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Their company's success helped build a nation.
The company is such a big part of Korea's economy.
But who are the family behind one of the world's tech giants?
Major corporate empire that we now know today, samsung.
Inheritance samsung from the bbc world service explores the real-life dramas of the lee family and their company, samsung.
There's a succession style drama underneath of all this inheritance samsung coming soon wherever you get your bbc podcasts.
Oil hovers above 100 on the world's biggest supply shock in years.
Global oil prices surged.
The price of a barrel of oil smashed through $100 at one point.
There are still lots of unknowns, so the disruption won't end overnight.
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Vishala Sripathma.
On the way, volatility in the oil markets continue as Iran vows to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.
And a California jury is mulling over whether social media giants can be held liable for harm to children.
So let's start with the markets, because the International Energy Agency is warning tonight that the war in the Middle East has triggered the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
They say intensified Iranian attacks on infrastructure and shipping in the Gulf are now feeding directly into global energy prices.
And Brent crude is reflecting that.
It's pushed back above 100 a barrel as traders price in the growing threat of to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most critical shipping lanes.
Here's how it's being reported in the US.
Crude oil jumps back toward 100 a barrel.
As the new supreme leader says, the straits will remain shut.
Developing right now on Morning News, Now overnight, Iran striking more tankers near and along the critical Strait of Hormuz.
The International Energy Agency has agreed to release a record 400 million barrels of oil from emergency reserves.
So some news reports there from the United States.
The IEA says everything now depends on how quickly tanker traffic can safely resume through the strait.
Until then, oil supplies will stay tight and prices will stay high.
Analysts warn that even a short delay could force refiners and governments to scramble for alternative supplies, driving energy costs higher, risking fresh inflation pressures and also potentially squeezing economic growth.
So what does this all mean for the markets and for the months ahead?
Susanna Streeter is Chief Investment Strategist for Wealth Club.
Hello, Susanna, how are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
Very busy covering and analysing all of these developments for Sharla.
I bet you've had a hectic day.
Well, thank you very much for joining us.
With today.
The markets were interesting because I was having a look at the graph of the FTSE 100 and it was up and down like anything.
Which industries would you say, Susanna, have been most vulnerable, would you say?
Well, you saw the immediate effect for energy intensive industries and the transport sector.
Of course, airlines the first to be hit.
But it's really going to be energy intensive industries across the board.
I mean the fertilizer industry.
That's going to be one hit and that will have tremendous knock-on effects for food production.
But also we're talking steel production.
Any kind of heavy industry that is very reliant on energy is going to be hit.
And that is why you've seen certain exchanges around the world.
For example, South Korea's KOSPI particularly badly hit.
Also, Japan's Nikkei has fallen pretty dramatically during different sessions over the past week or so because the countries are so reliant on imported energy.
And so you're seeing this really reflected in industries right across the board, because there will also be knock-on effects to other kind of secondary industries, even within the hospitality and the services industry, because of higher energy bills.
And the big worry is that it will lead to inflation.
And not just the kind of temporary inflation caused by high energy prices, but more deep-seated inflation, if companies feel that they have to pass on the cost of higher energy prices onto the prices they charge to their customers and potentially in the pay that they give to their employees.
And that is why central banks are worried.
And clearly ordinary people will be very concerned about that.
And if this war doesn't end in the next couple of weeks?
We've had some suggestions about when it might end could we see the oil price climb even further?
Well, certainly we have had those warnings.
And I do think that the longer this goes on for, the more we will see Brent crude creep up.
Now we've had the unprecedented release of emergency supplies, coordinated by the International Energy Agency 400 million barrels.
That's only going to last so long.
And it won't fully replace if this conflict continues for many more weeks.
It won't replace what's been lost in terms of production because those big oil producers in the Middle East Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq they are already reducing production because storage facilities are filling up fast.
Saudi Arabia can pump some out via a pipeline, but simply not enough to replace what they would ordinarily be supplying to the world.
