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Hi, I'm Matt. And I'm Leah, and we're from the Grown Up Stuff podcast.
And just in time for tax season, on this week's episode, we're chatting with CPA Lisa Green Lewis about how small businesses can tackle their taxes using TurboTax Business.
A Forbes study mentioned that a whopping 93 % of small businesses overpay their taxes, and 17 % of Gen Zers believed that you could write off any expense as a business expense.
So... I can't blame them.
...it's really important to do your taxes right.
Listen to Growing Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
And this is Andrew Peech with World Business Report.
Today, as gold hits record highs, it's not only commodity traders who are celebrating.
If you look at the price of gold over the past couple of years and compare that to the price of cocaine, gold is a much more attractive, illicit economy today.
And beyond tariffs, we'll look at the economic challenges for Canada's new Prime Minister.
Also, where is the debris from those L .A.
wildfires ending up?
At this landfill, you're not even allowed to throw away a pink can or an energiser battery.
So why are you allowed to bring homes full of burnt batteries, iPads, televisions, cars?
God knows what else.
First, gold. The price hit the $3 ,000 per ounce mark for the first time today, as demand for gold surges is amid economic uncertainty.
That's up 14 % since the start of the year.
Gold is always seen as a safe asset for investors.
It's often sought after in times of instability.
But why? To answer that and all my questions about gold, here's Adrianne Ash who is Director of Research at Bullionvolt.
Gold is relatively useless in terms of productive use but socially, it's always been used as the ultimate store of value.
you. And yeah, that seems to be where the markets want to be right now.
So if I buy gold, as people have been, that's what's pushing the value up, where is it?
Well, I mean, there's very many ways you can buy gold.
I mean, the physical gold product, you might buy as jewelry, you might buy it as coins or small bars, or you might buy it whereby somebody else looks after it for you.
And it's cared for in a vault.
You know, there are very many ways of doing that worldwide.
But it is about the physical products.
And And that's gold's appeal, is its physicality.
You know, this is a lump of metal, which nobody else's financial performance can deprive you of.
And I guess it is the gold bars in vaults.
That's the primary form of gold that we're seeing traded, that's pushing the price up at the moment.
Yeah? I mean, jewelry demand is very important to the gold price.
But what really makes the price of gold move is when large investors' investment cash is going into gold, it typically goes into gold bars, in vaults, because that's where it's liquid.
If you think about the gold bars of classical imagination, right, Italian Job, James Bond, those large 400 amps 12 .5 kilo bars, that's really the market in gold worldwide, that's you know, that's what's setting the price.
And is it held by individuals, by companies in vaults, as well as by central banks, because again it's the kind of Fort Knox Bank of gold, we tend to conjure up in our mind.
But are lots of people holding gold in vaults?
Central banks are increasingly important to the gold market.
And this has really been a change in the last 10 -15 years since the Western banking financial crisis.
Central bank demand has really been very important to the gold market.
But yes, you're talking about private investors, investment companies, hedge funds, family offices, owning gold bars as tangible property within specialist bullion vaults, where they can buy and sell very quickly, very easily.
And security is absolutely the primary concern there.
The security of those bars is absolutely paramount.
Of course. We've had Donald Trump and Elon Musk talking about going to sea to check on the gold at Fort Knox.
Can we all do that if we buy some gold?
Can we go and see it?
Is my bit of gold in the same gold bar as someone else's gold?
The issue there is that if I was to show you a pile of yellow bricks would you actually know whether you were looking at actually a pile of gold bars or something else?
What you want is for somebody to go and say yeah these bars are of the quality as advertised, they are of acceptable market quality and they are all there in good.
So it's about really knowing that the material is what it should be and that it's all there in full.
So if you're going to do a Fort Knox audit what you're actually talking about is really a Fort Knox inspection and And that's a very much bigger job and it's gonna take a long time to do all of those bars.
Of course. And the other US vaults are holding for the government.
I'm presuming that we think of gold as being so precious at the top of the tree if you like, not only because of its scarcity but because of its kind of social history.
