as earnings season kicks off for European lenders. Several of UBS’ American counterparts took big fourth-quarter charges associated with changes in United States tax laws, including Goldman Sachs, which reported its first quarterly loss since 2011.

— CHAD BRAY

The world’s financial elite gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the annual World Economic Forum, beginning on Tuesday. This year’s highest-profile attendee? President Donald Trump, who rode to power on a populist wave. Last year, President Xi Jinping of China was the star of Davos, championing economic globalization in a speech widely seen as a coming-out party. Trump, by contrast, could use his appearance at Davos to trumpet the improving American economy, from the rise in the stock market to the low jobless rate.

— PRASHANT RAO

The Bank of Japan will announce its monetary policy decision on Tuesday, and is expected to maintain its fiscal stimulus policies. With no change in policy expected, analysts will instead be looking at comments from the bank’s governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, for signs about when the current stimulus is likely to be reduced — a step that its counterparts in the United States and Europe have begun to take.

— ZACH WICHTER

When General Electric reports its fourth-quarter results on Wednesday, the numbers from the recent past will matter far less than clarifying what lies ahead. Last week, GE announced a surprising $6.2 billion charge to pay for lingering problems in its finance unit. The new chief executive John Flannery suggested that the setback might accelerate his plan for paring back the struggling industrial giant.

— STEVE LOHR

The surprising strength of the eurozone economy has raised questions about whether the European Central Bank will cut back its stimulus measures sooner than expected. As a result, Mario Draghi, the central bank’s president, is likely to be grilled about the ECB’s intentions on Thursday after a meeting of the Governing Council. In January, the central bank cut its money printing program in half, and has said it will keep up the stimulus at least through September. But statements by some members of the Governing Council have fed speculation that the program could end abruptly after that, setting the stage for interest rate increases in 2019.

— JACK EWING

The White House faces a Friday deadline for a decision on whether to impose tariffs on foreign solar panels. American makers of the products say they have been devastated by cheap products from China, while others in the solar industry warn that restrictions on imports could raise the price of solar power and make the sector less competitive. The U.S. International Trade Commission will also cast its final vote on Thursday on a trade case that Boeing brought against the Canadian aircraft-maker Bombardier. The trade case is a common one but in this instance it has been heavily politicized; the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain both weighed in on behalf of factories in their countries that help produce Bombardier jets or parts for them.

— ANA SWANSON

The Commerce Department will release its initial estimate for economic growth for the final quarter of 2017 on Friday morning, and offer a preview of how much the economy grew in President Donald Trump’s first year in office. Both the second and third quarters of 2017 boasted gains of more than 3 percent on an annual basis. If that happens again, it would be the first time since before the recession that the economy registered three consecutive quarters of 3 percent annual growth. At the moment, most analysts do not expect that to happen. Wall Street is forecasting a 2.9 percent annual growth rate, adjusted for inflation, for the final three months of 2017. In any case, the meager growth rate of 1.2 percent for the first quarter of 2017 is almost certain to keep the full year’s rate below 3 percent.

— PATRICIA COHEN