Treasury’s Lew confident TPP passes this year

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Friday that he doesn’t expect a dispute with the financial services industry to hold up passage of a sweeping Pacific Rim trade agreement this year.

Lew said he expects that businesses and the Treasury Department will eventually resolve their differences over a provision in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that financial firms argue would give foreign governments the ability to require them to maintain data servers within their borders.

{mosads}Lew said that progress is being made to reconcile an issue.

“I don’t believe it will ultimately be an obstacle on making progress on TPP, which I believe we will get done this year,” Lew told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington.

He said that the Treasury and financial sector are trying to strike a balance where U.S. regulators have access to information in real time while ensuring that countries can’t require U.S. firms to maintain data servers within their borders.

Lew said the disagreement is not a case of a “radical difference in objective, it’s just hard because it’s technically a complicated area.”

“This is challenging but there is a path to move forward,” he said.

Regulators are concerned that they might get stymied again as they did during the 2008 financial crisis from getting the data they need from the financial sector, Lew said.

But financial firms say that the Dodd-Frank financial reform law cleared up most of those issues.

The industry has said it would withhold support and its lobbying assistance until the issue is settled.