It must be. Lots of people say that gold has no intrinsic value.
It doesn't do anything productively.
You know, that a gold does so little it doesn't even rust.
But that's actually its appeal.
Gold has been the ultimate prize in all cultures and in all ages throughout history.
So if you look at the way that humanity actually values this stuff, it's always been the number one asset class.
That's where it really gets its safe haven appeal from today.
Nobody else's financial performance or survival can deprive you of metal which you own outright.
And the big difference with other forms of physical assets, is that gold is eminently tradable.
It's the most deeply liquid of all physical assets.
you can buy and sell this stuff 24 -7 pretty much.
So really gold's appeal is that it is deeply liquid, but it is also very, very physical.
And that I think is what makes it such a good diversifier when other things do badly over time.
And in the modern world of cryptocurrency and internet transactions, it's incredible really that when there's market volatility, there's still this flight to gold, it's like something that sort of dates back centuries.
Again, I think what you're going back to is that underpinning of the physical reality of gold bullion as being this primary asset.
Underwriting so many other things in the financial world today when you really come down to it, what do you want?
Gold in a vault, locked down, secure or some digits on a blockchain?
Which of these things is going to hold its value when things really turn bad?
That was Adrian Ashe from Bullion Vault.
Now other winners when there's a flight to gold are criminals.
When the value goes up, there's more incentive for illegal mining and just as demand on the commodities markets rises, so does the flow of illicit gold.
I've been talking to Julia Yansoura about this.
She's an expert in environmental crime and illicit finance at FACT, the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition.
Unfortunately, what we're seeing is that the increasing price of gold is increasing profits for criminal groups that are involved in the industry.
We've seen that transnational crime groups are diversifying away from drug trafficking and getting into other sorts of illicit economies, gold being one of the major ones.
So, we're talking about illegal mining of gold here.
We're talking about illegal mining, but we're also talking about trafficking of illegally sourced gold, and we're talking about gold as a money laundering strategy, which is something we're seeing more and more.
Interesting. So I mean obviously, the gold always has great value and the value has gone up, which you can actually see the price of gold on the markets translating into more criminal activity.
And I think you have to also map it out compared to other sorts of illicit economies.
If you look at the price of gold over the past couple of years and compare that to the price of cocaine, gold is much more attractive, illicit economy today.
Without wanting to give people listing ideas, what do you do when you come into possession of some gold?
How do you sell it?
How do you move it around?
How do you get rid of it?
How do you make money out of it?
Criminal groups have different strategies that they use.
One of them is investing in illegal gold mines.
Another is to get more involved in the transport of illicit gold.
Sometimes it's exported via formal trade channels.
Sometimes it is exported more informally using human couriers.
So, there are a variety of different strategies.
They're also using the gold to launder drug proceeds.
When we think about gold, you tend to think about the kind of gold bars that are held in central banks.
Is that the same when you're carrying it around illicitly on an aircraft?
Are you carrying a gold bar?
Yes. You know, if you're taking a regular flight, you have a backpack full of cash, you would actually have to declare that to the authorities upon crossing an international border, but the same is not true for gold in most countries.
We see an increasing issue with something called gold concentrate.
It looks like dirty sand, and it contains gold.
That's typically exported via maritime ports.
We also see issues with what's called junk gold.
We see issues with recycled gold.
So, you know, it is the sort of classic gold bars, but it's also going well beyond that.
Yeah. And once you receive your gold as payment for whatever, what can you do with it.
Yeah, so gold can be used for a lot of different things that can be you know sold and then you can take the cash and put that in a bank account.
For example, you can use it's often sold to sort of unwittingly businesses that are not taking their due diligence responsibilities very seriously.
So a lot of times it's a legal goal, it's entering the legal supply chain.
So interesting, what can be done to try and curb this because in South Africa, we saw than trying to crack down on illegal gold mining with terrible consequences for the humans who were involved in it.
They were, you know, starved out of the mine.
Are there any other ways the authorities can try and deal with this?
Yeah, I believe that the best way to curb this problem is not at the mining site.