And so that is the big worry that the prices will continue to ramp up, because they dipped when that emergency release announcement came out, but then quickly went back up again.
Yes, lots of volatility there.
Susanna, thank you.
Always great to have you on.
Susanna Streeter, Chief Investment Strategist for Wealth Club.
Well, as we've been hearing, the impact of this war has been felt far and wide.
My colleague, Sarah Rogers, has been hearing from businesses around the world on how it's affecting them.
Global oil prices said... The price of a barrel of oil smashed through $100 at one point.
There are still lots of unknowns, so the disruption won't end overnight.
Yes, lots of unknowns.
And those prices will be out of date by the time you're listening to this.
So rapid have been the changes.
The conflict in Iran is in its second week, but the economic impact is starting to hit home, wherever you live.
What is it, four bucks right here?
This is kind of insane.
It's happening so fast, it's only going to get worse.
I definitely am feeling the pinch.
I travel a lot, and yes, this is very expensive.
You know, I look at the new prices and I expect them to go down.
But I mean, obviously they're going up and I just don't understand.
Prices at the pumps already rising, say those people in LA and New York.
Now, unless you work in oil or shipping, the Strait of Hormuz may well be something that hasn't troubled you before.
But as the conflict blocks gas, oil and other exports, the supply shock could make nearly everything we buy more expensive if it isn't reopened.
Vincent Clegg, the CEO of the Danish shipping giant Maersk, told the BBC of the risks.
For us, the main concern is the safety of our crews, is the safety of our assets.
And as long as there are significant drone capabilities, no assurance of a truce, then it's very hard for us to put our colleagues and our ship in harm's way and risk having an attack be successful and create damage or loss of life in the process.
The world's largest oil producer, Saudi Aramco, has said the longer the conflict in Iran causes disruption to exports, the greater the global impact.
And some countries are more at risk than others.
India imports 90% of its oil largely from the Gulf and the exposure is substantial.
Restaurants and hotels warn of closures as cooking fuel is restricted and homes are prioritised.
This will impact the working people, students more than families.
But the hotel industry will face a huge impact because of this.
There's no gas supply in the hotel.
So what are we going to do?
It's time to shut the hotel.
There's no gas.
In Pakistan, schools have closed.
Bangladesh has closed universities and there's fuel rationing there and in the Philippines.
Seeing the rush over the last two days, it seems there is no oil in the country.
People who need fuel are purchasing it and those who don't need it are also purchasing it.
Those who used to buy fuel for 4 US dollars are now buying it for 17 US dollars.
Those who need only half a tank are filling a full tank and then coming back again after leaving it at home.
And financial markets have also been rattled.
In South Korea, not one but two stock exchange circuit breakers after sharp losses.
President Lee Jae-myung also announced a price cap on domestic gasoline and diesel.
We need to swiftly introduce and boldly implement the cap, as the public is the first and hardest hit by inflation from energy price hikes.
In Europe, measures aren't anywhere near as severe, but it is being felt through higher transport and manufacturing costs.
Jack Baxter is from logistics company Europa Worldwide, which is based in the UK.
He told the BBC it's been pretty stressful.
That's one way to describe it.
Unfortunately, we don't have a massive wealth of reserve.
Our business is moving goods from A to B and fuel represents about 25% of our operating cost.
Our profit margins are pretty tight.
So we have about 3% profit margins.
So it's important that we seek to immediately pass that through to our customers.
And our customers, therefore, seek to pass that onwards to the consumers.
So when oil flows unevenly, the cost of that instability shows up on receipts around the world.
Sarah Rogers reporting there.
Well, Washington is preparing to override a century-old shipping law, a move that could dramatically change how oil and fuel travel between America's own ports.
The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, which normally requires any goods moved between American ports to be carried on.
Ships built in the US, owned by Americans and flying the US flag could soon be put on hold.
