World News Guru

Apr 11th 2025 | Hong Kong and Singapore S O FAR THIS year China has imported ten American films, including the zany “A Minecraft Movie”. But there is a limit to how much American drama anyone can stand. After President Donald Trump’s latest plot-twist —lowering the “reciprocal” tariff on most countries to 10%, while raising it on China to 125%—the China Film Administration stepped in. It said it would cut the number of Hollywood productions screened in the mainland. After all, Mr Trump’s tariffs would diminish the Chinese audience’s “favourable perception of American films”, it said. Explore more Finance & economics https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27512&network_id=

Apr 8th 2025 | Delhi, Singapore and Tokyo “D o not retaliate and you will be rewarded.” That was the message from the White House on April 9th after Donald Trump announced a pause on tariffs for most trading partners. The president, who touts his dealmaking prowess, had earlier said that he was open to talks. Most countries, China aside, accepted his claims, allowing Mr Trump to argue that the art of the deal was alive and well. Explore more Finance & economics United States This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “A time for deals” From the April 12th 2025 edition Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents ⇒ Explore the edition https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27420&network_id=

Apr 10th 2025 | Washington, DC F or a good few hours on April 9th, disaster beckoned. Share prices had been falling for weeks. Then the market for American Treasury bonds—normally among the safest assets available—started convulsing, too. The yield on ten-year Treasuries leapt to 4.5% (see chart 1), up from 3.9% days earlier. That meant bond prices, which move inversely to yields, had cratered. The failure of both risky and supposedly safe assets at once threatened to destabilise the financial system itself. Explore more Finance & economics This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Stupidly dangerous” From the April 12th 2025 edition Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents ⇒ Explore the edition https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27410&network_id=

Apr 10th 2025 | Washington, DC F or people who believe themselves to be autonomous individuals possessed of their own free will, the past week has been a bracing corrective. Everyone, down to the most rugged individualist, is a pawn in Donald Trump’s grand caper, bouncing between his threats of economic chaos and acts of mercy. On April 9th all it took was a few dozen words from him, delaying some of his most extreme tariffs for 90 days, to transform a spreading panic in financial markets into a full risk-taking frenzy. Explore more Donald Trump Finance & economics This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The court’s finest minds” From the April 12th 2025 edition Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents ⇒ Explore the edition https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27402&network_id=

Apr 10th 2025 | Hong Kong V ictoria Harbour is Hong Kong’s most glamorous body of water. But Rambler Channel is where the free port’s work is done. The quays along its banks extend over more than 7km. Gantry cranes, rail-mounted or rubber-tyred, serve as many as 24 vessels at a time. Last year, the surrounding port handled over 10m of the standardised containers that carry goods across the world, parcelling globalisation up into metal boxes, in green, blue and red. Explore more China Finance & economics United States Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27394&network_id=

Apr 10th 2025 T O WIN A game of Scrabble, start at the bottom of the periodic table. The 17 “rare earths” that reside there have longish names, such as dysprosium and praseodymium, which are replete with point-worthy letters. They share other traits, too. All are produced and used in minuscule amounts, yet are crucial to a range of high-tech goods, from batteries and renewables to weapons and medical devices. More important still, all are largely supplied to the world by China. Explore more China Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27384&network_id=

T he announcement on April 9th that America would pause sky-high reciprocal tariffs sent stockmarkets soaring around the world. Countries that had faced crippling levies, such as Cambodia and Vietnam, celebrated. But do not lose sight of the bigger picture. The announcement excludes China, leaves in place all earlier tariffs and implements the universal 10% minimum portion of the reciprocal tariff. America’s “effective tariff rate”—total tariffs paid as a share of total imports—may still rise by 15-20 percentage points. Even after the about-face, the incoming levies represent the most disruptive policy in the history of global trade. Explore more Economics Finance & economics Free exchange https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27376&network_id=

Apr 9th 2025 | WASHINGTON, DC D ONALD TRUMP has blinked. Little more than 12 hours after his radical regime of “reciprocal” tariffs took effect, he has put most of them on pause for 90 days. Mr Trump said this was in recognition of the fact that more than 75 countries had engaged with his administration in negotiations, working together to address America’s complaints about global trade. The convulsing Treasury market may also have aided his decision. Mr Trump’s announcement provided immediate relief to markets, with stocks and commodity futures surging, as the delay alleviated fears about imminent economic damage . Explore more Finance & economics https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27323&network_id=

Apr 9th 2025 | WASHINGTON, DC O f all the lines that could have rebounded, this might be the worst. During Asian trading hours on April 9th the yield on ten-year American Treasuries leapt to 4.5% (see chart), with 30-year bonds rising even higher. Early on April 7th the ten-year yield had been just 3.9%. Such yields normally fall when share prices plunge and panic is in the air, since they move inversely to bond prices and investors usually flock to the safety of America’s government debt in times of anxiety. Now stockmarkets are in freefall and yields have jumped anyway. Explore more Finance & economics https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27277&network_id=

