This BBC podcast is supported by the UK.
Want to know how to become the richest person in the world?
Start with the latest episode of our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire.
We're telling the story of how Elon Musk amassed half a trillion dollars from his troubled childhood in South Africa to buying Twitter and launching rockets into space, with all the boardroom dramas along the way.
Find out how he did it on Good Bad Billionaire.
Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Ukraine tells the EU it needs Russian assets.
I understand the concerns that some member states have, especially the Belgian government.
It's a marching into the war.
So the Belgian prime minister is right.
We should not do that.
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
This is Andrew Peach on the way how President Zelensky says Ukraine's war machine will be scaled back if the EU won't approve the use of frozen Russian money.
Also coming up today, Bolivia ends two decades of fuel subsidies.
We'll assess the impact and the economic challenges of making guitars.
First President Zelensky wants other European leaders to reach a deal on using frozen Russian assets to raise money for Kyiv, warning that Ukraine will soon have to cut back on producing drones if he can't get that money.
Mr Zelensky told a summit in Brussels.
His country faces a financial shortfall of up to 60 billion next year.
We want this instrument to support us.
We are more confident at the negotiation table with such an instrument than without it.
And the question of how you will stand for another year if you have no money.
The answer is immediately.
And also such question will not arise.
Now, most of these assets are held in Belgium, which is under plenty of pressure to drop its opposition to this proposal.
It's concerned about reprisals from Russia.
It wants cast iron legal protections against that.
France and Poland are leading the calls to hand the money over to help Ukraine.
The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is also supporting the idea.
You know my position.
I would like to use the frozen Russian assets for this purpose.
I don't see any better option than this one.
My impression is that we can reach a conclusion.
I understand the concerns that some member states have, especially the Belgian government.
But I hope that we can resolve them together and that we can also embark on a joint path to show Russia the European Union's strength and determination.
And how necessary that is, is also shown by the Russian president's reaction in recent hours.
Among the EU leaders who are against this, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Guarantees for what?
The whole idea is a stupid one.
To take away the money of somebody.
There are two countries which are in war, yeah?
It's not European Union, Russia and Ukraine.
And somebody European Union would like to take away the money of one of the warring parties and then to give it to another one.
It's a marching into the war.
So the Belgian prime minister is right.
We should not do that.
Phil Collette is a professor of financial law at KU Leuven University in Belgium.
Reparation loan is the idea that financial institutions who have assets of the Russian Central Bank on their balance sheet would have to grant a loan for the amount of those assets to the European Union.
The European Union would then grant a loan with that money to Ukraine to allow Ukraine to buy weapons for the war.
That loan to Ukraine would only need to be paid back once Russia has paid reparations to Ukraine after the war.
And if Russia does not pay reparations, then Ukraine would not have to pay back that loan.
And the bottom line here is that someone's got to fund the Ukrainian war effort for as long as it continues.
Yes, that's the idea.
And so it sounds wonderful.
There's a treasure trove of 185 billion euros from the Russian Central Bank.
So using that money sounds like a wonderful idea.
Then the European taxpayers wouldn't have to pay that.
Right.
And there's obviously a level of leverage involved as well that if the Russians are having to use their own assets to continue the thing, there's more of an incentive to bring it to an end, I suppose.
Well, I think for the European Union it's more that they want to be at the negotiation table during a peace deal.
And by doing what they're trying to do now, they think they will get a stronger voice at this negotiation table.
Myself not very much convinced of that, because it might even turn out that the EU puts itself in a position where it could end up blocking peace.
And are European Union countries on the same page about this?
Because, of course, we talk about the EU as a bloc.
The whole thing is it functions as a bloc, but it's got many member countries in it.
Do they all agree how to proceed with this?
Oh, no, not at all.
The country which is most of all against this is obviously Belgium, because Euroclear is based in Belgium and Belgium would bear all the risks.
So many other countries are in favor, as long as they don't need to pay for it.
So the resistance also in some other countries is growing.
Italy has raised big doubts about this scheme, Bulgaria, Malta as well.
And can Belgium veto it?
No, it cannot.
Belgium has no formal veto, even though Commissioner van der Leyen has said that they don't want to push through with this against the will of Belgium.
