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The U.S. electric grid is approaching a breaking point.
As demand soars from data centers and home energy use, our aging infrastructure can't keep up.
And the Department of Energy warns that without action, blackouts could surge 100-fold by 2030.
The good news?
One solution is already here.
Propane.
It's American-made, stored on site, and always ready.
Powering homes and businesses with cleaner, reliable energy that doesn't depend on the grid or the weather.
Learn more at propane.com.
In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
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How is it faster?
OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
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And this is Andrew Peach with World Business Report.
Thank you very much indeed for being with us today.
French MPs oust the prime minister over plans to deal with the country's deficit by cutting public spending.
We're going to be in Munich, where the European auto industry is talking about threats from the US and China.
Europe has never been able to compete on cost compared to other jurisdictions.
So they always had to be better to innovate, to be forward-looking and very competitive.
And we'll look at Donald Trump's plans to offer residency in the US for $5 million.
Let me just mention this story breaking in the last few minutes first, though.
The Murdoch family has reached a settlement that cements Lachlan Murdoch's control of the empire, which runs Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
His siblings, Prudence, Elizabeth and James, will exit the family trust.
They each walk away with over a billion from the sale of their voting shares in fox and news corp.
This is the end of years of fighting over rupert murdoch's succession plans, with lachlan murdoch now firmly in charge.
Have more reaction to this story if you stay with us here on world business report.
But first of all let's go to France, where another attempt to cut spending to tackle the country's deficit has led to another prime minister writing a resignation letter.
The French government has lost a vote of confidence in Parliament.
François Bayrou will be replaced, although it's not at all clear if anyone can put together a majority in the French Parliament right now.
For analysis.
I've been talking to Emmanuel Aureole, who's professor at the Toulouse School of Economics.
Every year our debt increases because our deficit is much larger than 3% of GDP.
It's close to 5.5% of GDP.
So our debt is rising and rising and rising all the time.
And it rises from 60% of GDP in 2000 to almost 150%.
12% of GDP today, almost doubling in a span of 25 years.
So now the different political parties, they don't deny it.
They say, OK, there is maybe an issue.
But the solution they propose are totally different depending on their position.
So for the extreme right, the solution is to throw away all the immigrants and then suddenly, by magic, France will be again with a positive budget compared to what it spent, because they claim that the big spending is by immigrants.
The extreme left is after the rich and they say well, no problem, we just tax the rich, make a special tax on the belonging of the rich, and it will solve everything.
So that's about the debate in France, and of course, as you can guess, center bloc.
It's much more on the traditional solution like cutting spending, increasing taxes, making people work more.
And this cannot fly.
I mean, there is no way these people can talk with each other, no way they can find a common ground.
And bearing in mind there doesn't have to be an election for quite a while, France could be stuck in this situation for ages.
What's your analysis of why France has a particular problem with its deficit?
I think the problem is the parliament.
We have a very radical and very fragmented parliament.
And yet we need it to vote the budget because we have no budget if the parliament is not voting it.
And we are not Spain or Belgium.
We need a budget.
If we don't have a budget, we really can do nothing.
We just can pay the civil servant and that's it.
So the country will be a bit paralyzed.
And also for our creditor and for investor, they really hate instability.
I mean, they really hate it and for good reason.
And so I think the image we send at the rest of the world is really poor.
And it's dangerous because we need people to buy our debt.
Another problem coming down the track is this promise to increase spending on defence, which isn't all that high in France.
But the country is now committed, along with other NATO nations, to increasing.
Yeah so, and that's a very good point, because if you look at how much we spend in defense, the interest of the debt is exactly the same amount and it's rising.
So we need to spend more on defense, but on other stuff, too.
We need to spend more on education here.
In the short term, what happens is President Macron chooses a new prime minister and we perhaps go round the houses again.
They come up with budget measures.
They get voted down in Parliament.
And so it continues.
Macron's unlikely to call another election.
He's ruled out standing down himself.
So then what?
I assume he will choose a new prime minister, exactly like last time it was Beirut.
And so what Beirut did because they had really no choice was to abandon the fact that the pension will not be indexed on inflation.
And so it cost 14 billion euros.
