That's not an endorsement, just a statement of fact. Trade deals often boost economic growth and lead to closer bi- or multilateral cooperation between nations.

An endorsement would be something like 'the agreement may not be perfect, but it would be in America's interests. President Obama should sign it and the Senate should ratify it.' I might also note that the NYT has quite recently featured op-eds highly critical of the TPP, a curious strategy for a newspaper that is supposed to be endorsing it, eg http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/opinion/obamas-covert-trad...

I'm pro-trade in general but haven't formed an opinion on the TPP so far because its outlines are unclear. The best summary that I've read on the subject suggests that negotiations are strongly motivated by strategic considerations: http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21583995-negotiations-sec...

How do they know that it is a statement of fact and not completely misleading if they are not allowed to read the agreement though?

They present it positively, but it might be severely damaging and without reading the text they really don't know.

Obviously trade agreements in general can be good, but this article is about this trade agreement in particular, not the general concept of them, so for them to to start with a positive feel-good spin on something they are banned from reading, does seem somewhat off.

Because it's a statement about the potential of a trade deal. Historically, some trade deals have yielded such benefits, and the size of the economic territory involved means that the potential upside here is significant.

But they don't know the potential of this trade deal because they do not have the text of it so cannot draw a comparison with historic trade deals. To present something as positive based on history when the thing is secret is nonsense. Is like someone hovering around a shell game who only talks about the previous winners.

It's easy to assess the potential of the trade deal, by the simple expedient of counting up the various deadweight losses attributable to tariffs. It's not like we don't know what existing tariffs are or what costs they impose on trade flows, that information is public. For a very rough estimate of the potential gains, you can look at the size of the market for a given trade area and multiply that by the measured increase in economic growth from previous free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, the EU and others.

If you want to learn more about it I suggest this CRS primer: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40502.pdf

"I haven't formed an opinion on TPP yet because its outlines are unclear."

None of us can construct an informed opinion because the content is being deliberately kept secret until it is too late for anyone but the privileged few to have a say.

I'm quite content to wait until it comes up for ratification. As I mentioned above, a deal you can vote on is far preferable to no deal at all, which is what we have with the WTO for over a decade now.

It sounds like a statement of the deal's goal to me. Definitely not an endorsement.

That's a pretty weak endorsement... "could help" doesn't mean "would help". It just looks like the author didn't choose their words carefully enough.