President Trump is proposing a 30-day waiver allowing foreign-flagged vessels to transport oil gasoline diesel, liquefied natural gas and fertiliser between US ports.
And the most significant shift would be this.
Foreign ships could carry oil from the Gulf of Mexico to straight to refineries on the East Coast, something the current law prohibits.
Supporters argue this could ease supply pressures created by the war.
Critics say it risks undermining the US maritime and shipbuilding industries.
Well, Lorianne Narocco is an independent consultant. and global supply chain reporter for CNBC.
And David Goldwyn was an energy envoy under former President Barack Obama and is now president of consulting firm Goldwyn Global Strategies.
Welcome to you both.
David, let's start with you.
Thanks for joining us.
Could you explain to us how significant this waiver could be?
I think it's really going to have a modest impact.
The Jones Act, as it's called.
Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act was meant to encourage the protection of the merchant marine and to build more ships.
But the reality is the U.S. doesn't have a lot of these ships.
What will happen is that not only crude oil, but petroleum products will now be able to be shipped from the Gulf Coast overseas to the East Coast or to California.
That's an efficiency in the system.
It's somewhere between maybe $0.05 to $0.10 a gallon that we'll save.
It's minor, but it will help.
And it also means that the East Coast, which often gets its gasoline from Europe because it's easier to get it from Europe than it is to get from the Gulf Coast, will be able to use US supply, allowing a more efficient distribution of product, which will not need to cross the Atlantic and will be more available perhaps for Europe and even for Asian suppliers.
So it's an efficiency in the system.
It'll be a modest price impact, but this is not going to be a significant substitute by any means.
Do you think there's a broader strategic motivation here then?
Well, the broader effort here is to throw everything at the wall they can to make up for the fact that 20 of the world's crude oil supply and LNG supply is being marginalized by this war.
There is really not much they can do.
If you add the release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, suspension of the Jones Act, perhaps even suspension of some of the Clean Air Act standards which were, you know, for blending of ethanol, you know you're talking about really pennies on the dollar.
These are meant to be a bridge and for a little bit of price relief until the straits are open.
But it's really very, very modest.
Even the SPR, you know, is days of substitution. which is important and helpful to bridge this gap.
But if the straits remain closed, as I think they will, for some weeks to come, then these measures will not have a significant impact on what could be 150 crude oil.
Now, you've worked in the White House.
What do you think is going through the heads of people around President Trump right now?
Well, you have the four or five people who cooked this up, you know, who are probably saying wow, didn't think this is how it was going to happen.
For the rest of the government.
You know, and the reality is they've eliminated the Energy Bureau at the State Department.
They're not listening to the civil service, not the Iran people, not the energy people.
So they didn't think this through.
They didn't foresee these consequences.
So now they've got a political crisis as well as a geopolitical crisis.
And the White House.
They're calling all the agencies saying give us everything you've got that can help provide price relief.
So now they're hearing all of these options on the supply side, Jones Act and waivers, and they finally got around to doing the SPR.
It's interesting, they're not really talking about demand side measures.
Often you would have Democratic presidents which would encourage people to try and restrict the speed of their driving.
Keep it under 55 miles per hour, inflate your tires things which can reduce consumption.
But this is not an administration that's interested in telling Americans to consume less.
So we're not really seeing any talk about those measures.
And I think the folks at the White House are also wondering – how bad this is going to get if they can't reopen the Straits.
So they're getting a lot of these ideas, which are important to do.
They need to be part of the kit bag, but they're in a very bad way unless they find a way to use some diplomacy and try and reopen the Straits and de-escalate this crisis.
And these measures will not help much.
Sorry, David, to interrupt that.
Laurie, you look at supply chains for a living.
I mean, if foreign ships start carrying all between US ports, what do you think that's going to do to the maritime industry, for example?
How worried would US shipbuilders be about this?
The U.S. really hasn't built a ship in decades.