I would argue that a much more promising way to address this problem is by using financial strategies from the anti -money laundering and counterterrorism financing toolbox.
For example, it's very important to know who is actually behind the companies involved in the export or import of this gold.
So, rather than solutions focused exclusively at the mining site, it's more solutions that take into consideration illicit finance and some of these anti -money laundering tools that we already have and we already know that they work.
Elicit Finance expert, Juliet Yansoura.
Back to where we started on the goal, we're talking about because of the activity on the markets.
Chris Low is the Chief Economist at FHN Financial in New York.
Give us the low down on the gold on the markets today, then, and why we're so focused on it, Chris.
Well, yeah, tremendous demand, especially here in the U .S.
And as a result, the price of gold on the exchanges traded above $3 ,000 an ounce for the first time ever today.
And this is reflecting worries about inflation, worries about the dollar, worries about the stock market, and of course worries about politics.
And when you put all these things together, trying to get away from risk, the safest place, the way to eliminate all these risks, is gold.
US consumer sentiment has plunged to a two and a half year low.
I don't think anyone was expecting this particular consequence of the second Trump administration, but there we are.
Well, that's right.
And I think a big part of what's going on is that the actual activity data we have, industrial production, employment, even the trade numbers, they all still mostly predate Donald Trump coming into office.
So we see 87 different directives out of executive orders coming out of the White House.
We see these terrified going on, but we can't see the consequences.
And it's clearly making people very nervous.
Just in the last hour, we've had some better news from Washington, which is that a potential government shutdown this weekend has been averted.
That's right. There was a continuing resolution that funds the budget through the end of the fiscal year, which is the end of September.
It wasn't going to pass.
Democrats said they would not support the bill.
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer changed his mind and explained it this way.
He said, look, Trump is trying to shut down the government and picking and choosing where he can do it.
If we actually do shut it down, then the executive has exclusive right to decide where to spend the money.
And Congress should not give him that power.
And for that reason, they changed their mind at the 11th hour and passed the bill.
Chris, thank you. Chris Lowe, chief economist at FHN Financial in New York.
This is World Business Report from the BBC World Service with me, Andrew Peach.
Mark Carney has been sworn in as Canada's new prime minister.
The former central banker steered Canada and the UK through financial crises, but now has a whole new set of challenges.
After being sworn in, he said he could work with the US President Donald Trump, who's threatening those tariffs that could devastate the Canadian economy.
But remember, it was already under pressure before Mr Trump came back to the White House in January.
So what will the new cabinet be focusing on?
Growing this great country by putting more money in Canadians' pockets, by ensuring that government spends less so Canada can invest more, by building millions of homes, by making Canada's superpower in both conventional and clean energies, by creating new trade corridors with reliable partners, and by forging one Canadian economy out of 13.
Joining us to discuss the road ahead is Fenn Hampson, Professor of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa and Co -Chair of an expert group on U .S.-Canada relations.
Fenn, thanks for being with us.
So, leading the tariffs aside, we've got to remember that Canada's economy was in such a mess.
It led to the downfall of the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, which is why we now have Mark Carney in the job.
What are the economic challenges that led to that, that are still there?
Well, Andrew, inflation was running, or has been running around 2%.
GDP growth in the second half of 2022, sorry, 2024 was a modest 1 .4%.
The unemployment rate has been sort of hovering between six and seven percent, closer to seven percent.
And I think reflecting some of that uncertainty in the economy, the fact that growth is anemic, the Bank of Canada very recently announced it was cutting its key interest rate by some 25 basis points to 2 .7 .5%.
But the real Achilles heel, Andrew, of the Canadian economy is productivity.
Canada has seen no productivity growth in recent years.
Over the past four decades, we have actually slipped significantly.
In 2023, we were the worst performer in the OECD.
3D and Mark Carney has certainly got productivity, the productivity challenge firmly in his crosshairs.
Because one of the big criticisms of Justin Trudeau was that the economy was never his number one priority, that certainly will be the case of Mark Carney, it's his whole field of expertise.
