I have not heard of export licenses being granted for 3DES.
Didn't the ANSI financial committee just adopt 3DES (over NSA objections)? Presumably they consider the export situation solved/solvable.
There is absolutely no difficulty obtaining cryptographic aparatus outside the US. I had an entire distribution of PEM and X500 that was entirely written outside the US. DES is avaliable from many sources, there are many tripple DES products avaliable. It is not impossible to get export licenses, there have been several issued for DES for financial applications. If the US wants to be cut out of the market for financial services software thats up to them. Non US citizens can write crypto code as well, the British crypto tradition is far longer than the US one for example. Phill