Oil prices jumped last night after Donald Trump said the Iran conflict was “nearing completion”. Despite the US president saying the attacks on Tehran would end in “two to three weeks” and America doesn’t “need their oil”, the markets were not soothed.

“A word – or social media post” – from Trump “used to spark big moves in prices”, said the BBC. Investors would leap on “signs” that things “could escalate or come to an end”. But now traders seem “to be growing more sceptical about the value of his comments”.

What did the commentators say?

At the outset of the conflict, oil prices were “sensitive to Trump’s comments” but his view of the war “seems to change hour by hour”, said Tom Saunders and Eir Nolsoe in The Telegraph. “His stream of often contradictory statements” have made many wonder “whether they can trust the messaging” coming from the US administration, and some traders have drawn back from the market, “leaving prices increasingly untethered from reality”.

However many solutions to the current global oil crisis Donald Trump comes up with, the oil market isn’t listening anymore – “and the price of oil keeps rising”, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. There’s simply no point in Trump “trying to talk the price of oil back down again. It just won’t work.”

His “Persian Taco” tactic “may have run its course”, said Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. “Making extreme threats” and then walking them back may “provide Trump with the illusion of agency” but he “no longer has control of events in Iran”. The markets are “figuring out” that it will probably be Tehran, not the US, that gets to decide when the conflict ends.

What’s next?

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is today chairing a virtual summit with almost three dozen nations, to explore measures to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said his government is determined to find a solution to the energy challenges, although “it will not be easy”.

And yet, “after nearly three weeks of this conflict”, the global financial system is “functioning without panic or alarming signs of stress”, said Zachary Karabell in the The Washington Post. “It’s important to distinguish between price movements” and stability. “The smooth functioning” of the financial system, “in the face” of crises like the oil shock, “gets little attention, probably because stability is not news”. But central banks, financial institutions and governments have “improved at monitoring” risks, and that should “at least provide some relief in a world full enough of fears”.

With oil and gas prices soaring and supply severely disrupted by conflict in the Middle East, households fear a corresponding spike in their energy bills and calls are coming for the government to act.

Keir Starmer today outlined government measures to “bear down on costs”. The prime minister pointed to Ofgem’s new energy price cap, which amounts to a 7% decrease in energy bills, as well as increases to minimum wages. Starmer also pointed to the £1 billion-a-year Crisis and Resilience Fund that will help vulnerable households with heating oil prices. But the best way to bring down costs for families is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Starmer stressed. That means “pushing for de-escalation in the Middle East”.

The price cap resets at the end of June – and according to forecasts, the next is set to increase by 18%. The Conservatives have called on the government to remove VAT from household energy bills for the next three years, while the Green Party said ministers should increase the tax on energy firms’ profits. Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick accused Rachel Reeves of “acting like a bystander” and not the chancellor.

What did the commentators say?

“The prime minister seems to be suffering from a dangerous degree of complacency in the face of the mounting energy crisis,” said The Independent in an editorial. While other countries’ governments implement measures to conserve energy and support families, such as Australia making some public transport free and Ireland cutting fuel duty, Starmer “has merely urged the British people to ‘act as normal’”. The government is “silent” on any plans it might have to “ameliorate prospectively crippling gas and electricity bills later in the year”.

The soaring price of fuel oil and petrol is playing out against “stagnating living standards” and a “succession of tax rises on work and employment”, more of which kick in this month.

Charities say this month’s increases to council tax, water, broadband and mobile phone tariffs are also “threatening to stretch many households to breaking point”, said the Press Association.

Businesses aren’t protected by the price cap, either. They’re set for “painful increases in their gas and electricity tariffs” as the situation in the Middle East “sends wholesale prices soaring”. Electricity costs have already increased by between 10% and 30% since the conflict began, while gas prices have soared by between 25% and 80%, according to energy analyst Cornwall Insight.

This April 1st is “no joke” for millions of families and small businesses, said the Liberal Democrats in a statement. We need an “urgent cost-of-living plan”.

But we can’t afford more state aid in the form of energy bill subsidies, said The Times. Reeves talks of “targeted” help, but with millions of pensions and welfare claimants, “that could be a very big target”.

The “ruinous spending” of lockdown “crippled this country’s finances”, which Liz Truss ignored when she proposed a universal cap to blunt the impact of the Ukraine war. Gilts “went into freefall” and Truss “was toast”. Since then, the bond market has “consigned Britain to the naughty step”.

Our national debt is at a “crippling 96%” of GDP, the servicing of which will cost £112 billion this year. Inflation and interest rates are set to keep rising, and recession is a “distinct possibility” if the war continues. The government “dare not increase the debt with another universal handout”. The bond markets “will not wear it”.

What next?

Reeves told BBC Breakfast that any support for energy bills would be based on household income, targeted at those who need it most, unlike the universal support rolled out in 2022. “I want to learn the lessons of the past because when Russia invaded Ukraine, the richest, the best-off third of households got more than a third of the support,” the chancellor said. “That makes no sense at all.”

The chancellor said it was “too early” to say who would get help, as demand for energy is at its lowest in the summer. But she “hinted help might not come” until autumn, said the broadcaster.

The Bank of England published its financial stability report today, its first since the US-Israeli war broke out. Domestically, the “economic outlook has deteriorated”, but the UK banking system “has the capacity to support households and businesses”, it said, “even if economic and financial conditions were to be substantially worse than expected”.

“It’s not easy to topple a $30 trillion economy,” said Alicia Wallace in CNN.com. But if the war in Iran keeps driving fuel prices higher, things will soon “start getting dodgy” for America. With Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz stopping the export of oil from many Gulf Arab states, and missiles and drones raining down on oil and natural gas facilities across the Middle East, the International Energy Agency warned last week that the world is facing the biggest energy crisis in history.

The U.S. is already feeling the shock waves. Oil has rocketed by roughly 30% to about $100 a barrel. Gasoline has hit a national average of $3.98 a gallon—up by a dollar since February—and is over $5 in California, Washington, and Hawaii. Understandably, some 45% of Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about gas prices, according to an Associated Press poll. For a “first glimpse” of where we may be headed, “look at Asia,” said Alexandra Stevenson in The New York Times. In a region that relies on Middle Eastern energy, gas stations in Thailand and Vietnam are posting “Sold Out” signs. People in India are hoarding cooking gas. Asian airlines have canceled thousands of flights, after the price of jet fuel more than doubled—and all this after only one month of a conflict “with no clear end in sight.”

The war is also “driving the world toward a food crisis,” said Heather Stewart in The Guardian. Hormuz is a “key choke point” in the global supply of urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer that’s made using natural gas, and sulfur, “a by-product of oil and gas refining and another critical fertilizer ingredient.” Once farmers get hit by the “double whammy of higher energy bills and more costly fertilizer,” it could push some 45 million people around the planet into “acute hunger,” according to a U.N. estimate. Americans won’t starve, said Max Zahn in ABCNews.com, but they will pay more for everything “from groceries to smartphones.” A third of the world’s helium travels through the strait; that gas is essential for the production of microchips used in phones, AI servers, and almost all electronics. The chaos in the Middle East is also pushing up the cost of plastics, which are made of petrochemicals, and aluminum, because the region is home to several key smelters.

There is some “good news” for Americans, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Thanks to decades of tightened emissions standards—so detested by President Trump—our economy is “far less energy-intensive” than it used to be, with “every dollar of GDP created” requiring only half the energy it needed back in 1980. As long as the war ends soon, many economists think the U.S. can probably “scrape through this year without a recession.”

It’s already too late, said The Economist in an editorial. Even if fighting stopped today, it would take at least four months for oil facilities in the Middle East to restart production and process back-logged crude into usable fuel, and for markets and prices to regain “some semblance of normality.” And that’s a best-case scenario, said Rogé Karma in The Atlantic. If fighting escalates instead, Iran could reach for the “doomsday option” it previewed last week, when it responded to an Israeli strike on its largest natural gas field by attacking a Qatari facility that produces 20% of the world’s supply of liquified natural gas—causing natural gas prices to spike 35% in Europe. If there are more such attacks on energy infrastructure in the target-rich Middle East, our current energy crisis may become a global “economic catastrophe” that we’ll be living with for years.

Given the current uncertainty, the Bank of England’s decision to hold interest rates at 3.75% last week was “the only one possible”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “Policymakers are as clueless on the length of the war, and the cost of energy six weeks or six months from now, as stock market investors.” So why did the London bond market throw such a wobbly?

UK borrowing costs soared to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis on the day after the Bank’s meeting, with the yield on benchmark 10-year gilts surging to 5%, “deepening a three-week long rout”, said the Financial Times. Two-year gilts – the part of the market most sensitive to interest-rate moves – were also pummelled.

Britain has been hit hardest in the global bond sell-off since the outbreak of war, because our dependency on imported energy means spiking oil and gas prices “quickly feed through to broader inflation”. When combined with flatlining growth and rising household borrowing costs, the risk of recession is plain.

‘The spectre of stagnation’

Perhaps last week’s turmoil was “a weird overreaction” to the Bank’s hawkish new tone, said Katie Martin in the same paper – rather than interest rate cuts this year, we are now contemplating hikes. But “the spectre of stagnation stalks the land”. The market has stabilised, but “in aggregate, more than £100 billion has been erased from the market value of UK government bonds in a matter of weeks”, said Stuart Fieldhouse on The Armchair Trader.

“UK rate expectations have been on a remarkable journey in barely a month,” said Chris Beauchamp at IG. “A full 100 basis points rise in rates is now expected for this year.” The bad news for consumers and business is compounded by the implications for the Government of “a fiscal squeeze”. If there’s further escalation in the Middle East, “this may be just the beginning of the crisis”.

The ‘Maradona Effect’

As data on demand weakness becomes evident, the Bank of England won’t want “to compound the damage with higher interest rates”, said Karen Ward of J.P. Morgan in the Financial Times. I suspect it is deploying the “Maradona Effect”, named after the footballing legend whose greatest skill was feinting. Conveying a very hawkish signal about the outlook for rates may obviate the need to actually raise them.

The Bank “faces an acute dilemma”, said Roger Bootle in The Telegraph. As we learnt in 2022, the issue at stake is what happens to inflation after the initial, oil-induced spike. The case for higher rates is to ward off “second-round effects” and stop inflation becoming embedded. “The art of central banking lies partly in not overreacting, but also in not taking action too late.”

If the price of oil continues to rise, it could trigger a “steep and stark” global recession, said Larry Fink, CEO of US financial giant BlackRock. There will be “profound implications” for the world economy if Iran “remains a threat” and oil prices hit $150 a barrel.

The BlackRock boss has a “unique insight into the health of the global economy”, said the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack, because of his investment management company’s colossal “size and spread”, controlling assets worth £11 billion across the world.

What did the commentators say?

“The Iran war is metastasising into a global economic calamity,” said the Financial Times’ editorial board. Until now, financial markets have been “lulled by the belief that the conflict would not last long” but, as hostilities enter a fourth week, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “lasting damage” has been inflicted on critical energy infrastructure in the region, and “the worst-case scenarios for investors and policymakers are coming into view”.

If this crisis continues, “no country will be immune to the effects”, said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency on Monday. The global economy faces a “major, major threat” as the Iran war has a worse impact on energy prices than the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Prepare for the price of oil to reach $200 a barrel,” said Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesman for Iranian militias last week. And what seemed then “like bravado” is now “closer to becoming reality”, said Jesus Servulo Gonzales in El Pais. Were prices to rise above $150, let alone near $200, there would be “an inflationary crisis”: “the world would become poorer, and economic activity would grind to a halt until the situation recovered”.

The current oil-price “ructions” would have “to get much worse” to trigger a global recession but “less happily, they will almost certainly further stoke popular anger over the cost of living”, said The Economist. The price of Brent Crude is currently around $100 a barrel (it was $60 at the start of the year); two months at $140 “would push parts of the global economy” into a slump. Consumer confidence is already “close to an all-time low in America and scarcely higher elsewhere”, given many countries “seemed primed” for an economic downturn “even before the Middle Eastern chaos began”.

In the US, “many economists believe” the country “will scrape through this year without a recession”, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. “But this is simply guesswork.” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has said the surge in oil prices is “an energy shock” that has created so much uncertainty, “we just don’t know” what will happen.

What next?

We urgently need to get the Strait of Hormuz opened, oil market expert Rory Johnston told The New Statesman. It’s “too important” to the global economy to remain closed. The most likely path “is that the Trump administration and Israel pull back on their attacks in Iran, and Iran says, OK, we’ll re-allow” tankers down the waterway. But even if the strait “reopened to 100% of its prior flow” today, it would take two to three months “to renormalise the global system”.

Under the “doomsday scenario”, in which the strait stays closed indefinitely, “we’re not talking recession; we are talking depression”.

At least half of the steel used in Britain should be made in the country, the government has said as it launched its new strategy for the struggling industry.

This is a “watershed moment”, said Sky News, and, in “economic and historical terms”, it’s “dynamite”.

What are they?

The strategy is an attempt to save Britain’s beleaguered steelmakers. At its heart is a new tariff on many steel imports and a reform of quotas on those imports. Imported steel quotas will be reduced by 60% and anything brought in above that level will be subject to a 50% tariff, said the Department for Business and Trade.

The government’s “ambition” is to raise the proportion of domestically produced steel to 50%, from its current record low of 30%.

Up to £2.5 billion will be given to steel producers that have effectively been nationalised and to support private steelmakers around the UK in their quest to produce lower carbon metal.

Why are the tariffs so important?

This is a “significant” moment, said Sky News, because these are “probably the biggest increases” in trade barriers imposed by a British government in “at least a generation”.

Other countries, “most glaringly” America under Donald Trump, have raised many of their tariff barriers, but Britain had “held firm”. For many ministers it was a “matter of national pride”, because they “felt that to raise tariffs, even in an environment where everyone else was, would be an abomination”. But now Britain is “dipping its toes into the waters of protectionism”.

Will they work?

A leading HS2 contractor has warned that raising tariffs on foreign steel imports will “exacerbate” cost pressures for the UK construction industry. Mark Reynolds, chair of construction company Mace, told The Guardian that with energy costs rising and an already depressed construction sector, the move is “ill-timed and unhelpful”.

But Gareth Stace, director general of UK Steel, said this was a “crucial moment” because “with global markets distorted by overcapacity and subsidy, a clear and ambitious domestic strategy is exactly what is required to ensure steelmaking not only survives in the UK but thrives”.

The Conservatives’ shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith described the measure as “red tape” and said that raising the cost of imported steel “means more cost for the construction industry, less infrastructure investment and is a further blow to the diminishing number of firms making things in the UK”.

The government’s approach to the industry has “always looked like a cross between inveterate, unshakeable optimism and the panicked thrashings of a drowning man clutching for a flotation aid”, said Eliot Wilson on CapX.

The tariffs are “not so much a strategy as a sticking plaster”. If the UK’s steel sector is “unable to compete on the world stage” we shouldn’t have a policy of “allowing it to survive financially” without “some notion of the limits of that”.

The Bank of England today held interest rates at 3.75% and warned of higher-than-expected inflation, as the US-Israel war with Iran delivers a “new shock” to the UK economy.

“War in the Middle East has pushed up global energy prices,” said Bank governor Andrew Bailey. “You can already see that at the petrol pump and, if it lasts, it will feed into higher household energy bills later in the year.”