And I think that would only be fair, because it's very easy to agree on something if you don't have to bear the risk and then outvote someone who would then bear the cost if things go wrong.
So first of all, there's a whole discussion to try and get European countries on the same page.
If it happens, what sort of reaction would there be from Russia?
Because Russia is not going to take it lying down.
Absolutely.
So there's a huge geopolitical risk as a first risk.
So if the EU would continue with this plan, we can be quite sure that Russia would confiscate all assets which Euroclear has in Russia as a countermeasure.
There's also other possible consequences.
There is a big reputation risk for the EU's financial markets because you must know that Euroclear is kind of the entrance gate for foreign countries to be able to invest in European government bonds and also securities listed on a European exchange.
You can only do that if you have a securities account at Euroclear, because Euroclear is an important financial market infrastructure which ensures that trades in securities and bonds are settled.
So if now foreign powers would gain the impression that their reserves held at Euriclear can be redirected at will for European policy objectives, their willingness to invest in European government bonds and securities may well erode.
And Christine Lagarde of the European Central Bank has an alternative idea as to how some money could be raised.
That isn't this.
What does she want?
Her idea is that Europe could use what is called the headroom in their budget.
That is, part of the budget that has not yet been spent or not yet dedicated for a specific purpose.
This would be about 50 billion euros.
So an idea would be that Europe uses this money to grant a loan abroad to Ukraine and not use the Russian assets at Euroclear.
That is not enough.
And there's also another problem that it is, in principle, you need unanimity to use this budget.
Lagarde says, why not use the specific legal ground for economic emergency?
And so that would buy time.
Then you have another year or so to work out the details of the reparation loan.
Phil Collette with me from KU Leuven University.
Now live to South Carolina and Walter Todd, president of the Greenwood Capital Organization there.
Walter, thanks for being with us on World Business Report.
We better wind back to that TV address by the US president Donald Trump last night, talking about his administration's economic accomplishments, among other things.
What do you make of it?
Yeah well, you know he tried to make the case that things were going great because his approval ratings are not very good with folks recently.
So I don't know that he swayed anybody's opinion one way or the other, but he was very adamant in his arguments.
Let's talk about one or two companies.
We've been following because of the Lububu craze, which has been big in recent times in many countries.
There's evidence now that's starting to die out.
Yeah well, you know I was reading about this and this is very similar to like Beanie Babies in the 1990s for those that are that old, Cabbage Patch Kids in the 1980s, which was when I was a kid.
So you have these booms and busts.
And so not too surprising to see that, you know, kind of fade out.
What about companies like FedEx?
We got numbers out for FedEx and also Nike.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So these are the last kind of two big companies to report this earnings season and a bit of a mixed bag.
FedEx was pretty solid.
Nike, not so much.
They're having some challenges in China as well as with their Converse brand.
But they're in the midst of a turnaround with a relatively new CEO.
So hopefully should see some improvement in 2026.
Just tell us a bit more about the challenges Nike have got, because it's such a big firm that many people will be familiar with.
Yeah, so they got a new CEO about a year ago, Elliot Hill.
He's trying to manage a turnaround here and it's really focused on some legacy brands that they've got excess inventories in, so they're having to kind of sell those at a discount.
And then they're just having some challenges in China, specific to, I guess, maybe some pushback on American brands, perhaps over there, and they're having to clear some inventory.
So it's kind of one step forward, two steps back for the past year for Nike.
Wow.
Walter, thank you very much indeed for that.
Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
This is World Business Report from the BBC World Service with Andrew Peach.
The Bolivian President, Rodrigo Pass, has scrapped fuel subsidies that have been around for 20 years or more, meaning price hikes of up to 100.
The President, who's announced a whole package of economic changes, has ordered a 20 salary increase to offset some of the impact of that.
Removing poorly designed subsidies from the past does not mean abandonment.
It means order, justice, reality, clear and transparent redistribution.
The subsidies that were used to hide blunder will no longer condemn Bolivia.
These people in Bolivia say it's all too rushed.
There will be many problems.
Everything is going to go up.
It's already started.
We've already had problems with fares.
People are already angry.
What can we do?