When it comes to looking at the shipbuilding, we have turned to two foreign companies, both Hanwha, which is South Korean, and you also have Davy, which is over in Finland, to make either the polar icebreakers or the tankers.
And it's going to take years to make just a couple of them.
And when it comes to the facilities that these two companies have, it is going to take years in order for the infrastructure to be brought up to That level so they could actually make the vessels here, and they don't have anybody to train the workers here.
And they told me in both of my documentaries, they have to bring the employee, the US employees, to the respective countries in order to make these vessels.
You know, when you look at the Jones Act tankers that are actively looking, there are only 49 that are in service right now.
And when you're looking at the foreign tankers, they have to get here, and that would take weeks.
And so you know.
A couple of days ago I broke a story where US jet fuel on the West Coast comes from South Korea.
South Korea exports are down.
So I asked and I went through the multitude of all the different government levels.
You know you're going to need the Jones Act tankers in order to move the jet fuel from Houston over to California.
Do we have enough?
And I've yet to hear.
So trade takes time.
So right now they floated up a balloon about possibly waiving the Jones Act.
They have not done it.
And so it takes time to reposition these tankers.
Their company's success helped build a nation.
The company is such a big part of Korea's economy.
But who are the family behind one of the world's tech giants?
The major corporate empire that we now know today.
Samsung.
Inheritance Samsung from the BBC World Service explores the real-life dramas of the Lee family and their company Samsung.
There's a succession style drama underneath of all this.
In order to get here to America in order to do it.
And not only that.
I spoke with the Coast Guard today because there was a lot of, you know a lot of chatter out there saying that you have these foreign tank, you know tank owners trying to, you know, get the paperwork done so they could do it be able to move between the two ports.
And the Coast Guard told me that there is no validity to that.
They have not heard or seen any paperwork, if you will, from foreign tankers.
So you really have to put away the bluster and see what the reality is.
Yeah.
Well, Laurie, thank you very much for joining us.
Laurie and David there.
We'll be following that story.
As you said, Laurie, at the moment, it's a proposal.
It hasn't been confirmed that that's going to be happening, but we'll be following it very closely.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Well, we're getting a clearer and eye-watering sense of the price of the US-Israel war with Iran.
The Pentagon has told senators on the Armed Services Committee that the conflict cost more than 113 billion in its first week alone.
But even that figure raises questions.
It's not yet clear how the total was calculated or whether it included the extensive military preparations that were underway for weeks ahead, before the fighting began.
And it's important to note that these are US costs only.
They don't include Israel's spending, any losses borne by Gulf states or the huge global economic fallout from the disruption to energy exports out of the region, for example.
While few people understand the long term financial footprint of the war better than Professor Linda Vimes, who's Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Public Finance at the Harvard Kennedy School.
She's also the US Representative on the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration.
Linda, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
Linda, the costs are stark.
I mean, just looking at those numbers, they're rather eye-watering.
But it's a long-term impact that lots of people are worried about.
What are they going to be?
Well, I think that the costs, however eye-watering, that we're seeing right now are just the tip of the iceberg.
And if there's one thing we've learned from previous wars, it's that those who get into wars are always very optimistic at the beginning about how quick they can be and also how much they will cost.
And they turn out to have very long-term costs.
So the way I think about it is in four buckets.
There are the preparations cost, which in this case add another 5 to 8 billion on top of the 11 billion.
Then there's the 11 billion, or whatever the number is today, which is just the immediate operations cost.
And that's the tip of even that iceberg, because it doesn't count anything around the replacement and the reset and resupply and so forth.
Then there are these long-term costs which really add up, including the cost of the lifetime disability benefits and medical care for veterans.
And there are 50,000 US troops who are involved in this at the moment.
And if you look back, for example, at the very short US Gulf War in 1991, nearly half of those veterans are receiving lifetime benefits of some kind.
And these troops who are there now are being exposed to toxins and contamination and acid rain and other things for which they will be compensated.