The direct impact of rising energy prices is likely to add about 0.75% to inflation this autumn, instead of an expected fall. And, if businesses pass their higher costs on to consumers, that could add a further 0.25%. All the signals point to “households and homeowners” suffering “further financial hardship”, if the Iran war does not end soon, said The Times.

What did the commentators say?

Seventy years ago, we had petrol rationing, triggered by the Suez crisis, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. That’s “ancient history now – or it would be, if it weren’t for what looks increasingly like” America’s “version of Suez”. Yet again, a global superpower is “starting a war it seemingly doesn’t know how to finish, against an enemy it woefully underestimated”.

Oil experts have warned that Britain “could be only weeks away from needing to ration fuel”, if tankers don’t resume sailing through the Strait of Hormuz soon. Other countries are “already being forced into drastic steps”. In Pakistan, schools have been closed and government offices have been put into a four-day week, Vietnam is “urging people to work from home”, and Bangladesh has stationed soldiers at fuel depots.

“The financial impact on the UK from” this war is “yet to fully play out, but the outlook is bleak”, said Rosa Prince on Bloomberg. Donald Trump’s “folly” has “kiboshed” Keir Starmer’s “economic revival”. For a “brief moment”, green shoots emerged, and a path opened up for him “to salvage his beleaguered premiership”, only for “Trump’s addiction to foreign escapades” to crush it.

The Iran crisis could “easily accelerate the death of manufacturing” in Britain if “vicious” energy-price rises last longer than a few weeks, said Ben Marlow in The Telegraph. They could crush “the life out” of our heavy industry, shutting down production lines and mothballing “entire factory complexes”. There is a “real risk of widespread de-industrialisation”.

There is “deep energy-linked frustration” in Europe, too, said the BBC’s Katya Adler. “The knock-on effects” of this Middle East conflict is “awakening ghosts of crises past” when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine rocked the EU’s energy market. Europe has since ended its reliance on Russian gas and oil but it now depends heavily on the US and Norway for energy provision – “which won’t solve its problem with energy security” and won’t shield it from the current price spikes.

What next?

I see a “similar financial anxiety” in the UK as when Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago, said Albert Toth in The Independent. “And that had a long-standing impact on the cost of living.” Volatility in the oil market directly impacts household finances in various ways, some of them more “subtle” than others. People will expect energy bills and petrol prices to go up but “less obvious” will be the rising cost of food, pushed up by increasing transport costs and disrupted fertiliser supply chains.

For Starmer, dealing with Trump’s demands for military back-up may be difficult, but managing the “war’s economic blow is trickier”, said Bloomberg’s Prince. He may as well blame the US president for “sending Britain’s cost of living spiralling”. This week, he announced £53 million in support for low-income households who are most exposed to the sharp increase in heating-oil prices but his government “will need a much bigger package if the conflict drags on”. And “that won’t be easy, given existing strains on the public purse”.

British businesses are to be offered a £3,000 state bonus for hiring a young person who has been out of work for six months as the number of economically inactive young people nears one million.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said it was part of the government’s plans to “back Britain’s young people” after youth unemployment hit its highest level in more than a decade.

How bad is it?

According to the Office for National Statistics’ latest labour market overview, 14% of Britons aged 18 to 24 were unemployed in the final quarter of 2025, compared with 12.7% in the same period in 2024.

This growth has largely been driven by young people who are “economically inactive”, meaning those who are out of work and not seeking it. The most recent data from the ONS says the number of young people not in employment, education or training (Neet) between October and December 2025 reached 957,000, up from around 800,000 in 2019.

Why is it so hard to find work?

For many of those not in employment or training, “the challenge is not so much a lack of skills or visibility as the dearth of openings in a stagnating labour market”, said the Financial Times. “Young people say they lack work experience and something to talk about to employers,” said Sareena Bains, chief executive of charity Movement to Work. “Those opportunities are becoming few and far between.”

The tough labour landscape has been made worse by the roll-out of AI, which threatens to erase many entry-level jobs.

Business groups have also criticised the government’s decision to raise employer’s national insurance contributions and the youth minimum wage, as well as changes to workers’ rights, all of which could make companies less inclined to take a risk on a newcomer to the workforce over an experienced worker. In February, Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, told the Commons Treasury Committee that changes around tax and the national living wage have had a “particular effect on those aged 16 to 18, and 18 to 21”.

Having analysed the effects of setting minimum wage rates by age, Alan Manning from LSE concluded that the evidence is “too weak” to blame youth unemployment on the minimum wage.

What else is to blame?

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has identified a “toxic cocktail” of “rising employment taxes, perverse incentives to claim benefits and a broken migration system”. The think tank’s Wasted Youth report found that businesses are turning to non-EU migrants while a growing number of young Britons are claiming benefits.

Health is another major factor. The share of Neet young people who report having a health condition that limits their ability to work rose from 26% in 2015 to 44% in 2025 – a 70% increase, according to The Health Foundation. This “mirrors trends among young people generally”, said the think tank. “Regardless of whether they are in work or education, 16–24-year-olds today are much more likely to report having a work-limiting health condition than they were in the past”. This increase is “driven primarily by mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions”.

What is being done?

As well as the £3,000 incentive for firms to hire young people out of work for six months, the government has also announced small and medium-sized businesses will get a £2,000 bonus if they take on a young apprentice, and jobs with training subsidised by the state are to be expanded to 22- to 24-year-olds.

Current policies to help Neet young people and expand apprenticeships were “not stacking up to the scale of the challenge”, Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning & Work Institute, told the FT.

A more radical proposal, backed by former home secretary David Blunkett and former chancellor Jeremy Hunt, is a Future Workforce Credit, a £670 million effective tax cut for employers hiring Neets that would cover 30% of their salary. CSJ modelling based on similar interventions suggests the approach would get 120,000 young people into jobs while saving £765 million in tax and welfare spending.

The Bank of England’s decision to jettison historical figures, like Winston Churchill, from its banknotes and feature British wildlife instead has caused quite a stir.

The design change follows a public consultation during which animals and birds emerged as the most popular image choice. But critics are lining up to register their horror. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accused the Bank of “erasing our history”, and an audience member on BBC’s “Question Time” said it was “surrendering to the radical left”.

‘Values under attack’

“For more than 50 years, we’ve chosen to honour our greatest citizens” on our banknotes, in tribute to their “genius, courage and creativity”, said Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat in The Telegraph. Swapping them for “badgers, puffins and red squirrels” shows we now “lack the courage to state publicly who we are”. Erasing Second World War cryptanalyst Alan Turing from the £50 note severs “the link between citizen and story” and suggests “we care less for codebreakers than cuddly carnivores”.

This is “not a neutral act”, said James Price on City A.M. It’s dangerous to flatten “our visual realm” and “erase the uniqueness of our national story”. Britain feels ever more “like an airport terminal with a welfare state attached”, rather than “a home”. No wonder there’s a backlash: the “penny is dropping that our history and our values are under attack. We should never, never, never surrender them.”

It’s goodbye to the “proud tradition of honouring our greatest Brits”, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. “Charles Dickens, George Stephenson, the Duke of Wellington and Elizabeth Fry have all made appearances” on our banknotes over the years; “somehow, a red robin is never going to have the same resonance”. I think the Bank of England “is doing its best to kill off paper money”; certainly, rejecting tradition and favouring what will look “suspiciously like an emoji” will only help.

Silly controversy

I hear the “scoffs and cries of wokery” but I think “the move is a stroke of genius”, said Emily Watkins in The i Paper. “I’ll take a badger over Winston Churchill any day.”

“Our nation is too various to be represented by a handful of dead people stamped on notes – that’s something to be celebrated rather than bemoaned.” There is “no figure in history who can represent, let alone please, everyone”, so, really, the Bank is “saving us all endless grief”. By “representing no one, animals represent us all”.

I can’t think of a sillier public controversy, said Oliver Kamm in The Times. Depicting historical figures on banknotes “is not some hallowed tradition”; it only began in 1970. Presumably, the Bank was not “captured by forces of wokeness” for the 276 years of its existence before then.

Counterfeiters have more “sophisticated printing equipment”, so it is in everybody’s interests that the Bank “thwarts their efforts by regularly changing the appearance” of notes. It is more important to have a paper currency that “commands trust in the corner shop” than one “that bathes us in a patriotic glow”.

AI is losing its stock. More investors are opting to put their money into industries that are less likely to be affected by the technology and selling off shares of companies that are more likely to be impacted by AI. While this may not become a long-term investment choice, it points to skepticism about whether artificial intelligence truly benefits the economy.

What’s HALO trading?

“HALO” stands for “heavy assets, low obsolescence.” This means investing in “businesses less vulnerable to being supplanted by AI,” including companies operating “pipelines, utilities, transportation infrastructure, factories and ports,” said Bloomberg. Fast-food restaurants and commodity companies are included as well. These are companies that “you cannot type something in a prompt and disrupt,” Josh Brown, the chief executive at Ritholtz Wealth Management who coined the term, said to The Wall Street Journal.

HALO trading also goes hand-in-hand with AI scare trading, defined as selling “all things AI-linked,” said Bloomberg. Two specific developments are causing the rise of scare trading. The first is the concern that companies will lose valuation after announcing they are spending money on AI infrastructure, and the second is the fear that AI will “severely disrupt entire industries because AI agents will be able to replace white collar workers, shrinking the workforce and, by extension, consumer spending.”

AI scare trading has been “on a bender this year, steamrolling entire industries based on the flimsiest of evidence that the technology is coming for them,” said Axios. HALO trading, on the other hand, is a more recent occurrence and is why “many real-world sectors are outperforming this year, even as the overall market and especially tech stocks have floundered,” said CNBC. The two “top-performing sectors are energy and materials, which are surging more than 23% and 15%, respectively.”

What’s the future of investing?

HALO trading may be a temporary trend or “another iteration of the jitters that have periodically rippled through markets since the AI investing boom began,” said the Journal. Many investors are trading “on the expectation that AI will eat away at future revenue streams rather than current ones.” Much of the trading “has felt very whiplash-y,” Lisa Shalett, the chief investment officer of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, said to the Journal. We “don’t have any real idea” who the AI “losers are going to be.”

There are some recent signs that HALO trading has been decreasing. Tech shares have already “regained some ground this past week, with the Nasdaq besting the Dow industrials,” and stock values went up “after the news that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down” President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, said the Journal. However, many HALO stocks “have room to run after years of underperformance, can benefit from easier monetary policy and fiscal stimulus, and could even realize improved margins from AI,” said CNBC.

What’s certain is that the “choppy trading of the past few weeks,” along with “lingering concerns that big tech companies are overspending to get ahead in a technological arms race,” indicates a “kind of evolution for the AI investing frenzy” in which investors are “more discerning,” said the Journal. A company’s previous success is not a good enough reason to continue investing in it.

“We are in a new chapter, and I think that chapter is going to be defined by companies proving” their longevity, said Jed Ellerbroek, a portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management, to the Journal. “Hype isn’t cutting it anymore.”

People looking to spend tons of money on a car will soon have a more eco-friendly option, as a variety of luxury auto companies are developing electric vehicles. High-end automakers are taking different paths to market: Companies like Ferrari are all-in on EVs; others have a more muted approach. As the jostling continues, there are concerns that the luxury car market might be the wrong platform for EVs.

What luxury companies are making EVs?

Ferrari, Lamborghini, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are all experimenting with EV development. Ferrari has been pushing ahead at a rapid pace. The company “doesn’t have an EV on the market yet, but its first model, called Luce, is expected to be open for orders later this spring,” said CNBC. Still, there are hurdles ahead for the iconic Italian brand.

For starters, electric cars can go extremely fast just like gas-powered Ferraris, but “much of what makes an internal combustion Ferrari compelling is missing,” Karl Brauer, an executive analyst for iSeeCars, said to CNBC. People purchase Ferraris for the “way it stirs a person’s senses: the look of it, the sound and feel of the engine and the smell of the exhaust.” Experts say many of these experiences may not exist in an electric Ferrari.

Though Ferrari’s plans are in motion, the same cannot be said for Lamborghini, which has “pulled the plug on plans” for its EV in the “face of collapsing demand among its well-heeled customers,” said The Times. Instead, the company will debut a hybrid model. It admits this is a demand issue. The “acceptance curve” for EVs in Lamborghini’s market is “flattening and close to zero,” Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann said to the Times.

What does the market say?

Others in the auto industry have also noted the demand problem raised by Lamborghini executives. For “many years, many of the electric vehicles that Americans bought were luxury models, like the Tesla Model S, the GMC Hummer and the Porsche Taycan,” said The New York Times. All of these vehicles sell for more than $80,000, while Lamborghinis and Ferraris routinely sell for six figures (the Ferrari Luce EV is expected to cost at least $500,000).

Geopolitical factors, particularly tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump, are also being considered. Mercedes-Benz “had been selling electric versions of its luxury sedans and SUVs in the United States but recently said it would stop importing them,” said the Times. Volkswagen has similarly “slowed production of the ID.Buzz, an upscale electric van that’s made in Germany.” Many automakers have seen the “largest losses from luxury models. Now fewer sales will mean smaller losses.”

While luxury brands may be struggling with EVs, the “picture is very different for worldwide EV sales for brands not on the high-end,” said Wired, as this vehicle market is booming. It could also be that luxury buyers simply don’t want electric cars. For “luxury brands, which operate lower volumes and higher R&D costs,” said Philip Nothard, Cox Automotive’s insight director, to Wired, the industry’s challenges are “even more pronounced.”

For the past week, oil and gas traders have watched as a long-feared “worst-case scenario” played out in energy markets, said Bloomberg. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil and gas production flows, “has all but ground to a halt”, while Iranian missile and drone attacks have forced the closure of the world's biggest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia's largest oil refinery.

Real and present threat

It used to be thought that all bets would be off for the global economy in such a scenario. And yet, while prices have surged higher, the scale of the moves has been far smaller than in previous crises. “We're still a long way from ‘oil shock' territory,” said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The jump in prices to around $80/barrel is nowhere near the highs of $125 seen shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “A gas shock, however, looks a real and present threat.” European wholesale prices hit the stratosphere – jumping by 50% on two consecutive days, before falling back – as QatarEnergy halted production, taking “20% of the world's LNG offline at a stroke”.

UK gas (which hit 114p a therm) on Monday, would have to go to 250p – and stay there for a while – to match the intensity of the 2022 energy crisis, said Pratley. “But suddenly it is not unimaginable.” We may only import 2% of our gas from Qatar (Britain is mainly dependent on Norwegian pipeline imports and its own North Sea supplies), but a tighter market would see Asia and Europe compete more aggressively for LNG cargoes, pushing up prices across the board.

Guessing game

“The irony is that the US is largely insulated from a global gas price shock because of its own domestic production,” James O'Brien of D.Trading told Bloomberg. The pressure “hits allies first and hardest”. Trump won't feel the domestic energy pain he would with, for instance, a gasoline spike.

One reason why the reaction of the oil market has been comparatively tame is that traders are “second-guessing” Trump, said Malcolm Moore in the FT. “The White House has a strong incentive to keep a lid on inflation” ahead of midterm elections in November. Historically, oil shocks have often preceded recessions. “But the world has changed.” Developed economies are “far less oil intensive” than in the 1970s, “and much less dependent” on the Middle East. The US is the world's largest producer – and now has command of Venezuelan reserves too. What happens to prices in the longer run is contingent on “the biggest unknown”, said The Economist: how long the war lasts. It could yet cause “the biggest oil shock in years”.