Apr 9th 2025 B y imposing heavy tariffs on its trading partners, America has not only provoked a market crash, raised uncertainty to unprecedented levels and maybe sent the global economy into recession. It has also entered the history books. The tariff war of 2025 stands as the most disruptive policy in the history of trade. Explore more Economics Finance & economics Free exchange Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27263&network_id=

Apr 8th 2025 | Delhi, Singapore and Tokyo C OURTING THE tariff king is a tricky business. There are no rules, no obvious channels through which to reach him and no guarantee that anyone, apart from the man himself, can make a deal. Maros Sefcovic, the EU trade commissioner, spent hours talking with Jamieson Greer and Howard Lutnick, two of the president’s advisers, yet came away empty-handed. Neither has the authority to cut a deal. “We have offered to negotiate,” says an EU official, “but Greer and Lutnick don’t have a mandate yet. It’s all up to POTUS .” Explore more Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27243&network_id=

Apr 8th 2025 | Delhi, Singapore and Tokyo C OURTING THE tariff king is a tricky business. There are no rules, no obvious channels through which to reach him and no guarantee that anyone, apart from the man himself, can make a deal. Maros Sefcovic, the EU trade commissioner, spent hours talking with Jamieson Greer and Howard Lutnick, two of the president’s advisers, yet came away empty-handed. Neither has the authority to cut a deal. “We have offered to negotiate,” says an EU official, “but Greer and Lutnick don’t have a mandate yet. It’s all up to POTUS .” Explore more Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27207&network_id=

T HE TRADE WAR is escalating, and fast. On April 8th Chinese officials vowed to “fight to the end” in the face of new threats from Donald Trump, made just hours earlier. Having at first promised levies of 34% on Chinese goods, America’s president now vows to ratchet up tariffs by another 50% if China does not drop its retaliatory tariffs, also of 34%. According to Goldman Sachs, a bank, such measures would lift America’s tariff rate on China to 110% on April 9th, when the levies are due to come into effect. A day later Chinese tariffs on American goods would stand at about 70%. Explore more Finance & economics https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27177&network_id=

P lunging markets are normally unnerving because they reveal how quickly sober-minded investors can give in to terror. Just now the scariest thing is how rational those scrambling to sell appear. Share prices around the world have been cratering since Donald Trump announced his latest and biggest suite of tariffs on April 2nd. Although many market participants have held out hope that the new barriers would be swiftly lowered, perhaps after Mr Trump had used them to extract concessions from trading partners, it now looks increasingly likely that America’s president really means it. Indeed, on April 7th he announced additional tariffs of 50% on China, unless Xi Jinping withdraws his retaliatory levies. Explore more Finance & economics https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27097&network_id=

Apr 7th 2025 | Hong Kong D URING HIS inaugural address eight years ago, Donald Trump spoke of “American carnage”. In recent days he has spread something similar across the world economy: a problem he alone could fix, in his words, has become something he alone has globalised. Explore more Economy Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27057&network_id=

Apr 6th 2025 | San Francisco I N ITS SCOPE and severity, the trade war took markets by surprise. On April 3rd, the day after President Donald Trump laid out an unprecedented array of tariffs, the Russell 3000, one of the broadest measures of the American stockmarket, fell by 5%. It then fell by 6% on April 4th, when China announced that it would strike back with a duty of 34% on all American goods. Market pricing in a range of asset classes tells a worrying story: investors are expecting a severe economic slowdown. Explore more Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=27029&network_id=

Apr 6th 2025 | San Francisco I N ITS SCOPE and severity, the trade war took markets by surprise. On April 3rd, the day after President Donald Trump laid out an unprecedented array of tariffs, the Russell 3000, one of the broadest measures of the American stockmarket, fell by 5%. It then fell by 6% on April 4th, when China announced that it would strike back with a duty of 34% on all American goods. Market pricing in a range of asset classes tells a worrying story: investors are expecting a severe economic slowdown. Explore more Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=26973&network_id=

Apr 5th 2025 | Washington, DC I N DONALD TRUMP’S view of global trade , America has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far”. Ironically enough, customers near and far who avail themselves of the services of America’s banking, consulting and tech giants sometimes talk in similar terms. For foreign officials thinking about how to retaliate against Mr Trump’s tariffs , this points to an obvious target: imports of expensive American services. Explore more Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=26899&network_id=

D ONALD TRUMP’S tariff announcement on April 2nd has drawn mockery for its spurious maths. Any bilateral trade deficit is treated as gross unfairness; the tariffs are set by taking the measure as a share of goods imported from each country, and halving it. But there are other oddities too, from the fact that the tariff rates appear to be calculated for places with an internet domain name to the fact that they are based on a single year of data. The starkest demonstration of the absurdity of the tariffs is to look at the bizarre outcomes they produce. Here is our list of the five craziest duties. Explore more Finance & economics https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=26885&network_id=

Apr 4th 2025 | Hong Kong N EVER INTERRUPT your enemy when he is making a mistake. That sounds like Sun Tzu, a renowned Chinese strategist, but the adage, attributable to Napoleon Bonaparte, originated on the other side of the world. Perhaps that explains why China’s leader, Xi Jinping, seems oblivious to the advice. Explore more Finance & economics Reuse this content https://worldnewsguru.us/?p=26855&network_id=