So this is the amount.
We save with reforming our retirement age.
So we lost it just because of this indexation.
And so I suspect the new prime minister will have to do something similar.
And that was Emmanuel Aureole from the Toulouse School of Economics with me.
Now, let's talk about something that happened a couple of days ago in South Korea.
The foreign minister, Cho Hyun, says he's willing to travel to Washington to talk about the arrest of hundreds of South Koreans at the Hyundai plant in the state of Georgia.
According to US officials, some workers there tried to flee, including some jumping into a nearby sewage pond, when hundreds of government agents arrived at the plant.
Our North America business correspondent Erin Delmore has been giving me the latest.
Broadly speaking, this is part of President Trump's push to reduce illegal immigration in the United States.
We've heard a bunch of his officials come out in the past couple of days talking about this.
And his border czar, Tom Holman, said that this is something that the Trump administration would continue focusing on.
He called it a worksite enforcement operation, said there would be more of them.
And he warned that quote these companies that hire illegal aliens.
They undercut their competition.
That's paying US citizens salaries.
So broadly speaking, this is part of President Donald Trump's America first workplace policy.
When you imagine a raid like this, you don't imagine hundreds of officers turning up outside a multi-billion dollar factory run by a global company.
That's what's surprising about this.
Yeah, and a global factory that's on US soil and contributing to the economic activity in that state.
You know, this facility has a huge presence in Georgia and is a big part of that state's economy.
And it is the kind of project that President Donald Trump wants to broadly be encouraging.
He's even doubling down on that, saying, bring us your very smart, talented workers.
All that we ask is that you train Americans to work at your sites.
Now, it's a pretty complicated picture on the ground.
A lot of the workers who have been detained work for contractors or subcontractors.
That, of course, complicates who is working for whom, under what status, etc.
But you can bet that it is going to put a bit of a chill over other foreign companies that operate within US borders.
Of course, and the images that we've seen of people being led away in chains, that kind of thing, it's going to have a huge impact on US relations with South Korea, right?
Thank you so much for having me.
But something like this can also take place.
It's very surprising, given the warmth and the level of collegiality that we saw in the most recent meeting between the two leaders.
And do we know why this particular factory and these individuals were targeted?
Has that really emerged yet?
You know, it's something that we're still focusing in on.
We had heard from the US attorney on Friday, and that's Margaret Heap, saying that the goal of the operation was to reduce illegal employment and prevent employers from gaining an unfair advantage by hiring unauthorized workers, and also said that another goal is to protect unauthorized workers from exploitation.
But when you hear from the companies in the countries who were affected here, they're having a different take here.
You know talking about a lot of regret and concern over US actions and saying that they're still sending people back and forth to the States, although now some trips are subject to internal company review.
And Erin just give us a sense of what Hyundai and, for that matter, the South Korean government, have had to say over the last couple of days.
Yeah.
You know, Hyundai came out pretty early on and said that none of the detainees were direct employees of the auto company.
The South Korean government talked about its concern and regret over the situation, saying that it had been in talks with the US embassy and also talking about the rights of their employees also.
And talking about how the hope would be that economic activities of their company's interest in the US, and also the rights of their citizens, wouldn't be infringed upon within US soil.
Now, that's very interesting highbrow speak for diplomatic workings on the sidelines or perhaps in the background here.
But you have to imagine that there were some pretty tough conversations being had.
That's our North America business correspondent, Erin Delmore.
This is Peter Jankowskis, who's Vice President of Research and Analysis at Arbor Financial Services in Chicago.
Peter, what did you make of this story about this raid on the Hyundai plant over the weekend?
It's such a big thing.
Well, actually, it is.
It certainly is, you know, going toward the relationship with Korea generally kind of puts some of that relationship, I think, in a little bit of a jeopardy, if you will.
I'm sorry, we seem to have lost our connection to Peter.
We'll get him back on the line.
We'll talk a bit more in a little while.
This is World Business Report with Andrew Peach here on the BBC World Service.
Now the car industry is gathering in Germany for the Munich Auto Show, where manufacturers are showing off their latest EVs and the Europeans are talking about the threat of US tariffs and China pushing for more of their market share.