The US Supreme Court has finally stood up to President Trump, said David Frum in The Atlantic. Last week, it quite rightly struck down the tariffs that have been the signature initiative of his presidency. “A tariff is a tax.” A president who imposes them without Congress’s permission is “on his way to becoming a tyrant”.

‘Lashing out’

The move is “a long-run positive”, said Alan Beattie in the FT, but at the cost of short-term uncertainty all round. After the ruling, the US president behaved like “an enraged toddler lashing out after his favourite toy is taken away”, damning the Supreme Court justices and promising new tariffs.

The “smart play” after the legal defeat would be “to take an off-ramp”, said The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the White House “dusted off Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a work-around”, enabling Trump to impose tariffs of at least 10% across the board for up to 150 days (possibly rising to 15%). What happens after that is anyone’s guess, bar the prospect of an “unending Trump tariff mess”.

“Certain trading partners don’t look too clever right now,” said Beattie: principally the UK, whose 10% early deal with Trump may now be redundant. On the other hand, it was “an excellent day” for America’s most defiant partners, China and Brazil, whose imports to the US will now cost much less.

Endless litigation

The ruling certainly gives Beijing “a stronger hand” ahead of forthcoming high-stakes talks with Trump, said DealBook in The New York Times: “any decision that removes a tactical weapon from the Trump administration’s hand is welcome news in Beijing”. Potential refunds are another big issue.

Companies such as Costco, Toyota, Goodyear and Alcoa have already sought to reclaim levies; others will follow. Indeed, some economists reckon “a refund windfall” could kickstart “a huge economic stimulus”. Up to $175 billion is on the table, said Irwin Stelzer in The Sunday Times. But Trump is defiant – promising endless litigation for those claiming the tariffs back. The real winners in all this are lawyers.

Whether or not the refunds get paid, there are huge financial implications to this ruling, said Bloomberg. The US government’s fiscal calculations – already dubious – “have now been torn up”. Even the most “expansive” alternative measures are unlikely to bridge the $250 billion a year in expected tariff revenues. If Trump’s efforts to reimpose tariffs by other means are rejected by the Supreme Court – a clear possibility – who knows what he might do to intimidate the justices? In a worst-case scenario, Trump’s setback might become “a fiscal emergency (real, not imagined), an economic body blow and a constitutional crisis all in one”.

What happened

Netflix Thursday dropped its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, shortly after Warner’s board deemed a counteroffer from Paramount Skydance “superior.” That gave Netflix four business days to match Paramount’s $31-a-share offer. Instead, the streaming giant said the deal was “no longer financially attractive” at that price and walked away. “This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a statement.

Who said what

Netflix’s exit was a “stunning move that effectively puts Paramount in a position to take over its storied Hollywood rival,” plus HBO, CNN and other cable networks, The Associated Press said. The “prospect of such a combination,” notably putting both CNN and CBS under the control of Paramount’s David Ellison, “poses both antitrust concerns and questions of political influence.” Ellison and his father, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, are close with President Donald Trump, who has already demanded changes at CNN.

Netflix “has the cash to raise its offer” to match Paramount, a company “one-thirtieth” its size, said The New York Times. But Netflix shareholders have “questioned” the wisdom of spending so much on a “legacy movie business” that was “trading as low as $12 a share” in September. The Ellisons are paying and borrowing an irrational amount, a Netflix adviser told Reuters, and “there’s no point in playing chicken with someone who won’t turn the wheel.”

What next?

Paramount’s purchase must be approved by Warner’s board and shareholders and regulators in the U.S. and Europe. “Approval from federal regulators seems likely given the political environment,” TD Cowen analysts said in a note. But California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said on social media that the “two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny” in his state and “we intend to be vigorous in our review.”

President Donald Trump is not the sort of old-fashioned Republican who believes businesses should operate unfettered from government interference. Instead, he is now telling Netflix to fire a prominent board member who once worked for the Obama administration.

The streaming giant will “pay the consequences” if it does not fire Susan Rice from its board “immediately,” Trump said on Sunday. But Democrats will not “forgive and forget” companies that bend to Trump, said Rice, the former ambassador to the U.N. under former President Barack Obama, in a recent podcast. This earned Trump’s ire. Rice has “no talent or skills — purely a political hack!” he said on Truth Social.

The controversy comes as Netflix is trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in an $83 billion deal while fending off a rival bid from Trump-friendly Paramount Skydance. Trump does not have “direct authority to kill media deals,” said Axios, but his comments “could still have an impact on investors and regulators” who must approve the Netflix deal.

Netflix leaders are shrugging off Trump’s demands, said Politico. The bid for WBD “is a business deal. It’s not a political deal,” said CEO Ted Sarandos. That is not entirely true. The Justice Department is already “probing Netflix’s proposed takeover” for antitrust concerns, said Politico.

What did the commentators say?

Trumpism “closely resembles state-run capitalism,” said Steve Benen at MS Now. The president wants a say in “what private companies charge, their profit margins, the salaries of their executives” and even personnel matters. Trump in August called on Intel to fire its CEO, then followed up in September by urging Microsoft to fire an executive who worked in the Biden administration. His new threat against Netflix is not “posturing or hollow rhetoric.” If Trump wants to derail the company’s bid for WBD, he is “in a position to do so.”

The president is demanding Rice be fired “because she exercised her First Amendment right to criticize him,” Marc Elias said at Democracy Docket. Netflix “now has a choice” to make. The company can “stand behind a distinguished board member,” or it can “fire her at the despotic demand of the president.” Netflix should stand with Rice because firing her “would represent a form of institutional surrender with no bottom and no end.” The question now is whether “Netflix has the courage” to make the right choice and demonstrate that “not every pillar of civil society is too weak and too lacking in self-respect to face Trump’s threats with resolve.”

What next?

Warner Bros. Discovery has deemed a sweetened bid from Paramount Skydance to be superior to Netflix's offer, said The Associated Press. Netflix has four business days to counter, and regulators could still step in. Sarandos is working to prevent that. He will attend meetings at the White House next Thursday to discuss the WBD bid.

More work in less time with fewer workers — productivity gains are supposed to be one of the big benefits of artificial intelligence. But those promises have not yet come to fruition, according to a new survey of corporate executives around the world.

More than 80% of the 6,000 executives surveyed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) “detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity,” said The Register. It’s not for lack of trying: 69% of businesses say they use AI in the workplace, three-quarters “expect to use it over the next three years,” and more than 90% say it has “no impact on employment” at their businesses. The new survey is the latest addition to a “growing body of evidence” that AI’s advocates are “just not living up to their promises — at least not yet.”

The link between AI and productivity is “murky at best,” said Marketplace. That is because any productivity improvements are “going to be really hard to measure,” said Erika McEntarfer of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research to the outlet. There are other factors increasing business productivity at the moment, including new investments in research and the “loosening labor market,” said Marketplace. Figuring out AI’s impact will involve measuring “hundreds of millions of people, doing at least that many, if not more, discrete tasks every day,” said George Pearkes of Bespoke Investment Group.

What did the commentators say?

The NBER survey is “damning,” said Frank Landymore at Futurism. While most firms are using AI in some fashion, the “vast majority” say the technology “hasn’t budged the needle for them yet.” Other surveys have found that AI can “slow down rather than speed up human programmers” and ends up “accelerating burn-out” among human workers. There is precedent for this: The adoption of computers decades ago was “obviously transformative,” but they “didn’t immediately translate to economic gains.” This is why executives will keep “clinging to the hope that the tech’s promises will be borne out in the long run.”

Businesses are experiencing the “pause before the gale,” said James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute. There is a growing consensus that AI will gradually seep into the workplaces via office software in “useful, but hardly revolutionary” fashion. The firms that see productivity gains will be willing to “thoroughly rethink how work is organized.” When the promised benefits of AI finally arrive, “no one will doubt its existence and import.”

What next?

AI’s economic impact is “just beginning,” said Columbia Business School. But the gap between the promises and the measurable outputs is creating a “growing tension in public discourse.” Artificial intelligence already “feels transformative” in many users’ daily lives, but the “effects are not fully visible in traditional macroeconomic statistics.” What seems certain is that work will evolve as the technology changes. Workers have adapted to new technologies throughout history, said Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist. “I’m bullish on humans,” he said.

Ministers may delay plans to equalise the minimum wage for all ages, as promised in the Labour manifesto. Keir Starmer today insisted the government will stick to its pledge but he didn’t commit to a timeline for the change.

The government’s aim is to bridge the minimum-wage age gap, so that 18- to 20-year-olds are paid the same hourly rate as older people. But it’s facing strong pushback from business groups, who say this would make it too expensive to hire young people.

Rising youth unemployment has become an increasingly pressing issue: one in six 18- to 24-year-olds are without a job, the highest level in just over a decade, according to Office for National Statistics figures released yesterday. The national unemployment rate is 5.2%, higher than it’s been for five years.

What did the commentators say?

The government already announced an increase in the minimum wage for younger workers in last year’s Budget and there are fears that raising levels further would “result in businesses cutting the number of younger workers they employ”, said Oliver Wright in The Times.

“Labour has been its own worst enemy,” said the Financial Times’ editorial board. While global economic uncertainty, advances in AI and higher interest rates have all played a part in cooling the job market, “own goals” by the government, especially on national insurance contributions, are “adding insult to injury”. Britain’s latest jobs numbers, with “losses concentrated” in “sectors that disproportionately employ the young” look “grim” for a “party that prides itself on serving ‘working people’”.

Let’s not forget how AI is affecting the job market for young people, said City A.M.’s Saskia Koopman. “Hiring freezes” have now “overtaken mass layoffs”, making it difficult to get a foot on the employment ladder. If hiring – particularly in “AI-exposed areas” – continues to “stall”, the current “cyclical cooling could turn into something more persistent”.

It is particularly young men who are “bearing the brunt” of our “slumping job market”: “19% of men aged 16 to 24 are now unemployed, the highest rate since 2014”, said Tim Wallace in The Telegraph. For women of the same age, it's 13.1%. Hiring downturns, which always “fall hardest on the young”, also tend to affect the private sector, where men are more likely to work, more than the “female-dominated public sector”.

“The time has come for the brutal truth,” said Chloe Combi in The Independent. “Young people are being, and have been, failed.” Something has gone “profoundly wrong”, and it’s not young people’s fault: that lies “with the generations before them that created this no-hope landscape”. If changes aren’t made to give young people “a fighting chance”, they are in “serious danger” of being a lost generation.

What next?

In April, the minimum wage increases announced in the Budget will come into effect, raising the hourly rate for 18- to 20-year-olds from £10 to £10.85, and taking the National Living Wage for over-21s to £12.71.

Whether the government delays its promised age-band equalisation or not, it needs to act in other ways to help young people, said Combi in The Independent. We should be “pooling money into professional training and learning programmes”, which “would be an investment on so many levels”. Young people also desperately need a “sense of community” after the “catastrophic” Covid years: “affordable sports clubs” and “youth clubs” would help re-ignite “IRL socialising” and get the young “invested in the world around them”.

While Europe’s appetite for fast fashion shows no sign of waning, governments are going straight to the source: tackling the e-commerce giants themselves.

Last year, France tried to ban fast-fashion giant Shein in the country, after authorities found weapons and “childlike” sex dolls for sale on its e-commerce platform. A Paris court rejected the request but referred the matter to the European Commission.

Today, the bloc launched an investigation into the Chinese-founded company under its Digital Services Act (DSA). It will assess whether Shein’s safeguards are curbing the sale of illegal items, including content that constitutes “child sexual abuse material”. “In the EU, illegal products are prohibited – whether they are on a store shelf or on an online marketplace,” said EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen in a statement.

The Commission is also concerned about the “gamification” of the Singapore-based platform and its “addictive” design, a spokesperson told the BBC.

The ‘line in the sand’

Shein and e-commerce rivals such as Temu have made rapid inroads in Europe, but concern is growing over the environmental impact of fast fashion. In the EU, five million tonnes of clothing are “dumped” every year, said the European Parliament: 12kg per person.

Last year, the EU introduced “sweeping new rules” on textile waste, said the Financial Times. It passed on the cost of collecting, sorting and recycling textiles to companies. In a “direct swipe at the fast-fashion industry”, negotiators agreed that online retailers – including those based outside the EU but selling into the bloc – would be subject to the “same obligations” as bricks-and-mortar businesses.

The bloc is also using taxation to combat the economic threat. Until 2021, imports valued under €22 “arrived in Europe without paying VAT”, giving companies like Shein and Temu an “unfair advantage over local businesses”, said tax and finance law professor Albert Navarro García on The Conversation. Now, all non-EU imports are subject to VAT. The effects are “already being felt”, forcing international platforms to “modify their pricing”. Last year, France also became the first European country to “approve a tax on fast fashion”. Brands have to pay an extra €5 per item, which will increase to €10 in 2030.

France “continued its war on fast fashion” with amendments to a climate bill that would impose environmental penalties on retail giants, said Forbes. The bold move was both a “practical and symbolic line in the sand”. Fashion is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions. France, one of the world’s fashion capitals, showed it was “willing to legislate its worst excesses”.

A cultural and economic ‘affront’

France has been “going after” Shein for years, said Nicole Lipman in The Guardian. Authorities have investigated the company for human rights and environmental violations and fined it for “misleading discounts”. “The French fear Shein’s impact on the economy and labour markets, but also what the brand stands for: dirt-cheap clothing, at the expense of ethics.” Shein represents a cultural as well as economic “affront”.

However, in France Shein has become the fifth-largest clothing retailer by volume, according to the Institut Français de la Mode. In November, it opened its first bricks-and-mortar store in Paris, in the iconic department store BHV Marais. More than 100,000 citizens signed a petition opposing its presence, and many protested on opening day. Hours later, Shein was reported to French authorities for “sex dolls with a childlike appearance” listed on its third-party marketplace. The government suspended all Shein deliveries and moved to block the company.

Following “the uproar”, Shein said it “immediately removed the products and banned sex dolls from its site globally, regardless of appearance”, said Le Monde. But now, if the Commission reaches a so-called “non-compliance decision”, Shein may be forced to “alter its actions” further, said The Associated Press. Companies can also be fined up to 6% of their annual global revenue for DSA violations. That puts Shein “at risk of $2.2 billion [£1.6 billion] in penalties”, said The Verge.

“Protecting minors and reducing the risk of harmful content and behaviours are central to how we develop and operate our platform,” Shein said in a statement. “Following the issues identified last year, in addition to enhancement of detection tools, we also accelerated the rollout of additional safeguards around age-restricted products.”

Companies are exaggerating their AI capabilities to raise their value and, in turn, creating a host of problems for executives and employees alike. They are using this so-called AI washing to justify layoffs and avoid government scrutiny and public scorn.

What does AI washing look like?

AI washing can appear in several ways, most commonly through company claims that they are “integrating the newest technology” and are a “technological frontrunner,” even if they don’t actually have the technology to support this claim, said Fabian Stephany, a departmental research lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute, to The Guardian. Firms can also “showcase back-tested results where AI appears to outperform human analysts, while omitting real-world scenarios where the same models falter,” said the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA).