He's really selling himself to Canadians as an economic crisis manager, important to remember that he was head of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 -2009 financial crisis played an important role there in keeping the Canadian economy afloat.
Obviously working with Gordon Brown and others to do so.
But that's his calling card, that's his resume, and it's obviously something Canadians are very focused on right now because people are worried about job losses and the impact that tariffs, particularly a full -fledged tariff war, will have on the Canadian economy by some estimates could drive the economy, which some say is probably going to fall into a mild recession, into a deep recession that could see anywhere from a 4 to 7 percent contraction in GDP.
And there's an election in Canada coming soon.
The Conservatives were nailed on to win it.
Maybe now not so much because the Liberals have had a surge in popularity with the country being under pressure from the U .S.
Do you think Carney's gonna call a snap election soon?
Well, I think he probably will because right now even though he's Prime Minister and head of the Liberal Party he doesn't have a seat in Parliament.
And I think if he's going to undertake some of the reforms that he's talked about he's going to need a mandate from the Canadian public.
I mean it is interesting to note that his first day in office, he was sworn in this morning in in Ottawa.
There was a cabinet meeting and then right after it, almost in Trumpian fashion, I mean this is unprecedented, he invited the media into the cabinet room.
And with great flourish signed an order removing the consumer carbon, carbon tax which has been very contentious domestically, Carney himself was a strong supporter of the carbon tax as Trudeau's economic advisor, but he's now doing a 180.
Why is he doing that?
Well, one of the reasons he's doing it is because that has been one of the key planks in the conservative leader's platform, Pierre Poliev, the leader of the Conservative party, who has said that should he win the election, whenever it happens, he would get rid of the carbon tax.
So, Carney is moving quickly into what we would call conservative territory.
Fen thank you Fen Hampson live with us next to Lebanon where teams from the International Monetary Fund and the country's political leaders have been trying to find a way out of its economic black hole.
The organisation has praised Lebanon's recent policy actions.
Here's line shake Moussa who runs a bakery in Beirut.
I would say it's definitely been extremely challenging for small businesses generally over the past four or five years and one of the challenges that we continue to face at the bakery is the fluctuations in the price of raw materials which disrupts our workflow and also forces us to increase prices of our items regularly.
So for example, two years ago when the Russian -Ukrainian War started, we suffered a shortage of imported white flour which largely comes from Ukraine and this forced us to rethink our bread formulas for a couple of weeks and that means that for a couple of weeks we lost out on valuable business which really makes a difference for a bakery of our escape.
Currently, one of the things we're suffering from is a shortage of chocolate and brown sugar worldwide, which in theory does not really seem like a huge challenge when you put it against everything else we're experiencing in Lebanon.
But for a bakery of our size, this really kind of disrupts our workflow, because it means that all of our items are affected and it forces us to kind of rethink the way we're making them.
And that also means that we're losing out on valuable business in this time.
We also heard about the challenges in Lebanon from Aline Carnaakian, who runs MaRig, a restaurant in Beirut.
You are dealing with a country without banking systems.
So you don't have loans, you don't have cash flow, you don't have anything that backs you up.
Any business needs bank today.
You need the system to, to, to be paid, to pay, with what's going on with IMF, so they are, with the new government, they are starting to renegotiate.
If, if, if we are lucky and The deal is done with the end of the summer, August or something.
Then we have hope. But if it's postponed until October, November, then December is all the festive seasons.
And next year we have elections, so everything will be postponed and nothing will be done.
And this is very important to finalize with IMF so that we have the restructuring and we have the banking system back, and we have the money in flow to rebuild and to restart working as a normal country.
The question now is whether the IMF deal might reboot the banking sector.
To answer that and talk about the costs of reconstruction, here's the former Lebanese economy minister and central bank governor Dr. Nasr Sadie in Dubai.
The sums that we're talking about in terms of construction.
The World Bank has a relatively recent assessment.
They're talking anywhere in the region of say $11 billion to $14 billion.
I think that's an underestimate.
So my estimate is closer than the region of $20 billion, $25 billion that Lebanon is going to require in part for this reconstructing or what was destroyed, but what you also need is to look at infrastructure requirements.