Well, I've been talking about this to Sigrid de Vries, who's Director General of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association.
Global automakers, including the European and the American, and also Japanese Korean, but also Chinese.
They're now going global.
And this is a globally oriented.
They share a lot of information and also engineers and technology, and you will see that continuing.
And so they are partnering where they need to and where they find it makes a lot of sense.
And that could be in software development, could also be on electric vehicles.
So battery technology and that's how they get better, but also that's how they compete and how they strengthen and, you know, make sure that they make great products for the people that they make them for.
One of the big challenges for the auto sector in Europe is low productivity compared to other parts of the world.
Unionised labour forces perhaps haven't kept up with some of the technological developments in car manufacture.
How is all that being addressed?
By continuously upskilling and reskilling, but also focusing on innovation.
I mean, Europe has never been able to compete on cost compared to other jurisdictions.
So they always had to be better to innovate, to be forward-looking and very competitive.
And there is an excellence in car making that is still very prominent in Europe.
And that's, I think, also shown with the launches today.
That's also what's being very respected by Chinese and other competitors.
So there is still a lot to go for.
And the fight is on, I would say.
It's interesting to say Europe can't compete on cost.
Does that mean they should stop trying not worry about that, go for the luxury end of the market or the highest tech or compete in some other way?
No, I think Europe, the European Union, should take that to heart, because this is about the framework conditions for doing business.
So electricity costs, for example, are way higher in Europe compared to China or the US.
There is also a truckload of regulation that they have to deal with and that eats up engineering capacity, and that adds costs.
So I mean Europe cannot change really how others set themselves up in the world, but they can change what framework they offer for businesses.
And this is What they really need to look at now.
Competitiveness needs to improve and also, you know, economic security and the resilience of supply chains.
That is what needs to be worked on.
And that's where industry really needs also policymakers to play ball.
And looking elsewhere in the world again, the US wants to boost its auto manufacture.
It's doing it by punishing other countries with tariffs on imported cars.
What's all the talk about that at the Munich show?
But there was, of course, a lot of worry and concern.
I mean the tariffs imposed by the US administration.
They've made doing business much harder because that leads to a lot of additional costs at a time that they already have, you know, high cost to grapple with.
So that is indeed an important worry.
There's also a lot of uncertainty around the globe and we're in a de-globalizing world.
The situation for CEOs has really changed and they need to also respond to that by diversifying supply chain, managing their businesses in a different way.
And that's what they're doing.
Another thing I know the industry would love is for the European Union to get rid of its ban on combustion engine cars by 2035.
We want this transformation to work and having a very rigid cutoff point, and also going for zero emissions for everyone in every corner of the European Union.
It will be very, very challenging, especially in such a short frame of time.
So we need this transformation to work better.
Electric is the future, but the transition is not going to plan.
So we need more flexibility, transition technologies need to get more room, and that will provide then also the industrial perspective for suppliers and manufacturers to bring out new vehicles and conquer markets.
So we're indeed in talks with the European Commission to modify the path.
So not to change the intent, or it's not a lack of motivation but we need to change methods and framework.
And that was Sigrid de Vries, Director General of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, with the car industry gathered for the next few days in Munich.
The U.S. electric grid is approaching a breaking point.
As demand soars from data centers and home energy use, our aging infrastructure can't keep up.
And the Department of Energy warns that without action, blackouts could surge 100-fold by 2030.
The good news?
One solution is already here.
Propane.
It's American made, stored on site, and always ready.
Powering homes and businesses with cleaner, reliable energy that doesn't depend on the grid or the weather.
Learn more at propane.com.
In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database application development and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.
How is it faster?
OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
Cheaper?
OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.
Better?
In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.
This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment.
Try OCI for free.
Head to oracle.com slash strategic.
That's oracle.com slash strategic.
You're listening to World Business Report with Andrew Peach here on the BBC World Service.
Now, earlier this year, the US President, Donald Trump, unveiled plans for selling a gold card visa for 5 million, offering permanent residency in the US and a path to citizenship.
Globally, this sort of thing has been controversial.
Do super rich people use schemes like this as tax plans, insurance plans or something else?