Another form of AI washing “involves the rebranding of traditional analytics as AI,” said the NYSBA. “Regression models, statistical analyses and even Excel-based automation tools are frequently repackaged under the AI banner.” This allows companies to “capitalize on AI’s market appeal without investing in the underlying technology.” A common denominator is the usage of AI advancement as a reason for layoffs.

Artificial intelligence was deemed responsible for almost 55,000 announced layoff plans in 2025 and since 2023, it has been cited in over 71,000 job cut announcements, according to an analysis by the research firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “A lot of companies are making a big mistake because their CEO, who isn’t very deep into the weeds of AI, is saying, ‘Well, let’s go ahead and lay off 20 to 30% of our employees and we will backfill them with AI,’” said JP Gownder, a vice-president and principal analyst for the research firm Forrester, to The Guardian. However, many of these companies “do not have mature, vetted AI applications ready to fill those roles,” said Forrester. As a result, “over half of layoffs attributed to AI will be quietly reversed as companies realize the operational challenges of replacing human talent prematurely.”

Why is it happening?

AI discussions are “full of wild exaggeration,” said Forbes. “People say the technology can do everything you’ve ever dreamed of. It can be used to dramatically change your business instantly. AI chatbots know everything.” That makes it a perfect scapegoat for laying people off. Using AI as a reason for layoffs “may be less controversial than other reasons — like bad company planning,” said The New York Times. CEOs could also be “blaming layoffs on AI advancements when they actually just overhired during the pandemic,” said The Guardian.

A big elephant in the room is that many businesses fear the Trump administration, making them wary of blaming layoffs on policies like tariffs. There has been a “real hesitance among some parts of corporate America to say anything negative about the economic impacts of the Trump administration because they feel that there will be consequences,” said Martha Gimbel, the executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale University, to The Guardian. “By saying that the layoffs are due to new efficiencies created by AI, you avoid that potential pushback.”

Elon Musk pulled off one of the most audacious deals of his career this week – merging his rocket company SpaceX, with his loss-making artificial intelligence startup xAI. Fittingly for the world’s richest man, said the FT, he has created “the most valuable private company in history”.

Musk’s supporters see the $1.25 trillion mega-merger as further evidence of his “genius”: the stated aim is to launch a constellation of data centres into space to tap the unlimited, free energy of the Sun, and settle the problem of how to fuel the AI revolution for good. Critics, however, view the move as the entrepreneur’s “latest example of financial engineering”.

Cash cow

The merger will precede an IPO in June, billed as “the largest flotation of all time” – the date is reportedly important to Musk “because of a rare alignment of planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury”. But the rapid timeline may have less to do with “celestial conjugations” than with Musk’s desire to beat rival AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic to market and gain first-mover advantage with investors.

Given the numerous engineering challenges, “it sounds like the stuff of science fiction”, said The Economist – and, for a while it may remain just that. It is unclear, for example, whether the hardware needed can survive being repeatedly exposed to cosmic rays. Then there is the matter of cost. Although SpaceX is able to launch things into space for far less than any competitor, it’s still not cheap. The commercial rationale for stitching the parts together, then, is shaky. A better reason might be financial. Musk’s xAI is “a cash incinerator”, reportedly burning through $1 billion a month and still weighed down by the remaining $12 billion of debt from Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter. SpaceX, which reportedly generated profits of $8 billion last year, might be a handy cash cow.

Shareholder sting

Last week, Musk’s carmaker, Tesla, declared it had also invested $2 billion in xAI, raising further questions about his commitment to the company. The suspicion, said Andrew Orlowski in The Daily Telegraph, is that Musk’s obsession with AI and robotics could see the carmaker “wither and die”. Some have speculated that it too could be folded into his new enterprise.

Plenty of people have bet against Musk before and lost. But for SpaceX’s minority shareholders, this all-share transaction must look less like a visionary attempt to “accelerate humanity’s future” and more like a sting carried out “with minimal scrutiny of valuation or a meaningful attempt to seek their views”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “Ad astra!” cries Musk. Shareholders could be forgiven for taking a rather “less stellar” view.

The value of the U.S. dollar has been steadily declining, but one person who doesn’t seem worried is President Donald Trump. On the contrary, he has been lauding the dollar’s fall as a positive change for the American economy. “I think it’s great,” Trump said to reporters last week. The president has repeatedly stated that a declining dollar is good for U.S. businesses. But with the dollar recently hitting a value of 95.56, a four-year low, some economists are sounding warning bells.

‘Interferes with his priorities’

Trump’s main argument is that having a weaker dollar breeds more competition among American businesses, and in his view, a “strong dollar, like higher interest rates, interferes with his priorities: faster growth, reshored manufacturing and a smaller trade deficit,” said The Wall Street Journal. This is an idea Trump has had since his first term. “I think our dollar is getting too strong,” and “that’s hurting — that will hurt ultimately,” Trump told the Journal in 2017.

A weaker dollar could provide “near-term benefits to the U.S. economy,” as a “lower currency also boosts exports, without the uncertainty and distortions that tariffs entail,” said the Journal. This occurs even as the weakening currency, combined with Trump’s sweeping tariffs, can “discourage imports.” Historically, Trump has also felt that the dollar “appreciated when the U.S. economy outperformed.”

Some seem to be fine with this economic stance, as trading floors are “abuzz with talk of the ‘debasement trade,’ a broad term for bets on the deterioration of American financial exceptionalism,” said The Economist. Another reason some economists aren’t panicking is that the dollar is “not actually all that weak,” as its real exchange rate (which accounts for inflation discrepancies between countries) was, in 2025, “13% above its average of the past 30 years.”

‘Signifies diminished confidence’

Trump may not have a problem with a weakened dollar, but most economists feel differently. A weak dollar is “not the weather, it’s the barometer,” said Steve Englander, a researcher at U.K. bank Standard Chartered, to CNBC. A weaker currency “reflects the fact that something’s going wrong, either domestically or internationally, and the currency weakness is sort of an escape valve.” Having a weak dollar also “signifies diminished confidence in the U.S. as foreign investors grow wary over the country’s fiscal outlook,” said CNBC.

Since the dollar has been doing well for a long time, many people might be “unable to process the scenario of a weakening dollar and a strong U.S. economy,” said Stephen Jen, founder of asset management group Eurizon SLJ Capital, to Bloomberg. If the dollar’s slide continues, it could mark the “beginning of the next leg lower in the dollar, and many may not be prepared for it.”

And the dollar’s fall has largely been Trump’s own doing, as it has been “driven, in part, by concerns about Trump’s unpredictable, and often unorthodox, approach to economic policy,” said NPR. Having a weaker dollar can also make items overseas more expensive, a “major issue given that the U.S. has traditionally imported more from abroad than it exports.” As the dollar continues to drop, alternative assets like gold, which has risen nearly 8% year to date, are “outperforming as a safe haven for investors,” said Fortune.

Located around Yokohama train station, there is an “especially unique watering hole”, specifically designed for customers who are contemplating quitting their jobs, said Japan Today.

At Tenshoku Sodan Bar, the bartenders are all trained counsellors, who offer impartial advice which you wouldn’t find from high-pressured friends and family, or unrelenting bosses who demand round-the-clock loyalty.

Though “job-hoppers” are still much less frequent in Japan than in Western countries, they are “on the rise”, said The Economist. The concept of a one-company-for-life worker – or “salaryman” – is “eroding”, as younger generations have “started to question this way of working”.

‘Resignation angst’

One “niche but increasingly popular” industry which helps workers break out from the “salaryman” cycle is “proxy quitters”, said The Washington Post. For a fee of up to ¥50,000 (£235), dissatisfied employees can hire someone to quit their job for them.

The service has boomed since the pandemic, with employees’ reasons including that they have been “bullied or harassed at work”, lack the nerve to confront their boss, or simply don’t know how to quit, as it is so rarely done. Nearly one in 10 Japanese companies have “received resignations via proxy quitters”, according to a 2024 survey by Tokyo Shoko Research.

This rise in proxy quitters has revealed a “darker side of Japan’s work culture” to the rest of the world, said CNA. Bosses often have “disproportionate power over employees”, which leads to the expectation of “long hours and unpaid overtime”. Workers are bound by the concept of “messhi hoko” – or “self-sacrifice for the public good” – which is “ingrained” in the Japanese working culture. The expectation to prioritise company needs over personal ones is often cited as one of the culprits for Japan’s declining birth rate. At its most extreme, it can “even be fatal”: the term “karoshi” refers to the phenomenon of “death by overwork”.

Proxy quitting services have emerged as a “direct answer” to these “intricacies of Japanese tradition and social conventions”, but their legality operates in a “grey area” and some employers argue they are “exceeding their authority”, said Leo Lewis in the FT. Even without legal challenges, however, the industry could peter out on its own. Predicated on “resignation angst” and a rigid workplace hierarchy, as office culture evolves, “demand will evaporate”.

Increased ‘leverage’

Evidence suggests that more and more people are defying traditional taboos and choosing to switch jobs, said The Japan Times. According to government data, around 940,000 people switched from one full-time employment to another in 2023, compared with 750,000 in 2018.

Changes in demographics are now working to young people’s favour, said The Washington Post. With a falling birth rate, “rapidly aging” population and “shrinking” workforce, employees wield considerably more leverage. Younger generations are less accepting of the excessively long days which are a “hallmark of Japanese corporate culture”. What was once the “revolutionary idea” of quitting for better terms is now a much more frequent possibility.

The numbers support this, said CNA. In the annual survey undertaken by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 26.4% of young employees said they would “change jobs if given the chance”, while 7.6% planned to be self-employed in future.

Younger workers are also now more likely to claim the benefits which their employers are legally obliged to provide, said The Economist. “The share of men taking paternity leave has jumped from 2% of those eligible a decade ago to 30% in 2023.” More labour fluidity has caused Japan’s rigid payment structures to loosen, with salaries catching up with the rest of the world due to workforce demands. Though employers may be bracing for the impact of an influx of young, empowered workers, it could also “inject dynamism into Japan’s ossified institutions”.

Fresh from his online mauling at the hands of Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, the world’s richest man can take some consolation. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is reportedly “lining up” four Wall Street banks to advise on “a record-breaking IPO”, and it could make the rocket group – already the world’s most valuable startup – the biggest flotation in history, valued as highly as $1.5 trillion, said the FT.

No final decision has been taken, but the float may come as soon as this year. SpaceX’s soaring valuation has been driven by its “cemented” status as the leading US developer of commercial rockets for space exploration – and its Starlink satellite service. Markets were already anticipating a feast of “US mega listings”, with two big beasts of generative AI – OpenAI and Anthropic – also plotting potential floats.

Still, don’t get too “starry-eyed”, said Katie Prescott in The Times. Both are growing at a rate of knots: OpenAI’s annualised revenues rose above $20 billion in 2025. But they’re spending billions more. Staying private would keep “a comfortable cloak of secrecy over their operations”, giving time “to unpick their devilishly complex corporate structures”.

Much of the secrecy around OpenAI has already been blown open by the “increasingly public legal beef” between CEO Sam Altman and Musk, said Bloomberg. Musk, who is suing OpenAI for $134 billion, accuses its management of violating original promises about its governance (he was an early investor) and he has been providing “a steady drip of juicy internal documents”. Altman counters that Musk wants to take OpenAI down to boost his own xAI business. Certainly, this suit “poses an existential threat to OpenAI”, said Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. “It could prove decisive in the battle for who prevails in the multitrillion-dollar race for AI dominance.”

When Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary ruled out installing SpaceX’s Starlink internet in the company’s planes – claiming the cost of installing the aerial antennas was unaffordable – he triggered a “bizarre feud”, said Peter Campbell in the FT. It culminated in a suggestion from Elon Musk that he might buy the Irish carrier, if only to fire its “utter idiot” chief executive.

The spat between two of the most provocative business leaders quickly went viral. While O’Leary dismissed X/Twitter as a “cesspit” and claimed Musk knew “zero” about planes, Musk retorted with a poll titled “Buy Ryanair and restore Ryan as their rightful ruler” (its founder Tony Ryan died in 2007).

The Ryanair chief argues the antennas would result in a “2% fuel drag”, said Julia Kollewe in The Guardian – adding $200-$250 million per year to the company’s $5 billion annual fuel bill, which he couldn’t recoup. While a buyout may look like “idle talk”, Musk “has followed through on such threats before” – as Twitter discovered in 2022.

Ryanair’s shares have barely budged, suggesting investors aren’t taking the idea seriously, said Peter Campbell. Raising Ryanair’s $35 billion market value would be a stretch even for Musk. He’d also have to take on Brussels. Under EU rules, airlines based in the bloc must be majority owned by European nationals.

President Donald Trump threatened a massive new trade war against Europe in his bid to acquire Greenland. And the financial markets immediately tanked. Then on Wednesday, he backed down.

Trump dropped his tariff threats after meeting with European leaders in Switzerland, said CNN. NATO leaders agreed to a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland, Trump said on Truth Social. “I think it puts everybody in a very good position,” he told reporters. But the preliminary agreement came the day after “bond yields spiked and stocks sank” as investors registered the alarm over Greenland and raised fears of a surge in “Sell America” trading, said Politico. Some observers saw an old pattern at play in the president’ s sudden backpedaling. Trump is “being mocked for another ‘TACO’ (‘Trump always chickens out’) moment,” said CNN, likely because he was “spooked by the result of his own actions.”

The Greenland adventure has investors newly wary, said the Financial Times. The president’s unpredictability is “chipping away at the credibility of U.S. institutions,” said Altaf Kassam at State Street Investment Management. Others are more willing to stick it out, confident in the long-term trajectory of the U.S. economy. “We have seen plenty of bluster from Trump before,” said Mark Dowding at RBC BlueBay Asset Management.

What did the commentators say?

The “Sell America” trade is “not as bad as it sounds,” said Madison Mills at Axios. Investors are not worried that the “American economy is crashing” because of Trump’s actions. Rather, they think they can “make more money abroad.” That is true because of profits, not global tensions: International stocks “outperformed the S&P 500 in 2025,” making them more lucrative to stockholders. But financial realities should keep investors attached to the United States. “There is no alternative to U.S. Treasury bonds in terms of liquidity, safety and scale.”

Investors are “struggling” to adjust to the “fundamental shifts in the world’s geopolitical tectonic plates,” said Jamie McGeever at Reuters. How can the markets price in the “end of NATO and the U.S.-Europe alliance” or the rise of a “multi-polar world” divvied up between the U.S., Russia and China? Financial markets had maintained “relative calm” in the face of all that instability. This week’s market sell-off, though, was a sign that the “calm is fracturing.”

What next?

Europe is quietly lining up its weapons for the next trade war, if it comes. The continent owns $8 trillion of U.S bonds and equities, making Europe the “world’s biggest lender to the U.S.,” said Fortune. If Trump is willing to disrupt longstanding alliances in pursuit of his aims, said Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos, it is “not clear why Europeans would be as willing to play this part.”

Wednesday’s news seemed to calm the markets, said CNBC. Tuesday’s “Sell America” trading “reversed on Wednesday,” with the Dow Jones Industrial Average surging nearly 600 points after Trump announced the Greenland deal.

The independence of the US Federal Reserve seems ever more at risk as Donald Trump continues to try to influence the central bank’s policies, and has even ordered a criminal investigation into its chair, Jerome Powell.

Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has repeatedly called for Powell to be replaced. He has also attempted to remove board member Lisa Cook, accusing her of mortgage fraud. Trump’s attacks on the Fed have widely been seen as an attempt to “force interest rate cuts out of the central bank, in defiance of its mandate and independence”, said Sky News.

Outside the US, too, there is growing (if more restrained) criticism of the idea of central bank independence. The long-accepted notion that a central bank, unsaddled by political turmoil, is the best vehicle for delivering economic results looks weaker in the face of continuing global instability, swelling deficits and high inflation.

Why is independence important?

The pro-independence argument is that politicians are likely to be “tempted by self-defeating monetary policies” in pursuit of short-term electoral goals, such as decreasing unemployment and “inflating away debts”, said The Economist. Monetary policies that “make everyone better off” in the long run are more attainable and more sustainable if they’re “delegated to a conservative central banker, perhaps even an price-obsessed ‘inflation nutter’”.

The principle that central banks should “enjoy some independence” is certainly not new. In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte said that the recently created Bank of France should “be sufficiently in the hands of the government”, but “not too much”. But it was really after the Second World War that the modern idea of central-bank independence emerged. In 1951, the “Treasury-Fed accord” gave the US Federal Reserve increased independence and, around the same time, Germany’s Bundesbank was given more autonomy, soon becoming “a model for the rest of the continent”.

Central banks have since been seen as a “triumph of applied economics”. As “independence rose, inflation fell” and “recessions became rarer”. But now this “triumph” is “under threat” in the US and elsewhere.

Why is that changing?

Recent surges in inflation have damaged public trust in central banks and sparked vocal criticism from politicians. The global financial crisis, a prolonged period of quantitative easing, and the “pressures of climate risk, geopolitical shocks and fiscal activism” are further raising the “fundamental” question of whether the “orthodox consensus” has “reached its limits”, said Chatham House.

Independence worked well when most politicians and experts “agreed on what central banks should do to stabilise the economy”, said UnHerd. But that consensus has “disappeared” and “independence without consensus is tyranny”.

Should we be worried?

Trump’s interference with monetary policy “could lead to financial panic and economic disaster” that would be felt around the world, said Bloomberg. A monetary policy dictated by “short-term political calculations” might lead to lower interest rates but would then spark higher inflation and, ultimately, “increase the cost of credit, discourage private investment and make public debt (which, in the US, is already rising unsustainably) harder to service”.

But Trump’s “damaging attacks on the Fed shouldn’t obscure its failures”, said Investors’ Chronicle. “Technocratic policymakers with limited democratic accountability shouldn’t be beyond censure.” The Fed’s recent “rate calls” have “contributed directly to house price and asset bubbles” and its “regulatory failures” in the past “helped lead to the subprime mortgage disaster” and the 2008 crash. Changes to how central banks operate are not “inherently a terrible idea”.

What happened

Lucasfilm on Thursday announced that Kathleen Kennedy, George Lucas’ handpicked successor, is stepping down as president after nearly 14 years and will be replaced by new co-presidents Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan. Filoni, a “Star Wars” veteran best known for his work on “The Mandalorian” and the animated series “The Clone Wars,” will remain chief creative officer.

Who said what

Kennedy “oversaw a highly lucrative but often contentious period in ‘Star Wars’ history that yielded a blockbuster trilogy and acclaimed streaming spinoffs” but “found increasing frustration from longtime fans,” The Associated Press said. “Her relationship with ‘Star Wars’ loyalists became a saga of its own.”

With its expensive productions and sometimes “toxic” fan base, “Lucasfilm is extraordinarily difficult to run,” The New York Times said. Kennedy “became a lightning rod,” especially when it came to “diversity in casting and storytelling,” but Filoni is “known for his strong standing among ‘Star Wars’ die-hards,” and with his elevation, “Disney is signaling that it believes the boutique studio is on the right path.”

What next?

The main tasks facing Feloni and Brennan “will be to find ways to keep ‘Star Wars’ fresh and relevant,” and in good standing with its “very vocal” fans, Variety said. They are taking over Lucasfilm “at a pivotal time, as ‘Star Wars’ is set to return to theatrical releases after years of false starts,” The Verge said. Kennedy is a producer of this year’s “The Mandalorian & Grogu” and next year’s “Star Wars: Starfighter,” a “high-stakes” movie “intended to evolve the franchise beyond the Skywalker saga,” the Times said.

“As anime rises in the box office ranks, Middle Eastern and American investors are circling the industry like sharks,” said The Telegraph.

With a sizeable Gen Z and Gen Alpha following, as well as booming merchandise opportunities, anime is an increasingly lucrative market for countries like Saudi Arabia, who are looking to invest in cultural soft power.

‘Strip-mining’ IP

Much of the interest in the industry stems from the Saudi Vision 2030 programme. Launched in 2016, the programme aims to build economic growth through means other than oil and establish the kingdom as a global leader in multiple sectors, including entertainment.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s sovereign wealth fund has “set aside $1 billion” to launch Arena SNK Studios, the main purpose of which is “strip-mining the worlds of anime and video games” for new intellectual property. Meanwhile, state-backed studio Manga Productions has gone from licensing to “co-producing original content” with “major Japanese partners”, said Variety.

Anime is particularly loved in Saudi Arabia, where it “has been a significant part of Saudi youth culture since the 1980s”, said Arab News. A report by digital media agency Dentsu MENAT in October found that around 30% of Saudi anime fans “watch content daily”. The agency’s CEO, Tarek Daouk, said that Vision 2030 was a chance to turn Saudi Arabia from a “consuming community” into one with the “opportunity to produce” anime of its own.

‘Cultural asset and soft power’

Despite the Crown Prince reportedly being a “keen fan of anime” himself, many are cynical of the Saudi programme, said The Telegraph. Critics point to two main objectives of the kingdom's investment in anime (“and ‘making great art’ is neither”): to “speed-diversify a national economy”, and to “win over all the international ‘feel-good industries’” in the hope that regime’s human rights abuses will be “politely forgotten”. “What the Saudis are doing now isn’t that different from what the US did exactly a century ago: win over the world by becoming its pop culture crucible”.

The numbers support anime’s value as a “cultural asset and soft power”, said The Diplomat. The industry reached a significant milestone in 2023, generating a “record-high” 3.3 trillion yen (£15.4 billion) in revenue, with “overseas revenue surpassing domestic revenue for the first time”. That explosion in global popularity means Japanese studios “need to take into account not only domestic but also overseas audiences”, as they “face challenges from both domestic and international competitors”.

Japan, however, is welcoming investment from the Middle East, said The Japan Times. Specifically “mentioning the popularity of Japanese manga and anime”, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told a Saudi Arabia-led international financial conference in December that she was “accelerating efforts to promote supply chain cooperation between Japanese and Saudi enterprises”. Takaichi then quoted a famous line from the manga series “Attack on Titan”: “Just shut your mouths. Invest everything in me!”

Putting your money where your mouth is has never been easier, as it’s now possible to gamble on basically anything, including election outcomes. However, many experts worry that gamifying politics could compromise the political system’s integrity and manipulate how issues and candidates are represented in the media.

What are prediction markets?

Prediction markets are like the stock market, but “instead of buying shares in companies, you buy shares in the outcomes of real-world events,” said Vox. The top prediction market apps today are Kalshi and Polymarket, and they “allow you to stake money on everything from the outcomes of elections and wars to the weather in your city tomorrow to who will win the Grammy for Album of the Year.” The apps essentially “transform any future scenario, regardless of how glib or disturbing, into a profitable wager,” said NPR.

Under the Biden administration, there was an “aggressive clampdown” on these prediction market apps to the point that Polymarket was “forced to cease its U.S. operations in 2022, and its chief executive had his home raided by the FBI last year,” said NPR. However, the prediction market is once again “taking flight with the full blessing” of the current White House.” The industry skyrocketed in 2025 and brought in $10 billion combined in bets on Kalshi and Polymarket in November.

The prediction market really took off once the federal ban on sports betting was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2018. Now, the gambling industry is “ingrained in U.S. sports culture with leagues, franchises, players and networks now partnering with betting organizations,” like the sportsbooks DraftKings and FanDuel, said CNN. Betting on professional and college sports also accounts for most of the bets placed on Kalshi.

On the flip side, DraftKings and FanDuel have both announced plans to launch their own prediction market services. “Sports have been a big driver thus far. We think sports are kind of a gateway,” said Devin Ryan, the director of financial-technology research at Citizens, to MarketWatch. “This will be about much more than just sports.”

How will they affect politics?

The biggest concern is the increasing influence of gambling on politics. President Donald Trump dropped the Biden administration campaign to outlaw betting on elections, and Kalshi and Polymarket have added Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser.

In 2024, a win in court against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission allowed Kalshi to “offer event contracts that allowed its users to wager money on the U.S. election,” said MarketWatch. “You have a vision in recent elections of a completely different type of engagement in politics,” said John Herrman, a tech columnist at New York Magazine, to Vox. “You have people who have basically removed themselves from the democratic process to engage instead in a market process — it turns everyone into a speculator rather than a voter.”

Also, just as you can no longer watch sports without ads from various sportsbooks, CNN and CNBC have both “announced partnerships with Kalshi that will incorporate the app’s voting markets on things like elections into the networks’ news coverage,” said NPR. Other networks could soon follow suit. “Entanglements with prediction markets might create other problems for journalists,” said The New Yorker. “Considering how significantly news coverage shapes betting odds, there’s ample opportunity for insider trading.”

Bets placed on certain candidates or issues might bring more interest or popularity and thus skew coverage or voter behavior. On top of that, gambling addiction is likely to become more prevalent. “We should probably prepare for a world where, much in the way that sports have become nearly impossible to follow or talk about without talking in this meta way about odds, betting outcomes, etc.,” said Herrman, “politics will start to feel like that.”

India’s “quick commerce” bubble may be about to burst, said the CEO of Blinkit, an app that promises delivery of orders within 10 minutes.

Albinder Dhindsa issued the warning as some competitors in the market are running on losses. He believes his company will thrive, but there has been unrest, and Blinkit's riders took industrial action over pay and working conditions earlier in the year. The strike is just part of a wider crisis developing in India’s growing gig economy, where “speed trumps safety and workers are easily replaced”, said The Independent.

“The pendulum has already swung once from scepticism to exuberance,” Dhindsa told Bloomberg and believes he does not know when “correction” will come, but only that it will.

Dark stores

Blinkit allows customers to order groceries, fresh produce and daily essentials, which they expect to be delivered in around 10 minutes. To achieve this speedy turnaround, the platform relies on a network of “dark stores” – retail spaces that act as dedicated hubs for fulfilling online orders, rather than in-person shopping.

It forms part of India’s rapidly growing quick commerce sector, funded by investors attracted by the country’s “dense cities, lower cost of labour and ubiquitous digital payments”, said Bloomberg.

The company launched in 2013 as Grofers, but rebranded in 2021 as Blinkit, invoking the idea that service will happen “in the blink of an eye”. Acquired by the country's food delivery giant Zomato in 2022, it’s now active in many cities across India, delivering “everything from eggs to iPhones” to a client base of millions.

But, it has yet to turn a profit, hampered by “capital costs and supply chain complexity” as it pursues further expansion, including into rural areas.

Straightforward demands

Earlier this year, more than 150 Blinkit workers in the city of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, went on a two-day strike to protest “unsafe working conditions, falling earnings, and retaliatory ID suspensions” (when gig platforms deactivate workers' accounts without due process or a means of redress), said The Independent.

The striking riders had “straightforward demands”, including “weather-appropriate uniforms and shaded waiting areas” alongside an end to a “punishing rule that effectively forces them to work the hottest hours of the day”.

They also want the company to “restore the original incentive pay structure”. They are paid on a per-order basis, with “fluctuating incentives”, with terms having “ been quietly changed over time”. Riders claim that they used to receive Rs 555 (£4.93) per 32 orders delivered, but now earn just Rs 448 (£3.98) per 43, which means they are “doing more work for less”.

In November, the Indian government introduced new labour laws so that the fleet of self-employed workers will now receive social security, but they still have no right to a fixed wage or paid leave.

The April strike was a “flashpoint” but not the last in what is becoming a “growing struggle” between “speed-driven platforms” and the workers holding up a gig economy that’s forecast to employ over 23 million Indians by 2029.

Americans may find themselves paying more for a bourbon neat these days. U.S. whiskey distillers throughout the liquor industry are facing financial hardship lately, and economic experts are pointing to the Trump administration’s tariffs as a major cause. This includes Jim Beam, whose troubles have led to a drastic step: closing its distillery.

What brands are being impacted?

The economic slump has affected several iconic American brands. This includes Jack Daniel’s, Old Forester and Woodford Reserve, which are all owned by parent company Brown-Forman. The company previously announced it was “laying off about 650 employees, or 12% of its workforce, in the face of declining demand,” said The New York Times. Several other whiskey brands, including Garrard County Distilling Co. in Kentucky and Uncle Nearest in Tennessee, have been placed into receivership in 2025.

But Jim Beam has taken perhaps the most extreme move by announcing it would halt production at the plant’s main distillery in Clermont, Kentucky, for an entire year. The brand will “pause distillation at our main distillery on the James B. Beam campus for 2026 while we take the opportunity to invest in site enhancements,” the company said in a statement. This marks a significant step for the country’s largest bourbon manufacturer, given that this distillery “produces about a third of the company’s annual output of approximately 26.5 million gallons,” said the Times.

How are tariffs causing these issues?

The ongoing challenges “straining the liquor industry” are “part of the fallout of Trump’s trade war,” said CBC News. These tariffs (and subsequent counter-tariffs from countries like Canada) led to a trade deficit as “overall exports of American spirits fell 9% in the second quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year.” Boycotts of American alcohol brands have also contributed to this decline.

However, there are other factors afoot beyond tariffs; the statement put out by Jim Beam did not even mention tariffs. Another culprit is the skyrocketing supply of aging barrels. Kentucky has an “all-time high of 16.1 million aging barrels of bourbon in its warehouses,” said the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. Because these barrels are taxed by the state, Kentucky distillers paid a “$75 million tab in aging barrel taxes this year, a 27% increase from 2024 and an astronomical 163% increase over the last five years alone.”

Overall demand for whiskey and bourbon has decreased, which has now “caused an oversupply of whiskey,” said Bloomberg. Sales have slumped as “consumers rein in spending and drinking” during downward economic times. And much of the available product can’t even be sold right now — most of the 16.1 million barrels of bourbon currently being aged “won’t be ready to bottle until after 2030.”

Despite these other factors, Kentucky politicians seem to place the blame on the Trump administration’s shoulders. It is “hard to overstate just how devastating Trump’s tariffs are for America’s signature spirit,” said Rep. Morgan McGarvey (D-Ky.) in a post on X, referring to the Jim Beam closure. “Thousands of Kentuckians power the bourbon industry — we will all feel the impact of this.”

SiriusXM’s subscriber base has been shrinking over the past few years, but the satellite radio corporation thinks it has found a solution: Howard Stern. The self-described King of All Media has been one of the company’s mainstays since his show joined SiriusXM in 2006. The brand is hoping that a new three-year deal Stern signed on Dec. 16 can keep new listeners tuning in.

What is the situation at SiriusXM?