I think it was too soon.
It should have been done little by little.
I think people are now forming huge lines at grocery stores and it's overwhelming.
Luis Sajardo from BBC Monitoring is in Miami and he's been telling me a bit more about the impact this is all going to have on the Bolivian economy.
Bolivia has been facing a serious fiscal crisis for many years now, and a big part of it has to do with subsidies that the government gives to the consumption of fuel.
And so the government has announced, in a very drastic move, to remove these fuel subsidies, which is expected to have a big economic and social impact on the country.
As a way to offset this, he is also announcing an increase in the minimum wage, an expansion of welfare payments to the poorest people in society and a series of more long-term measures, like tax incentives, which he hopes will attract investment in the country and fuel future growth.
I mean, you'd imagine taking away the fuel subsidies that people are used to would go down pretty badly.
That is precisely what many people are forecasting is going to happen.
And it's actually, we're starting to see signs of that already.
Students of Latin American politics will know that almost every time a country tries to remove large-scale subsidies, that tends to generate unrest.
And you're starting to see protests, for example, by lorry drivers, who are already announcing a strike in cities like Santa Cruz, one of the bigger cities, cities in the country.
And you're also starting to see political resistance to this move.
Notoriously the vice president his own vice president, Edmond Lara, has announced that he is opposed to this removal of subsidies.
So it is clear that Bolivia is likely to face a tense political moment in the next few weeks.
And, of course, the hope of the government is that it will manage to start showing results before this content, with these measures, spreads across the country.
Wow, the results would have to be quick, wouldn't they?
Are they equipped to cope with this?
To cope with strike action, protests and that spinning over into something worse, potentially?
Bolivia is a country of very strong social contrasts, large impoverished population that has been suffering in the last few years as well.
It is also a country with a strong tradition of union activism and union protests.
So it is hard to know at this moment how well equipped the Bolivian political system will be to deal with what is looking to be a moment of discontent with these measures.
Of course also Bolivia recently had elections in which President Paz was elected on promises of being a more moderate alternative to the other, more conservative candidate to Tokiroga, who many people had been saying would try to implement a shock therapy.
Of course, many people will say that what Paz Zamora is presenting now looks a lot like shock therapy.
So there's going to be a lot of expectation of how the political and social scene develops in Bolivia after these measures have been announced.
That's Luis Fajardo with me from Miami.
The US has welcomed all of this, saying the changes will encourage investment in Bolivia.
Professor Diego Von Vacano is a political scientist at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at the Texas AM University.
It's really not unexpected.
Again today.
There were a lot of protests in Bolivia, especially by the transport sector, the people who transport especially goods to the cities.
There may be some significant social upheaval, but it's not entirely a free market for fuel.
The government has set a new price, which will last for six months, roughly.
So again, it's not completely draconian, in the sense that it's not really going completely to the free market.
So again, this is a little bit of a slow.
It's not shock therapy in the most direct immediate sense, but they expect to review the results in about six months.
So we'll see whether the desired effect in about six months.
Where does the US fit into all of this?
The U.S. has reacted positively since Rodrigo Paz won.
And just yesterday Marco Rubio announced that he supports these measures by the government because they end basically 20 years of socialist state-led development, which I would say maybe worked well for the first 10 years of the Evo Morales government but then declined, especially with the Luis Arce government since 2020, 2021.
And so Marco Rubio and the U.S. government has received this news very favorably.
They want Bolivia to become much more oriented to the free market and to create a better relationship with the US and Bolivia so that I think in the long run the US will propose deals for critical minerals and other areas that will really undermine the presence of China and Russia, especially in Bolivia, and benefit the US in the long run.
I was going to ask you about lithium in particular, because the country has lithium reserves and President Trump's administration is well known for identifying these rare earth minerals and deposits of them around the world and, you know, working out ways in which the US can get a piece of that action.
Bolivia has really unfortunately, failed to deliver the lithium that, especially about five years ago, the world needed, when there was a big window of opportunity for Bolivia and for the world to transition to cleaner energy.
But that period has really passed on.
I think we're no longer in that window of opportunity.