And should people with deep pockets be able to skip the queue anyway?
My colleague Josh Martin has been finding out.
Migration to the United States has been symbolised by the green card for more than a century, but US President Donald Trump's latest announcement on visas took a more optimistic tone and a more eye-catching colour.
The gold card, remember the words, the gold card.
While cracking down on undocumented migrants, the White House launched a plan to hand out residency visas to any foreign investors who passed background checks, so long as they paid up.
We're going to be putting a price on that card of about 5 million and that's going to give you green card privileges plus.
It's going to be a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.
But a few months on, after the gold card website has launched, it's still waiting for the details.
Despite what the president told reporters in the Oval Office, residency by investment and its relation, citizenship by investment, have existed for decades.
They even share a similar nickname as Trump's gold card, commonly called golden visas and golden passports, respectively.
When Portugal launched its golden visa program in 2012, it hoped that foreign investors would revive its property market after a crash.
The program caught the eye of Hong Kong citizen Lily Chan.
We travel to Europe at least once a year for holidays and things.
So I have been to Portugal before.
It was peaceful, safe, good weather, good food, and it's cheap.
In 2017, I was thinking about retirement and try to diversify my money.
It's a EU passport, so I will be free to go to different countries.
I don't have to live in Portugal at the end, even I get a passport.
And I only need to spend seven days out of a year there.
The property is cheap.
And although golden passports might grab the headlines due to alleged criminals exploiting them, golden visas can offer an insurance policy for citizens living in politically dicey circumstances.
No wonder then that historically...
They've been purchased mainly by citizens of mainland China and the Middle East.
Hong Kong's political situation also influenced Lily.
The Golden Visa program that Lily used for Portugal, which was based on residential property investment, helped channel 75 billion euros, or 87 billion dollars, into the Portuguese economy.
But it no longer exists, in part because of the overheating housing market in places like Lisbon, where Lily bought and renovated her apartment.
The list of places that'll grant you a golden visa is actually growing, even as the EU pulls up the drawbridge on a back route into the bloc.
But one country at the bottom of the world is drawing the type of wealthy people President Trump would like to invest in the United States.
And they're not from China or the Middle East, they're from the US itself.
Well, I had been traveling to New Zealand for quite an extensive time, more than 30 years.
And I made the decision to move my business there and also to move there full time.
So it was natural for me to enter the country as part of a program to bring investment into New Zealand.
That's Mark Bergman, a US tech investor and venture capitalist who moved from Silicon Valley to New Zealand under a previous iteration of the small country's Golden Visa program.
I view it more as opportunity.
I'm investing in New Zealand and I'm expecting to see significant economic return.
It's sort of up to me if I do a bad job.
Obviously, I won't see those returns.
But my hope is that I will make significant return and create great value within New Zealand.
Mark's level of commitment is somewhat of an anomaly of these programs.
For the poor island nations of the Caribbean and Pacific who first started selling passports, it was a near perfect product.
Selling official documents boosted government revenues, while the super-rich would rarely relocate or put pressure on public services.
New Zealand's investor visa was designed to be the opposite of that.
The vast majority of the world's population will live, work and die in the same country they were born into.
Golden visas offer a way around this for the wealthy few.
But countries joining the multi-billion dollar marketplace offering residency and then passports to the highest bidder may find that investors are not necessarily loyal shoppers.
I'll leave the last words to my two guests who have gone through the residency by investment process.
Each have different levels of commitment to their new, sometimes home.
I've been coming to New Zealand and I've been running a business in New Zealand for many years.
Having moved full time and obtained a permanent residency, it's a clear shift.
Whereas before, there was always this sense of, well, maybe you're just a tourist.
Now they see that I am a Kiwi along with them.
It takes time to grow into that, you know.
I don't want to be too attached to it because there's a lot of uncertainty going on.
You know, it's a business deal so far.
And you can hear more of Joshua's report on golden visas by searching for Business Daily, wherever you get your BBC podcasts from.
Let's go back to our main news today.
The French government has lost a vote of confidence in Parliament.
The Prime Minister Francois Bayrou will have to resign.
Tomorrow.
He'd wanted to cut public spending to tackle France's national debt, but didn't get the support of MPs.