In the third quarter of 2025, SiriusXM had 33 million subscribers nationwide, the company said in its earnings report. But this is “some 100,000 fewer than the year before,” according to The Associated Press. SiriusXM’s self-pay net subscribers — those who pay directly for the satellite subscription — also fell by 40,000 in the third quarter.

These figures show that it has been a challenging year for SiriusXM, which started 2025 by losing 303,000 self-pay subscribers in the first quarter. But not all was gloom for SiriusXM, as it also “reported third-quarter revenue of $2.16 billion, above analyst expectations but down 1% from the prior-year period,” said The Hollywood Reporter. This period additionally saw SiriusXM take in a “net income of $297 million, after reporting a net loss of $2.96 billion a year ago.”

How could Stern’s new contract help?

Stern announced that he re-upped his contract for three years, keeping him on the SiriusXM airwaves through 2028. “I’m happy to announce that I’ve figured out a way to have it all: more free time and continuing to be on the radio,” Stern said in a statement. Stern had previously pranked listeners by announcing his retirement, causing some to wonder if the 71-year-old would finally leave the airwaves.

Stern will be “continuing his radio reign despite commanding an audience that is far smaller than what he drew during his heyday,” said MarketWatch. Since Stern’s last contract, SiriusXM, and satellite radio in general, have seen a “slow but steady erosion of its subscriber base as listeners have switched to streaming-music platforms” like Spotify.

And while Stern’s listenership has been decreasing along with SiriusXM as a whole, he still commands a large chunk of the company’s platform: Stern’s show currently has a “mid-single-digit percentage of what he drew at his peak, which would put it somewhere around 1 million listeners per broadcast,” said MarketWatch, making him a valuable commodity. A 2020 report from Credit Suisse estimated that 15% of SiriusXM listeners would cancel their subscription if Stern ended his show, which at the time represented a “potential subscriber loss of 2.7 million.”

This all comes as competition for SiriusXM increases. Many audio companies have begun a television ad push as the businesses “seek new audiences and ad dollars and more creators embrace video,” said Axios. Two of the biggest players in the industry, Spotify and iHeartMedia, recently “signed deals to distribute some of their podcasts on Netflix.” But SiriusXM also still has other big properties under contract, including Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast and the SmartLess podcast hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes.

“Father Christmas is more likely to arrive by delivery van than sleigh and reindeer these days,” said The Times. But with our increasing shift to online shopping comes one “not-so-Christmassy treat”: “falling prey” to the “porch pirates”, who swipe parcels from doorsteps.

How big is the problem?

Parcels worth a total of £666.5 million were stolen across the UK last year – up 77% from 2024, according to data obtained from UK police forces by tech company Quadient. Nearly five million households suffered at least one parcel theft – and that’s only counting those that were reported to the police.

Delayed and missing parcels are “not a new phenomenon but their impact is felt more acutely during the festive season”, said This is Money. December is the peak month for thefts, with November coming in a close second.

What are your legal rights?

Under UK law, it is the responsibility of the seller, not the courier nor the customer, to ensure the safe delivery of an item. As a result, the seller is legally bound to provide a replacement or refund of the contents of a parcel that is lost or stolen before the customer takes physical possession of it.

This may seem clear-cut but “things get a little more complex” if you have selected a specific “safe place” for the delivery to be left in, said The Independent. By nominating a neighbour to take charge of a package, or permitting the courier to tuck items away behind bins or a garden wall, you are “essentially accepting the risk of any potential loss”. Of course, this doesn’t apply if the parcel was left somewhere other than your safe place (chucked behind your bin, for example).

If you do opt to specify a safe place – or ever have in the past – do carefully check your instructions before buying, and be aware that, if you use the same seller again, those safe place instructions can easily be carried over from previous orders.

What to do if your parcel is stolen?

Your first move should be to contact the seller to arrange a replacement or refund, citing Section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act. If you made the purchase with a debit card, you can ask for a “chargeback” from your bank, said The Times. This means that the bank “steps into your shoes” and raises a dispute with the seller on your behalf.

Purchases made with a credit card have more extensive protections: for any purchase over £100 and under £30,000, the credit card company is “jointly liable with the retailer and will refund you the full amount if your items do not arrive”.

What can be done to protect parcels?

A prominently displayed video camera doorbell is a popular way to deter porch pirates, said The Guardian. Some people have gone further, though, and taken “justice into their own hands”, leaving out decoy parcels, filled with “anything from dirty nappies to glitter explosions” and uploading the doorcam footage to social media.

Big brands could do more to “anonymise” their parcels, removing branding and making them “less attractive”, Quadient executive Gary Winter told the paper. The could also exert pressure on couriers to “try knocking the door a bit harder and waiting a few seconds” and to make sure parcels are not left “visible from the road”. But it goes without saying that delivery drivers are “under massive pressure to deliver such high volumes, particularly at this time of year”.

There’s money to be made in the business of extending lifespans, and this so-called longevity economy has become a flourishing part of the financial system. While humans have always looked for ways to live longer, recent health advancements alongside shifting demographics mean people are investing in the longevity economy like never before.

How much money is in the longevity economy?

Trillions of dollars are flowing into this economy. In 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was surging, the longevity sector was valued at $15 trillion globally, according to market research from Data Bridge. It has been growing at a steady rate every year and is expected to have a value of $27 trillion by 2030, and some analyses have the longevity economy possibly reaching this mark by 2026.

This is due to several factors, most notably a shift “toward health span — the years we spend in peak physical and mental condition,” said Entrepreneur. Customer demand also plays a large role, as by 2034 the “U.S. will have more people over 65 than 18,” and one in six people globally will be over 60 by 2030. This is “not just demographics — that’s a new consumer majority.” Increasing health care costs also factor into the money being pumped into the economy, as “chronic diseases and mental health conditions already account for 90% of U.S. health care spending.”

What other factors make up the longevity economy?

There may be more to the longevity economy than many people realize. As “elders live longer and healthier lives and continue to actively participate in the global economy, possibilities open to potentially turn longevity into an asset for society,” said BBC News. In the U.S., it is estimated that by 2030, people over 55 “will have accounted for half of all domestic consumer spending growth since the global financial crisis.” In Japan, this figure will be 67%; in Germany, it will be 86%.

Demographics also play a large role. For the first time in history, the longevity economy “includes four generations of age 50 and older: the GI Generation (1901-1926); the Silent Generation (1927-1945); the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and Generation X (1965-1980),” said the Los Angeles Daily News. But even though “populations may be aging in significant numbers, we can’t let the idea of ‘oldness’ and its implications stifle the way we think about economic opportunity,” Dr. Joseph Coughlin, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, said to BBC News.

Even though “millennial demands are linked to the rise of the on-demand economy, older adults benefit immensely from its convenience,” Coughlin told BBC News. This has resulted in a slew of products and services surrounding the longevity economy. Most notable are tech entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson, who is at the “forefront of the movement looking for new ways to reverse aging and extend health span, and live to age 150,” said Fortune. Also emerging is the invention of technologies like wearable aging clocks and more devices designed to keep you younger longer.

President Donald Trump’s tariff-driven trade war is not slowing down China’s export economy. Beijing this week reported a record $1 trillion trade surplus with the rest of the world in 2025, raising concerns about “growing imbalances” in the global economy.

The trillion-dollar milestone puts China’s well-known “dominance” of world trade “into even starker relief,” said The Wall Street Journal. While Trump’s tariffs have limited the country’s exports to the United States this year — plunging nearly a third in November compared to last year — China’s exports to Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America have “surged” significantly. The trend has “raised alarms around the world, especially in Europe,” whose automotive and luxury goods sectors find themselves threatened by “nimble Chinese competitors.”

That leaves Europe “squeezed between an ultra-competitive China and a protectionist America,” said Politico. China’s trade surplus “is untenable,” said French President Emmanuel Macron to the Les Echos financial newspaper. European companies were once big investors in China, he said, and now it is time for Chinese businesses to “create value and opportunities for Europe.” Europe could impose Trump-style tariffs on imports, Politico said, but Macron would prefer a “truce” with Beijing.

What did the commentators say?

China’s gigantic trade surplus reveals the difficulty that Trump and others will have “trying to rebalance global trade,” said Amy Hawkins at The Guardian. But it also demonstrates how much Beijing’s economic might is “still overwhelmingly reliant on foreign markets.” And it has raised fears that the country is now flooding non-American markets with “cheap goods that threaten local industry.” It is more likely, though, that those goods will “ultimately end up in the U.S.” after traveling through third countries to avoid Trump’s tariffs.

We could be looking at a “second China shock,” said Alexandra Stevenson at The New York Times. The first shock came two decades ago when American and European companies outsourced manufacturing to China while closing factories at home. The second will come now that China is “redirecting more of its exports to developing countries” that have “less control over how it unfolds.” And there could be “profound” social consequences like unemployment and unrest in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. “They’re going to need to brace for impact.”

What next?

The next developments may depend on whether the current trade “truce” between the U.S. and China can hold. Some observers believe the relative peace “may not last,” said CNBC. That failure — and a second effort by China to push its exports to other markets — “might compel Europe to impose more restrictive measures to protect its manufacturing sector,” said Jing Wang, a China economist at Nomura, to the outlet.

China’s economy will increasingly “ride on the strength of domestic demand,” said Bloomberg. For now, though, Beijing “faces a worsening economic picture” at home. There has been a slowdown in domestic consumption and investment is also falling. As a result, analysts believe that China will continue to rely on exports and take “only incremental steps” toward relying on its own people to be customers for the goods it makes.

Investors are cooling on Ben & Jerry’s as the founders continue to be caught up in a spat with the ice cream brand’s owners.

The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which owns Ben & Jerry’s as well as Cornetto and Wall’s, completed a spin-off from parent firm Unilever this week and began trading on the European stock market as a standalone business, but its initial valuation was “significantly lower” than expected, said The Times.

Unilever, and now Magnum, have been embroiled in a “war of words” with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Ben & Jerry’s. The pair have accused both companies of silencing the brand’s “social mission”, after they were told by Magnum boss Peter ter Kulve that they should “hand over to a new generation”.

‘Tug of war’ over activism

The “long-running legal spat” is about the “powers to define” Ben & Jerry’s direction, said Madeleine Speed in the Financial Times. Since the company was acquired by Unilever in 2000 for $326 million (£246 million), Cohen and Greenfield have become “increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with the direction of the brand”.

It has been an ever-present “tug of war”, said Sky News. Currently, Magnum is trying to remove the chair of Ben & Jerry’s independent board, stating that "internal investigations” reveal she “no longer meets the criteria”.

There were also fears that Ben & Jerry’s pro-Gaza activism would derail the spin-off from Unilever, said The Telegraph. Back in 2021, “tensions flared” as the ice cream brand announced it would halt sales in “occupied Palestinian territory”, followed by legal action from Ben & Jerry’s when Unilever “sold distribution rights in Israel and the West Bank to a local licensee”. Last November, Ben & Jerry’s claimed that Unilever had “tried to silence” its social mission by “blocking statements on the conflict in the Middle East”. In a prospectus for investors seen by The Telegraph, Unilever admitted that the political views of Ben & Jerry’s founders could “adversely impact the Group’s reputation, business, financial condition, and results of operations”.

Corporate activism is ‘melting’

When Unilever bought the brand in 2000, Cohen and Greenfield said the company “not only understood their social-mindedness but guaranteed that it could continue without interference”. However, the Trump administration’s “anti-diversity, America-first mindset” is at odds with the “feel-good, save-the-world, ‘kumbaya’ philosophy” that has long fuelled Ben & Jerry’s marketing, said Monocle. Corporate activism, particularly on the left, is “melting”.

Greenfield quit Ben & Jerry’s in September, after more than 50 years. Cohen is still involved and still “in the middle of a bitter feud”, said The Times. He “shows no sign of shrinking away” and will “continue to speak out”. At upcoming conferences, he will “take Unilever and Magnum to task”.

As for Unilever, it “believes it has acted reasonably”. It said it would have allowed Ben & Jerry’s calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, if the brand had “also condemned Hamas terrorism and called for the release of hostages”. It is “to be fair”, hardly “the only big company that shies away from antagonising the White House”.

Labour has been accused of breaking another manifesto pledge after a last-minute U-turn watering down a key protection in its flagship Employment Rights Bill.

Changes to the proposed legislation included the government ditching plans to give workers the right to claim unfair dismissal from day one of a new job. The decision has been described as a “complete betrayal” by one Labour MP and leaves the bill as a “shell of its former self”, according to Unite general secretary Sharon Graham. But it is hoped the compromise will be enough to win over sceptical peers in the House of Lords and get the bill passed into law by next April.

What protections does the bill offer now?

Protection against unfair dismissal, which currently only comes into effect after two years in a job, will now kick in after six months – in line with most European countries. A compensation cap on successful unfair dismissal claims imposed by the Tories will also be lifted.

Other rights, such as the right to claim sick pay and paternity leave, and to apply for flexible working, will be enshrined from day one, and zero-hours contracts will be banned. The threshold for calling a strike will also be lowered, with a union requiring only a simple majority of members who voted rather than at least 40% of those eligible to vote as the current law dictates.

The enforcement of employment rights will be overseen by a new Fair Work Agency, which will have the right to inspect workplaces, issue fines and bring legal action on behalf of employees.

What has the reaction been?

The TUC’s general secretary Paul Nowak said the bill is “essential to better quality, more secure jobs for millions of workers across the economy”. But opposition politicians and business leaders have warned the new provisions are likely to have the opposite effect.

With unemployment already at a near five-year high, “employers have stopped hiring, in part because a rising living wage and steep rises in their national insurance charges have made it too expensive, but also because the looming legislation makes it too risky”, said Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph.

“The measures could cost firms £5 billion a year and risk being passed on to staff through smaller pay rises and hidden taxes which reduce wages over time,” said The Sun.

“No company can plan, invest or hire with this level of uncertainty hanging over them,” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said. Even the tweaked legislation is still “terrible for economic growth” – a key mission of the Labour government.

What happens next?

Despite anger in some parts of the party over the changes, the focus among Labour MPs is “keeping the rest of the package intact”, particularly the end of zero-hours contracts, said The New Statesman.

Former deputy leader Angela Rayner, who led the passage of the bill through Parliament before she was forced to resign, reportedly plans to lay an amendment tomorrow to speed up the bill so it can be implemented as early as next year.

Several Labour MPs told The Guardian that they “fear that the climbdown by the government will embolden peers and critics of the bill to push for further changes”. “This can’t be the thin of the wedge and we won’t let it be,” said one.

Meta is in talks to shift part of its AI infrastructure to Google-made chips, instead of ones made by Nvidia, in a deal worth billions of dollars that could permanently upend the world of tech.

This has been a “rocky couple of weeks” for Nvidia, said Brent D. Griffiths in Business Insider. Following reports of the Meta deal, Nvidia was trading down by more than 3%, and “lingering doubts” about the company surrounding the AI bubble are beginning to “creep back in”.

What did the commentators say?

Nvidia customers have been crying out for “more competition” in the chip market, and one “may have been hiding in plain sight”, said Dina Bass in Bloomberg. Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) were first released 10 years ago, and are ideally suited to generating responses to ChatGPT or Claude, said the outlet. They are “less adaptable” and “more specialised” than Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), but crucially they offer a “less power-hungry” system at a lower cost. Google’s advancements “underscore how major AI names are embracing TPUs as they race to add computing power to cope with runaway demand”.