Then there is the really significant cost of increasing the base budget of the Pentagon.
The president already has asked for a 50%, that's a $500 billion increase in the Pentagon budget.
Yeah.
And although he's not going to get the whole thing, I think that with the backdrop of a live war, he will be able to secure much more, at least 100 billion more.
That goes on forever.
Sorry to interrupt, Linda.
So is this unusually fast burn through of money in this scenario of war?
Well, it is a very fast burn.
But if you compare it to the 12-day war, Midnight Hammer operation, in which the US took out Iranian obliterated, according to President, the nuclear weapons.
Area in Iraq back in June, I mean, that cost two and a half billion.
So it was a similar kind of a burn rate.
And now we're doing this, but at greater intensity.
And the Houthi operation was also extremely expensive because carrier strike groups.
Keeping them there and deploying them is super expensive.
And all of these munitions that we're using are very, very expensive.
So do you think this?
Perhaps then, will be something that we considered when it comes to wrapping up this military operation?
Or is that kind of something that perhaps is a more of a dynamic situation?
Clearly, the president is thinking about oil prices, which I know you've been speaking about.
But I think what he is not thinking about is the fact that all of the money that we spend is being borrowed.
We are borrowing it now.
And interest rates are a lot higher than they were in 2003 when we invaded Iraq.
And so we are already paying 14 of the national budget in the US on interest, much of which accumulated during the previous wars.
So we are transferring the entire cost of whatever we're doing now to future generations.
And there is also...
An economic cost.
It's too early to really estimate it.
But the cost to energy, the cost of shipping, the cost to insurance.
The U.S. has just issued a 20 billion dollar reinsurance facility to buy up insurance.
All of these things will become significant costs over the next few months.
Professor Barnes, thank you very much for joining us.
And we'll be looking at the costs a bit later on next week as well.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Well, it's been almost a month of testimony from addiction experts to engineers and even Mark Zuckerberg.
A California jury right now is hearing closing arguments in a landmark case that could decide whether social media giants can be held liable for harms to children.
Meta and Google's YouTube are the companies facing the allegations.
Our North America technology correspondent Lily Jamali has been following the trial.
Hi Lily.
Hi.
Hi Lily.
So how did Meta and YouTube defend themselves?
Well, Meta and YouTube both really tried to dwell on the fact that – and I would say Meta more than YouTube did this – on the plaintiff herself.
This is a 20-year-old woman from California.
She's been going by her first name in this case, Kaylee.
And they talk about.
The lawyers did in their openings, as well as during their questioning of witnesses, the struggles that she had growing up with her family, her struggles in school all to say that you know.
Yes, she was using Instagram, sometimes for many hours a day.
Yes, that's problematic.
But they would say that's not addictive and that these other issues in her life are really what contributed to her mental health harms, which she alleges stem from her use of these tools, of these social media platforms.
And if the jury rules against them, what could this mean for the wider tech industry?
Well, you know, certainly what we hear in this case and what we've seen in this case has the potential to affect thousands of other cases that have been brought against social media companies.
So in this case, the last two companies that remain defendants are Meta and Google's YouTube.
But just before this case went to trial, there were two other defendants, TikTok and Snap.
Those companies settled this case, but they didn't settle several others that will come after this.
This is a bellwether trial.
It's one of a couple that are basically there to test this legal theory that the companies in question designed their platforms to be addictive, that it wasn't a coincidence that people are addicted, scrolling sometimes for hours upon hours a day on these various platforms.
These were specific things, algorithms designed in this way to keep them hooked.
Okay, Lily, thank you for following that story for us.
Our North America tech correspondent, Lily Jamali there.
Well, that brings us to the end of this edition of World Business Report.
Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and you'll also get the daily edition of World Business Express, which brings you the latest money and work news every weekday.
Thanks very much for listening.
You can follow me on my socials.
I'm at BBC Vishala SP.
Thanks for listening.