But, as you said, the US government has, I think, wisely identified the critical minerals as one of the areas that it really has to focus, to try to improve relations with so many countries like, for example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has cobalt, and Indonesia with nickel, and Bolivia as well with lithium.
I think Chile and Argentina, their lithium industries are really well-developed, but given that Bolivia is almost entirely undeveloped, it presents a strong opportunity for the US and American companies to come in and propose extraction methods that are going to be better for the environment and maybe could create jobs in the long run.
Western hemisphere supply chain that will be more reliable than that depending on China, right?
So I think this is an opportunity for the US to really show that it can improve relations and provide markets for Bolivian minerals.
Okay.
And I just wonder whether there's any focus on getting investment from other countries as well as the US.
China and Russia dominated the last five years in Bolivian minerals, including gold.
But I think Rodrigo, open to any country coming in Western countries, countries with vast mineral experience, like Australia, let's say, or Canada, perhaps European countries and European companies from France and England.
So I think it's open to everybody.
But the US has definitely been one of the first countries to really try to step in and try to make statements about this relationship and this opportunity.
And how and when will we know if this has worked?
It's going to take a while, unfortunately.
I think we initially have to see which companies are interested in going into Bolivia or going back to Bolivia, whether they're from Europe or the US.
Professor Diego Von Vecano from Texas A&M University.
You've probably heard of ghosting and the world of dating.
The same trend is now happening in the jobs market though, with employers either failing to respond to candidates or posting roles that don't even exist.
Data suggests in June this year, US companies advertised more than 7 million openings, but only hired 5 million people.
Megan Lawton has been finding out more.
When Eric Thompson was made redundant from his tech job in Washington DC, he expected the hunt for a new role to be tough, but he didn't anticipate being ghosted.
Through November and December I did the job hunt thing, looking for everything under the sun, applying for as many positions.
I kept finding more and more jobs that just weren't responsive.
The experience prompted Eric to create a support group who are now calling for new US laws to stop ghost jobs.
Essentially, job postings that are misleading were never intended to be filled.
In our bill, we have this information that is required to be part of every job posting.
And everybody who posts the job has to validate that. that information.
His proposed Truth in Job Advertising Act would require expiration dates, proof a role is legitimate and penalties for employers who aren't transparent.
He's also launched a petition, which now has more than 50,000 signatures.
It took my breath away and was a little overwhelming to know that I wasn't alone in the dark.
I was so happy to get 50 people because I felt that I was screaming into the dark at one point.
In the UK.
Eilish, who works in marketing and was made redundant last year, says she's faced similar issues.
I've been ghosted by small businesses and I've also been ghosted by big corporations.
Hiring platform Greenhouse estimates a third of postings in the UK show signs of being ghost jobs.
Eilish explains she was once offered an interview but didn't ever hear back from the hiring manager.
It does just knock you down when you've built your confidence back up with the potential of an interview, to then be completely left in the dark.
Career coach and recruitment expert, Dr Jasmine Escalera, who is based in Miami, has surveyed hiring managers on why they offer ghost roles.
They might be posting these positions to actually create a talent pool.
It isn't that they don't want to hire, but they may not be hiring immediately.
But they also could potentially be inflating numbers.
So trying to show that the company or organization is growing when they're actually not.
She's concerned ghost jobs may be misleading the data that governments rely on.
We use this data to develop policy.
And so if that data is somehow skewed, then we're not really able to create the policies or the support that job seekers and employees need right now.
In Canada, some politicians are taking action.
From January, employers in Ontario with at least 25 staff must update candidates within 45 days of an interview and state whether a job is genuinely being filled.
Hopefully most employers will comply.
Here's Toronto-based employment lawyer Deborah Hudson.
My cynical side, just because I've been doing this for almost 20 years, says like how are they actually going to monitor and regulate this?
I don't think that the government has resources to be having investigations on what's happening or not.
However, if people see an issue, they can make a complaint and it will be looked into.
Until measures come into place, career experts suggest job seekers should watch for red flags, roles reposted again and again or listings left open for months.
Megan Lawton reporting.
You can hear more about that by searching for Business Daily, wherever you get your BBC podcasts from.
Now that's the sound of the iconic violin-shaped Hofner bass guitar, famously played by Paul McCartney, among many others.