Google has “pierced Nvidia’s aura of invulnerability”, said The Economist. Until now Nvidia has seemed “unassailable”, as investors bid shares “into the stratosphere” to cement its market dominance. With this move, Google has shifted from one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, to its “fiercest competitor yet”. Though the technology is still catching up to the market-leader, Google’s chips cost between “a half and a tenth” as much as the Nvidia equivalent. That being said, while Nvidia “no longer looks as invulnerable as it once did”, its strength of product, and position in the market, “should not be underestimated”.

Nvidia must be “spooked” by the Google announcements if it is posting online to “defend itself”, said Eva Roytburg in Fortune. Nvidia asserted that it is a “generation ahead of the industry” and “the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done”, on X. “It’s not hard to read between the lines,” said Fortune: Nvidia wants investors and customers to know that “it still sees itself as unstoppable”.

This may represent one of the “biggest threats” to Nvidia’s market dominance, but there is a long way to go until a “potential crack” materialises, said The Wall Street Journal. To challenge Nvidia, Google must start “selling the chips more widely to external customers”, which is not an easy feat.

What next?

The deal between Meta and Google could be worth “billions of dollars”, though this is not a fait accompli, as ongoing talks “may not result in one”, said The Wall Street Journal. Both Google and Nvidia are “courting potential customers”, offering “financing arrangements” to make the rollout of their chips a more attractive prospect. It is “still up in the air” how Meta would use these chips, either to train AI models or generate responses to queries via inference (which requires a lot less computational power than training).

“No one, including Google, is currently looking to replace Nvidia GPUs entirely”, said Bloomberg. The pace of AI development doesn’t allow it. There is a gap in the market for Google’s products, as companies look to “temper” the “dependence” on Nvidia to mitigate shortages, but ultimately, Nvidia’s GPUs are “better suited to handle a wider range of workloads” and more adaptable to wholescale change. The “best hope” for Google’s TPUs is that they form a part of the “basket of products required to power the growth of AI”.

After months of speculation, Rachel Reeves has finally delivered her long-awaited Budget but not before she was upstaged by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) releasing their growth forecast two hours early by accident.

The “extraordinary” error, said the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam, meant “all the policies and all the market critical fiscal numbers” were released before Reeves had said anything in the House of Commons.

With the chancellor already facing criticism for her handling of the lead-up to the Budget, the OBR leak “robbed her of the chance to set the tone and the credibility to be heard”, said Times Radio’s Kate McCann on X. “While not her mistake it may not matter in the minds of many.”

Reeves for her part admonished the OBR for the leak, before telling the Commons: “I will not return Britain back to austerity, nor will I lose control of public spending with reckless borrowing. And I will push ahead with the biggest drive for growth in a generation.”

The need to maintain her strict fiscal rules, keep her spending commitments and not break Labour’s tax pledges left Reeves relying on a “smorgasbord” of revenue-raisers that she hopes will be enough to keep Labour MPs, the markets and voters onside.

Here are five key changes the chancellor set out today:

Freeze to income tax thresholds

Having backed down from a manifesto-busting rise to income tax, Reeves’ “biggest money-raiser” will be extending the freeze on tax thresholds for another two years until 2030, said The Times. Maintaining the basic-rate threshold of £12,570 and the higher-rate threshold of £50,270, will hit millions of workers and pensioners through “fiscal drag”, said the paper.

It is nevertheless a “stealthy but valuable move” that will raise around £8 billion, said George Eaton in The New Statesman.

Increase in minimum wage

From April the minimum wage will rise for over-21s by 50p to £12.71 an hour. Workers aged 18-20 will receive a bigger 85p increase to £10.85, while under-18s and apprentices will now get £8 an hour.

This should be “one of the easier-to-sell retail offerings to the public, along with easing energy bills and freezing prescription costs and rail fares”, said Politico’s London Playbook, but it has garnered criticism from “unlikely quarters”. Businesses big and small were “always going to be concerned about the chunky hike (particularly for the under-21s)”, but so too is the left-wing Resolution Foundation think tank, which has warned it risks “causing more harm than good” if it suppresses youth employment.

Mansion tax

A new property tax will be imposed on homes worth more than £2 million through a revaluation of council tax bands F, G and H. This so-called “mansion tax” could see those with the most expensive properties in the UK face council tax bills of more than £6,000 a year, said The Times, and “if implemented, would mark a radical departure from the way we buy and sell homes – and have a lasting impact on the wider economy”.

The changes will, however, prove popular with large sections of the public as well as Labour MPs, with one minister telling The New Statesman: “Everybody knows it doesn’t make sense that a terraced house in the north of England pays more council tax than a mansion in central London”.

Limit salary sacrifice and tax-free ISA schemes

There will be a reduction in the amount that can be saved in tax-free cash ISAs for the under 65s from £20,000 to £12,000 “in a bid to get households investing more in UK stocks”, said Bloomberg. A £2,000 annual cap will also be introduced on the amount workers can put into their pensions under “salary sacrifice” schemes without paying national insurance. At the moment there is no limit and the change “would mean any contributions above the cap would be subject to NI payments by both employees and employers”, said the BBC. The move is set to raise a “whopping £4.7 billion”, said Sky News’ Sophy Ridge, “which shows how many people will be impacted by this”.

Combined with the two-year freeze in income tax thresholds, the tax raid on pension contributions will leave a “middle-class family with two earners facing a £1,600 hit” over two tax years, said The Times.

Scrapping the two-child benefit cap

Introduced by the Conservatives in April 2017, the controversial cap prevents parents from claiming universal credit or tax credit for more than two children. Campaigners estimate it pulls 109 children into poverty each day and now affects 1.6 million children across the UK.

There had been some debate within government about whether to tweak the limit or introduce a taper rate but scrapping it altogether “will be hugely welcomed by Labour MPs across the spectrum, and will give them a much-welcomed win to tout to activists wavering further leftward”, said London Playbook. Whether the £3 billion move will be “popular with the public is less clear” as the majority of voters support the cap but also expect Labour to bring down child poverty. Either way, “don’t expect this to go quietly”.

Crypto is supposedly the currency of the future, but it is not doing so well presently. The sector has lost more than $1 trillion in value over the last few weeks.

The crypto industry is having a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month,” said USA Today. Bitcoin has lost more than 10% of its value for the year, dropping from a high of $126,000 in October to under $90,000 last week. The drop in digital currency values is due to a “whirlwind of factors” that include shaky showings for artificial intelligence and technology stocks amid growing concerns about the overall economy. “No one can say” when the dust might settle.

“It was supposed to be crypto’s year,” said The Wall Street Journal. Since 2025 brought a “crypto-loving White House, Wall Street adoption and friendly legislation,” it seemed poised to erase the industry’s regulatory obstacles. Instead, the “sky-high expectations of a golden age” have foundered. Cryptocurrency’s original reputation was as an “antiestablishment asset” coming out of the Great Recession. Now the sector is trying to “go legit” but having trouble shedding its standing as the “deranged, foul-mouthed little sibling of Wall Street.”

What did the commentators say?

“Brutal” selloffs in the crypto sector happen “every few years, or whenever sentiment snaps,” said Emily Nicolle at Bloomberg. But those previous cycles did not match the “speed and scale” of crypto’s collapse in recent weeks. The difference this time is that crypto is now “woven into the fabric of Wall Street and the broader public markets.” That means its fate is now “tied to AI-fueled market optimism.” Amid growing fears of an AI bubble, though, it does not take much prompting to “spook investors into selling.”

Crypto in recent years has gone from an “object of mockery” to “broadly accepted, even encouraged” by mainstream financial institutions, said The Economist. That victory actually poses a problem. The “wider acceptance” has deepened crypto’s links to the broader financial markets, so that the “pain from a crypto crash will be felt more widely than in the past.” A government intervention seems remote, but “surprises can never be ruled out” in politics and in crypto.

What next?

Crypto believers see it as a “safe store of value against inflation and rising national debt,” said Marketplace. But the current instability comes amid “sticky inflation and a rising national debt.” The sector’s growing acceptance on Wall Street means your 401(k) probably includes some crypto stock. If the downturn lasts, that would produce “some knock-on effects on spending” in the broader economy, said Columbia Law School lecturer Todd Baker to the outlet.

There are now some fears of a “crypto winter,” said MarketWatch. But other observers say the sector is likely still in solid shape for the long term, thanks to its integration with financial markets. Banks like J.P. Morgan now accept crypto assets as collateral. We are not seeing a crypto winter, said Frontier Investments CEO Louis LaValle. “I think we’re watching bitcoin grow up.”

McDonald’s golden arches might as well be made of real gold and Burger King’s burgers may be reserved for kings. Fast food was once a cheap and accessible source of food, but now many lower-income Americans are being priced out of the restaurants. This is largely attributed to higher prices coupled with the high cost of living. At the same time, the gap between the wealthy and the poor is widening, making upward mobility difficult.

Why is fast food more expensive?

Across the country, prices are rising across the board, including at fast food restaurants. “Higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up and driven away lower-income customers,” said the Los Angeles Times. The average price of a menu item at McDonald’s increased by approximately 40% between 2019 and 2024, according to a company fact sheet.

At the same time, consumer income is not keeping up with the cost of living. “You are seeing across the country that rents are at pretty high levels. You are seeing food prices are high, whether it’s in restaurants or grocery. You are seeing child care is high,” said McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski to investors. “There’s some significant inflation there that the low-income consumer is having to absorb.”

McDonald’s is not the only chain seeing fewer customers. Chipotle, Burger King and Wendy’s have also reported fewer lower-income patrons. So some restaurants have attempted to create value menus with cheaper items to bring back clientele.

President Donald Trump attended McDonald’s Impact Summit on Nov. 17 and praised McDonald’s for “recommitting to affordable options.” He also claimed that the Biden administration “started the affordability crisis” and that his administration is “ending it.” However, the Trump administration has played a significant role in making fast food more expensive. “Price hikes, in part due to the Trump administration’s tariffs, disproportionately affect lower-income Americans since they spend more of their incomes on goods than services, which are not directly impacted by levies,” said The Independent.

What are the economic outcomes?

Economic strain is not all equal. Over time, the U.S. economy has been turning more K-shaped. This means that the “high-earner cohort” is “doing better and better while others fall further down the economic ladder,” said NBC News. This has particularly affected those ages 25 to 30. This group is “facing several headwinds, including unemployment, increased student loan repayment and slower real wage growth,” said Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright to NBC News. As a result, those who are not rich are opting to budget and eat at home. On the flip side, the global luxury conglomerate that includes brands like Christian Dior and Tiffany & Co. had a “better-than-expected quarter, sending its stock 12% higher,” said USA Today.

Affordability continues to be a major policy issue for Americans, and “discontent will continue to increase so long as they perceive affordability as an issue, even if economic indicators improve,” said Fortune. This will “not only keep lower-income Americans from spending but could also lead some to harbor anger that could drive workplace resentment.” That is to say, confidence in today’s economy is deep-fried.

It has been 14 years since Apple CEO Tim Cook replaced company founder Steve Jobs, a legendary figure, and then led the company to even greater financial heights. Now reports say Cook is contemplating retirement next year.

Apple is “stepping up its succession planning efforts” ahead of Cook’s possible retirement, said the Financial Times. Cook turned 65 this month and is looking to “hand over the reins” to a new company leader. The firm behind the iPhone has “very detailed succession plans,” he said in 2023 to singer Dua Lipa on her podcast. The transition comes at a critical time for the tech giant. While Cook has overseen a massive increase in its market valuation, from $350 billion to $4 trillion, the company has more recently “struggled to break into new product categories” and has fallen behind competitors in the artificial intelligence race, said the Financial Times.

Those challenges could prompt Cook to “think about stepping down and letting fresh young blood take over, said Macworld. So could challenges like the massive tariffs that President Donald Trump has levied on countries where Apple produces its products. But Apple is still experiencing “unprecedented success,” recently reporting quarterly earnings of more than $100 billion. That means his replacement “will have very big shoes to fill.”

What did the commentators say?

Cook has “actually been CEO of Apple longer than Steve Jobs ever was,” said M.G. Siegler at Spyglass. Jobs arguably set Cook up for his success. Cook “just needed to execute on the vision Jobs laid out,” but that should not diminish his accomplishments. After all, he was the “person best suited for that task perhaps in the entire world.” Now, though, its failures on AI show Apple is a company “clearly in need of some changes.” That makes it “pretty clear” Cook will retire soon. “It’s just a question of when.”

We are looking at the “twilight of the star CEO,” said Ben Berkowitz at Axios. Cook, along with Disney’s Bob Iger and Walmart’s Doug McMillon, are “stars of the business set” who are “preparing to leave the stage.” Their expected departures come at a “fraught moment for the American economy,” and involve companies that touch every aspect of life. The transitions at the top of these iconic corporations will complicate “what was already certain to be an uncertain 2026.”

What next?

The leak of Cook’s retirement plans looks like a “deliberate test of market reaction,” said 9to5Mac. Apple’s board would likely want to “gauge the response of investors” to Cook’s departure. Cook is probably “eyeing his retirement,” but his loyalty to Apple means he would “only leave at a point when the market is ready for it.”

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, is the “most commonly mentioned” name to replace Cook, said Fast Company. Cook will likely retain some involvement with Apple, perhaps on its board of directors. “I don’t see being at home doing nothing,” he said in January to the “Table Manners” podcast.

The UK’s unemployment rate hit 5% last week, the highest since the Covid-19 pandemic and higher than most analysts had predicted.

The Office for National Statistics figures, although in some dispute because of concerns over the quality of the data, indicate a weakening jobs market and slowing wage growth. Taking out the “skewed levels” of the pandemic years, the current unemployment rate is “the highest seen since August 2016”, said the BBC.

Two days after the unemployment numbers, it was revealed that GDP grew by only 0.1% in the third quarter of this year. The sluggish growth and rising unemployment rate are ringing alarm bells for economists about the risk that the UK will soon be entering a recession.

What did the commentators say?

To count as a recession, the economy has to have “two consecutive three-month quarters in negative territory”, said The Independent’s chief business commentator James Moore. In the first quarter this year, UK plc grew by 0.7%; in the second, by 0.3%. Now we’re “flatlining”.

And last week’s unemployment stats “caught most economists on the hop” – they “weren’t expecting anything quite as bad”. The jobs market “looks increasingly like a pile of industrial slag dumped in an area of outstanding natural beauty”.

Donald Trump’s state visit in September was accompanied by “a blizzard of announcements” on investment in AI, a “genuine vote of confidence in the UK economy”, said The Telegraph’s assistant editor Jeremy Warner. But outside of tech, there is “gathering gloom”; AI is “unlikely to save the UK” from “the growing drumbeat of an incoming recession”.

In September, a group of chief executives “fired warning shots at the Treasury”, said Christian May, editor-in-chief of City A.M. John Roberts, boss of British retail giant and FTSE-listed AO World, thinks “things are so bad he feels the UK is heading into recession”. The R-word is “a big call”, said May. More people are talking about stagnation – “an equally ugly phrase”. But the fact that we’re talking about recession at all is in itself “telling, and alarming”.

Fears of a recession are growing because all “the signals are lining up at the same time”, said Nigel Green, of the deVere Group, in the Daily Mail. “Weak output, higher unemployment and looming tax increases form a combination that investors cannot ignore.”