There have practically been no infrastructure investment in Lebanon in the past seven, eight years.
So what you're talking about is a massive reconstruction and redevelopment program.
So the challenges faced by Lebanon, which the IMF is pointing to are substantial, to say the least.
Now cleaning up from one of the largest wildfire disasters in recent history, takes a while.
The first phase of the operation around Los Angeles involved taking truckloads of hazardous waste.
Now the cleanup is in phase 2 which involves removing the remaining debris and some of it is ending up near parks and schools in LA County which isn't going down too well.
Marketplaces Kaylee Wells reports from Calabas in California.
Dozens of protesters are standing in a line at the entrance of the Calabas's landfill, about 30 miles from downtown LA, blocking trucks from carting in garbage.
You might hear Calabasas and think really wealthy, like the Kardashians.
And to be fair, Courtney is among the protesters today.
But on this side of town, the sea of mid -century tract homes is more upper middle class.
The median home sale price of $1 .2 million isn't much higher than the county average of nearly $900 ,000.
They're mad because LA County selected this landfill to receive the ash and dirt that was left over from the LA wildfires after the household hazardous materials got cleared.
That's the job of the Army Corps of Engineers which didn't respond to a request for comment.
LA County Sanitation Department told me in a statement that all the toxic stuff gets separated out of the debris headed here.
They cannot guarantee that it's non -hazardous and our argument is there is no way to sort through the ash.
Resident Kelly Martino says this is a local municipal landfill.
It's not designed to receive hazardous waste.
At this landfill you're not even allowed to throw away a pink can or an energizer battery.
So why are you allowed to bring homes full of burnt batteries, iPads, televisions, cars, God knows what else?
When you're sorting through ash and dirt, finding all of the toxic stuff is a tall order.
Some of it might still be in there.
Asbestos, lead, PFAS, arsenic, mercury, Calabasas Dr. Tanya Altman, is with the American Academy of Pediatrics.
What I'm concerned about as a pediatrician is that in years to come, we are gonna see more cases of cancer and tumors and autoimmune issues and illnesses and diseases just from the environmental exposure of these contaminants.
Thousands of residents live within a mile of this landfill.
Dallas Lawrence leads the local school board.
It's in the immediate vicinity of five schools.
It's 100 yards away from a park used by kids every single day.
This is not a not in my backyard an envy issue.
This is a not in anybody's backyard.
And until a couple weeks ago this waste wasn't supposed to come here because it was coming from too far away, but the LA County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to allow it.
The board also expanded the landfill's operating hours and the number of tons of waste it can take every day.
The bordering city of Calabasas filed for a preliminary restraining order to stop the trucks, but the court denied it.
Because legally, under current circumstances, the county is allowed to send this waste to landfills where it wouldn't normally go.
Here's Calabasas Mayor Peter Kraut.
The ordinance in 2020 was specifically designed to allow for an expedited cleanup in the event of an emergency declared by the governor.
It's also happened before.
The landfill took in debris from the last major wildfire, the Woolsey Fire, in 2018.
There are upsides to doing things this way.
This landfill is closer to some of the fire -devastated areas than the alternatives, which means truck trips are shorter so the cleanup goes faster and doesn't require as much diesel fuel.
The state can stop it at any time if there's a threat to public health, but until then you know I feel cheated I feel linesighted." Crouch says the city of Calabasas didn't know this was coming until the day the public found out.
Now, his hands are tired.
The Palisades homeowners are entitled to a speedy cleanup.
What I don't want to see is a speedy cleanup and a health hazard brought into the city of Calabasas.
After about an hour, police arrived and broke up the protests.
On the last day of the landfill received its first loads of debris.
Calabasas and its residents have filed lawsuits to try and stop it, but while they wait for the courts, the trucks keep coming.
That's Kaley Wells from Marketplace, our U .S.
broadcast partner reporting from Calabasas in LA County.
There's more online for you at bbc .com.
news from me, Andrew Peach, and the team here on World Business Report.
Thanks for being with us on the BBC World Service.
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