The company's filed for insolvency in Germany.
It started making these instruments back in 1887 in Lübe, which is now part of the Czech Republic.
Hofner isn't the only guitar company facing discord at the moment though, with challenges from the collapse of the market after a boom during the pandemic, new US tariffs a whole list of problems.
I've been talking to Julie Robbins, who's the chief executive of Earthquaker Devices, which makes guitar pedals in Ohio.
There's a lot of difficult headwinds that folks in our industry are facing right now.
Supply chain issues and tariffs.
So for us in the U.S., it's components and things coming in.
And for a brand, a European brand like Hofner.
I'm sure they're having difficulty reaching the market, having additional tariffs on everything coming in.
On top of that, consumer spending is shifting, especially those spending on non-essentials.
So lower sales for big purchases.
There's also been a correction in the market since the pandemic.
During the pandemic, people were buying a lot of instruments and accessories because they were at home.
But after the pandemic, people started to liquidate those, put those in the used market.
And then the used market really boomed and new sales slowed.
Right.
And I suppose even people who want to have an instrument might have bought it, because they're not things that wear out particularly quickly.
That's right.
That's right.
Maybe you have one and you keep it forever.
It's not something that you're always needing to replace.
Another thing is that, you know, music trends are changing.
There's a lot more electronic music or other ways of making music, and it could reduce the demand for traditional string instruments.
Right.
So there's a kind of long term decline the impact of the pandemic and its fallout, and then the tariffs as well.
I was going to ask why the tariffs would affect the sector particularly, but maybe because it's just already dealing with all the other things you mentioned.
Well, there's tariffs on pretty much anything coming into the US and it's dependent on the country of origin.
And then there can also be a sector-specific tariff.
But it's really making it challenging to bring products in from overseas, because the tariffs can sometimes change unpredictably while they're even in transit.
So it adds a lot of additional expense for either the retailer that's purchasing it or for the consumer.
And the pedals that you make which attach to electric guitars.
Am I right in saying that they have a thousand components in each one?
That's correct.
So in other words, the supply chain for a thousand tiny components is enormously complicated.
It is.
They come from over 15 different countries and 34 different harmonized tariff codes.
So it's really difficult to navigate and manage all the changes that are constantly happening.
And how are you going about doing that as best you can?
Well, we spend a lot of time reviewing spreadsheets and trying to make predictions.
This year so far absorbed all of the costs related to tariffs, but beginning in 2026, we're putting through a price increase to be profitable on our sales.
But we've been really monitoring the market.
We've done all kinds of things that didn't pan out, such as trying to remake our supply chain, find alternate suppliers in other areas, and that ultimately didn't pan out.
We couldn't find domestic sources because these components just don't originate here.
But most of them we actually do buy from within the US, but they've just already been imported by a wholesaler.
For people who don't know, Julie, can you just tell us what Hofner guitars are, why they're special?
When I think of Hofner guitars, I think of the Beatles, the famous bass that they played.
You know, an iconic European brand.
They've been around for more than 100 years.
Many, many models.
Right.
And the fact that we're suddenly hearing about this is that just because it's a company that people will have heard of?
It's seen as a sort of classic brand.
Big bands like the Beatles have used it.
Is that why these issues that you're facing all the time have suddenly caught everyone else's attention?
Perhaps that's it.
Yeah.
A month or so ago, G&L went out of business.
That was a big brand. that had been around for a long time in the U.S.
And I've heard from some of my colleagues in the industry, some of my competitors, that there's contract manufacturers that are closing next year that are based in the US because of a decline in sales and due to the overall market conditions.
I've had about 10 customers in North America.
So retail stores go out of business in the last year.
There's definitely some really challenging headwinds for our industry.
Julie Robbins will be from Ohio.
And that's it from World Business Report.
From me, Andrew Peach, thank you for listening.
Want to know how to become the richest person in the world?
Start with the latest episode of our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire.
We're telling the story of how Elon Musk amassed half a trillion dollars from his troubled childhood in South Africa to buying Twitter and launching rockets into space, with all the boardroom dramas along the way.
Find out how he did it on Good Bad Billionaire.
Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