Now there'll be a new prime minister.
But can any French MP command a majority for the sort of economic measures that people generally seem to think are necessary, like Emmanuel Aureole, who we were speaking to a little earlier in the programme?
Let's talk to the BBC's Pierre-Antoine Denis, who's with me.
Just talk us through the drama of today, because this was like some sort of slow, unfolding car crash.
Everyone could see what was going to happen and couldn't stop it.
Yeah, 100%, Andrew.
So basically around the end of the summer, François Bayrou, the outgoing prime minister, now went on a campaign to try and basically to try and change fate a little bit.
Everyone knew that this budget that he was going to try and pass was always going to be a problem.
And before the discussions over the budget, he tried to do, you know, one of these big announcements like I'm going to put my neck on the line and you're going to vote for me on whether you like me or not.
And if you don't like me then I'll go, because there is no point trying to pass my budget and waste all of our time.
So he tried to create this of what he actually called this common truth, this common consensus that we all have.
That's what his words were in the Parliament today, to try and bring consensus in the Assembly.
Obviously, it didn't work out.
He's been out with that vote with quite a high margin and everyone saw it coming.
Everyone knew that the next budget on the table was always going to be a tricky situation.
And, as you said, when it tabled this idea of 44 billion euros in budget cuts, freezing on all welfare plans, trimming pensions and even scrapping two national holidays to increase productivity in France.
Everyone knew that this was always going to be ending in this exact scenario.
And so this is where we are.
So there seems to be broad agreement that France does need to address its deficit. way of doing it really is by cutting spending but when you come to any measures that add up to a substantial amount of cutting spending as you say welfare pensions national holidays those kind of things no one wants to i don't know dip their hands in the blood no one wants to be responsible for it That's exactly it, Andrew.
And if you listen to the different MPs today in the parliament, everyone kind of agree.
Yes, we do need to cut.
We do need to find a way, because the debt, to give you an idea rises by 5000 euros every second in France.
You also have the idea that it's double the limit of the 60% of GDP allowed by the European Union.
It is the first highest debt ratio in the Eurozone after Greece and Italy.
Everyone agrees that this needs to be tackled.
But you're right.
No one really wants to get their hands dirty.
And that was all the words of François Bayrou saying, I took this challenge on myself.
And, you know, you don't even want to believe in me.
You don't give me a shot at it because you are...
He believes that there are political arguments around it, and they are because of the impopularity of himself and Emmanuel Macron, the president, and his desire, from this unlikely union between the far left and the far right, to try and topple this government, eventually trying and put Macron's neck on the line himself, trying to put pressure on him, because they are accusing Emmanuel Macron of not respecting the results of the snap election that Emmanuel Macron called last summer, which resulted in this very fragile coalition, which makes France ungovernable at the minute.
Politically, what happens now is Macron appoints a new prime minister, and they spent weeks or months coming to probably, conclusions that aren't that dissimilar to the ones that have just been put to parliament.
They get put to parliament again, they get voted down again.
So we go on, possibly for some months or even years.
Meantime, what happens to France's economy?
Because the situation gets worse.
The situation does get worse for some of the numbers I've said.
And it is true that the issue currently is... that France has to repay more than it produces.
And therefore, as it stands now, with a budget that is now coming to an end that was the one of 2024 which was this emergency measure that one can take in Parliament because of, because of disagreements within the chamber, which is likely to be what's going to happen this year.
Ultimately, you keep on rising the debt, you keep on rising the amount of money that you're owing to creditors.
And you're right.
The problem is that the France's economic situation only gets worse at the minute.
And this is why the different parties are calling for actual snap presidential election to finally put the vote back to the people and finally find a new agreement politically.
Antoine, thank you very much indeed.
Let me just finish by updating on the story that broke about half an hour ago, just before the programme started.
The years-long succession battle within Rupert Murdoch's media empire has drawn to a close.
His son Lachlan, will control the group after Rupert Murdoch's conservative leanings, as the other members of the Murdoch family who've been involved in the legal dispute walk away with billions of dollars.
That's it from me, Andrew Peach, and the team on World Business Report.
Thank you for listening to the programme.
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