Britain’s economy is “in the dog house”, said The Economist. “Inflation is sticky, debts and deficits are high, and productivity growth is low.” Infrastructure and housing projects are “turning out to be a sorry disappointment” rather than drivers of growth.

But “some of the doomsaying is overdone”. Britain is not in a recession – yet. Its strengths, such as its universities, the English language, service sector, and the City of London, are “enduring”. In many ways, Britain “can look to continental Europe and count its blessings”.

What next?

No mainstream economist has “a fully blown UK recession pencilled in” for the coming year, said The Telegraph’s Warner. Recessions “generally require some sort of trigger” – although in this case it may not be necessary, given that the economy “seems instead to be simply dying”.

Office for National Statistics figures published today show the government has “inched a little closer to its 2% inflation target”, as inflation fell to 3.6% in October, down from 3.8% in September, said The Spectator. This “slight improvement offers limited relief” – “the real test” will be whether inflation falls to 2% by mid-2027, in line with Bank of England projections.

A further cause for modest optimism is that a December interest-rate cut is “all but nailed on, which will please mortgage borrowers”, said The Independent’s Moore. But tax increases will “inevitably attach a lead weight to Britain’s economic legs”. There’s “a lot riding” on next week’s Budget – “that R-word could at least be in play”.

“Buy when there’s blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own,” was the maxim of 19th-century banker Nathan Rothschild. But for investors who don’t share his appetite for risk, gold has always been considered the ultimate safe haven.

This appears to be more true today than ever as the price of the precious metal has soared 50% this year, far outpacing returns from equities. In October, the gold value hit $4,380 an ounce, an all-time record.

The rally has been largely driven by uncertainty – “whether that is geopolitical, economic or now there is the interest rate cycle entering people’s minds”, Ryan McIntyre, from investment management firm Sprott, told The New York Times.

What is driving the gold rush?

Each theory behind gold’s soaring price “rests on a different buyer: institutional investors, central banks and speculators”, said The Economist.

Institutions are attracted to gold as a store of value in times of crisis. Previous surges took place after the dotcom crash of the early 2000s, the financial crisis at the end of the decade, and during the Covid pandemic. This time round it is Donald Trump’s tariff war and fears of an imminent AI-stock crash that is driving investors to seek safety in gold.

Central banks, too, have increasingly sought protection “not against short-term meltdowns but longer-run changes”. According to the International Monetary Fund, central bank holdings of physical gold in emerging markets have risen 161% since 2006, with purchases going into overdrive in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both China and Russia have ramped up switching their official reserve assets out of currencies such as the US dollar and into gold.

Finally, there is the recent US government shutdown. The prolonged stand-off increased “long” positions held by hedge funds on gold futures, meaning that speculators are “the most likely drivers of recent price movements”.

What does it say about the economy?

Citadel hedge fund founder and CEO Ken Griffin recently said the rising price of gold is an indication of something big. “That something is a loss of trust,” said The Telegraph. “A loss of trust first and foremost in US treasuries, but also in other G7 government bond markets, including the UK.”

Stress in the long-term bond markets combined with a devaluation of the US dollar, which suffered its biggest decline in more than half a century this year, “have unsettled alternative assets typically viewed as low-risk investments”, said ABC News.

“There’s no way you can interpret these exploding gold prices as a good sign – they're a warning sign,” said Paolo Pasquariello, professor of finance at the University of Michigan. “There’s clearly a case to be made that these high gold prices are a leading indicator of troublesome times ahead for the US economy.”

Will it end?

October’s sudden price decline, when gold dropped 10% before recovering, was “driven by a confluence of factors” that may prove a useful predictor of what might curb the rally, said Bloomberg.

A successful resolution of trade tensions between the US and China “could stop gold from resuming its record-breaking rally – as could a broader de-escalation of US tariffs”. A “continued dollar rally, a resolution to the legal proceedings against Fed Governor Lisa Cook, and a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine” could also take the shine off gold’s appeal to investors.

The Walmartification of French fashion is now complete, said Sophie Coignard in Le Point (Paris). To widespread Parisian disgust, one of our most glamorous department stores, BHV, is now officially home to the Chinese online juggernaut Shein: it was in this landmark building that the ultra-fast-fashion company opened its first-ever bricks and mortar premises last week.

Don’t look on this as “just another retail opening”, said James Tidmarsh in The Spectator. “It’s cultural surrender.” For more than a century, BHV has “embodied a certain Parisian ideal” of accessible luxury, craftsmanship and good taste. “Now it’s flogging throwaway polyester” stitched in exploitative Asian factories; that which, until now, was only available on Shein’s website alongside 600,000 other cheap goods. “It is proof that Paris, once the world’s fashion capital, is now renting out its soul to Chinese algorithms.”

French is ‘addicted to fast fashion’

We French are supposedly scandalised by Shein’s arrival, said Erwan Seznec in Le Point. And certainly Shein’s grand opening was assailed by angry crowds protesting against the Asian giant’s vile labour and commercial practices. These are well documented: a recent investigation revealed extensive evidence of forced labour, with workers in some factories forced to work 18-hour shifts for just £0.03 an item. And the discovery that child-like sex dolls were being sold on Shein’s website resulted in a threat to ban the website in France unless they were removed.

Yet for all the “virtuous rhetoric” and the snobbery, the French are still “addicted to fast fashion”: every single respondent in a recent survey admitted to buying clothing from a fast-fashion brand this year, whether it were China’s Shein and Temu, or more traditional European players such as H&M and Zara.

And fully 35% of French shoppers – enticed by its “rock-bottom prices”, targeted algorithms and “discounting techniques” – admit to having bought something from Shein itself last year, said Stéphane Vernay in Ouest-France (Rennes). They’re no doubt familiar with the accusations of deplorable behaviour levelled against Shein... “but who cares? The urge to buy is stronger.” Shein’s tills in Paris were ringing last week, and it now plans to open five more locations in France.

‘We’re soon not going to have any industry left at all’

You’d have thought Europe’s politicians would be trying to shield our manufacturers from this onslaught, said James Tidmarsh. Not a bit of it. In France and in the UK in particular, they’ve opened the door to the Chinese: they’ve handed our textile industry to companies such as Shein; they’ve opened our roads to carmakers such as BYD and MG – and they call it “progress”. Progress? Our manufacturers just can’t compete with these regulation-skirting companies. “We’re soon not going to have any industry left at all.”

Only the US president has clocked this “unprecedented trade offensive”, said Gaëtan de Capèle in Le Figaro (Paris). Trump has already “built a wall imposing a 100% tax on parcels from Shein and its acolytes”; shipments to the US have dropped 40% as a result. Yet for all “its unrivalled regulatory nit-picking”, Brussels won’t be able to halt the influx for another few years – by which time countless homegrown businesses will have gone to the wall.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has abandoned plans to increase income tax in the Budget on 26 November, and will instead focus on a range of smaller tax-raising measures.

The U-turn – leaked mere days after briefings about a plot to challenge Keir Starmer – comes after new Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts decreased the size of the economic “hole” Reeves needs to fill. This means she no longer feels under pressure to break Labour’s manifesto and put up income tax rates.

What did the commentators say?

The OBR told the chancellor that the hole in the public finances is now “closer to £20 billion than the £30 billion originally expected”, said Steven Swinford and Mehreen Khan in The Times. Reeves promptly ripped up the manifesto-busting plan she knew would “aggravate mutinous” Labour MPs and “fuel anger among voters”.

Downing Street officials “insisted” the Budget re-write was not a “response to the leadership crisis that has engulfed Keir Starmer” this week, said George Parker, Anna Gross and Sam Fleming in the Financial Times. But the chancellor’s about-turn has had an immediate effects on the markets, with gilts having their “worst one-day sell off since September” when the news broke.

When Reeves finally delivers the Budget, she will probably favour a “smorgasbord” approach, raising money from multiple avenues, including levies on gambling and taxes on expensive properties. She is also expected to “extend a freeze on personal tax thresholds” for a further two years, pushing more people into higher tax brackets as their wages rise.

“Rachel Reeves is Queen of the U-turn,” said Harvey Jones in the Daily Express. “She was forced to backtrack” on scrapping the winter fuel payment” and “caved on” over proposed cuts to the “ballooning” benefit bill. In fact, she has been made “to correct everything from her CV and childhood chess achievements to claims she didn’t know she needed a licence to rent out her property”.

“It is a mess,” said Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph. The Budget is “turning into a shambles”. In a week of “in-fighting, plotting and leaks”, the chancellor is being “buffeted” by political events, instead of controlling them. The proposed “series of minor tax rises” to try to stay within the fiscal rules shows that her preparation has “descended into a farce”.

What next?

A gap of £20 billion is “still a big number”, said Pippa Crerar in The Guardian. In addition to freezing income tax thresholds, we should expect “taxes on salary sacrifice schemes” and even a “fuel duty equivalent for electric vehicles”.

Talk of a new “exit tax” on entrepreneurs leaving the country has dwindled somewhat, said Swinford in The Times, but, if it is brought in, it could have a “significant impact on investment and growth”, particularly “in the artificial intelligence and broader tech sectors”.

The death of industrialist Gopichand “GP” Hinduja, head of the Hinduja family who topped the Sunday Times Rich List 2025 with a net worth of over £35 billion, has made public a long-running family feud.

The Hinduja dynasty has been “riven by a decade-long 'Succession'-style feud”, said John Arlidge in The Times. With the two remaining brothers, Ashok and Prakash, taking control in the interim, major questions over how “power, control and money should pass from one generation of the family to the next” are still unanswered.

‘Publicity-shy’

The second of four brothers running a business empire, GP ran the Hinduja Group since the death of his older brother Srichand (“SP”) in 2023. Since it was founded in 1914 by their father Parmanand, trading carpets, tea and spices to the West, it has grown to 11 sectors (including healthcare, banking, IT, trading, media and real estate), operating in 48 countries with up to 250,000 employees.

Though the “publicity-shy” Hinduja Group may not be a household name, its UK and global reach is profound, said Josh Spero, Chris Kay and Krishn Kaushik in the Financial Times. GP and his older brother transformed the family’s “modest trading operation” in India and Iran, into a “major”, global “conglomerate”.

GP was a “very vocal champion” of closer economic and political ties between his ancestral homeland of India and naturalised country the UK, said The Hindu. He would often address gatherings in London to “exhort” businesses to “invest in the booming Indian market”.

‘Embroiled in controversy’

“The family has had to endure publicity – all of it bad – since the feud erupted”, with the dispute “likely to get worse” after a period of mourning, sources close to the family told The Times. The fighting within the family has become so intense that the “total legal fees are said to have reached £20 million”, with “one wing of the family communicating with the others via lawyers”, said the outlet.

The unrest began when GP’s elder brother Srichand claimed sole ownership of Hinduja Bank, which is based in Switzerland, which “shattered” the “sense of family harmony”, said Rory Tingle in The Daily Mail. The struggle intensified as Srichand developed dementia, with a High Court judge raising concerns that the family had “failed to arrange adequate care for him”.

The surprising initial request undermined the “age-old” motto of “everything belongs to everyone and nothing belongs to anyone” held within the family, said Benjamin Stupples in Bloomberg.

Most notably, GP was “embroiled in controversy” in 2001 after it was revealed he had written to Peter Mandelson, then the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, about “obtaining a UK passport for his brother Prakash”, said Lauren Almeida in The Guardian. The brothers had “donated £1 million through their charitable foundation” towards the Millennium Dome, a project that Mandelson was overseeing. Mandelson resigned, but was later cleared following an inquiry.

The Hindujas also faced allegations over international arms policy, said Ishani Sarkar in Style. The family was involved in the “so-called Bofors scandal”, which was a “major weapons-contract political scandal between India and Sweden”. However, the allegations made against the family were dismissed by the Delhi High Court in 2005.

Most recently, the family has faced serious accusations from abroad, said Imogen Foulkes of the BBC. The third Hinduja brother, Prakash, and his wife, son and daughter-in-law, were sentenced to jail by a Swiss court last year for “exploiting staff” in their “Geneva villa”. The family is appealing the charges.

What happened

Tesla shareholders Thursday voted in favor of a pay package for CEO Elon Musk that clears the way for him to become the world’s first trillionaire. The $1 trillion package “consists of 12 tranches of shares to be granted if Tesla hits certain milestones over the next decade,” said CNBC, and could expand Musk’s stake in the company from about 13% to 25%.

Who said what

This is the “largest payout ever awarded to a corporate leader,” said Bloomberg. The deal is “designed to motivate the world’s richest man” to refocus on the EV company, said The Wall Street Journal. “Even though his far-right political rhetoric” has “hurt” the brand this year, said Reuters, Tesla’s future success “hangs on Musk’s vision of making vehicles that drive themselves, creating a robotaxi network across the U.S., and selling humanoid robots.”

What next?

Musk told shareholders at Thursday’s annual meeting that he plans on “massively increasing vehicle production” and ramping up production of Tesla’s Optimus robots “faster than anything’s ever been ramped up before in human history.”

Tesla’s board has approved a $1 trillion pay package for CEO Elon Musk on the condition he meets a series of performance targets over the next decade. “It’s not just a new chapter for Tesla,” said Musk. “It’s a new book.”

The decision was met with “cheers and chants” at the company’s annual shareholders' meeting, said CNN. Musk does not receive a salary but, assuming the “lofty” targets are met, the shares in the package would be worth $275 million a day, “dwarfing any other executive pay package in history”.

‘Miracle man’ or ‘erratic leader’?

For Musk, the central requirement of the deal is to raise the value of Tesla from around $1 trillion to $8.5 trillion. Additional stipulations mean the achievement “won’t be easy”, said Sky News. Musk will also need to deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles over the next decade, which is “double the number churned out” since 2013.

What’s more, he needs to “roll out” one million AI-powered robots “despite the fact it hasn’t released a single one so far”. And most importantly, he needs to provide a “succession plan” for his chief executive role. But “even if Musk falls short of some of these targets, he could end up earning a lot of money”.

Many investors see Musk as a “miracle man capable of stunning business feats”, making him indispensable to the company, said The Guardian. Despite Musk’s turbulent venture into US politics and rifts with Donald Trump destabilising Tesla’s sales, including a 50% decline in Germany, he will always be seen by his supporters as the man who brought them from the “brink of bankruptcy” to “one of the world’s most valuable companies”.

Despite 75% of the shares voting in favour of the proposal, the package was not without its opponents among the shareholders, said ABC News. Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund has been “raising concerns about its scale and potential risks”. In a separate statement, the fund expressed reservations about the “total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk”.

A ‘winner-takes-all version of capitalism’

The timing of this deal shows the “split screen” of “strikingly different lessons about” who deserves wealth in America, said The New York Times. The Tesla vote comes just two days after New York elected the “tax-the-rich candidate as their next mayor”.

While Musk champions a “winner-takes-all version of capitalism”, Zohran Mamdani’s dominant result in New York serves as a “reminder of the frustrations many Americans have with an economic system”. For Musk’s political detractors, he could soon become a “foil” to exploit the “divide in American business and politics”.

The scale of Musk’s remuneration, if achieved, is “staggering”, said The Guardian. It “exceeds the GDP of entire countries, including that of Ireland, Sweden and Argentina”. Critics of the deal point out the danger of concentrating power in “one erratic leader” who has blindly “ignored the challenges the company has faced”.