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Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for 15 a month is back.
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Hello and welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Roger Hearing and on this edition, a weaker jobs market in the US suggests the economy is doing less well.
But could that lead to interest rate cuts?
Also we hear from two businesses caught up in the tariffs chaos.
Apple's latest tech is unveiled.
We'll tell you what it is.
And how a high murder rate is threatening tourism on a Caribbean island paradise.
But first, the US has fewer people in work than it thought.
Now it added 911000 fewer jobs than initial estimates had suggested in the year up to March, according to revised figures from the Labour Department.
The jobs market had been growing at a slower pace than previously thought at the end of the Biden administration and in the first months of the Trump administration.
So does that mean the world's biggest economy is weaker than economists had hoped?
Here's the White House press secretary, Caroline Leavitt.
This revision proves two things.
Number one, the president was right, and this is why we need new leadership at the Fed.
And this makes it very clear that President Trump inherited a much worse economy by the Biden administration than ever reported.
And it also proves that the Federal Reserve is holding our monetary policy far too restrictive.
Interest rates are too high.
The Fed needs to cut the rates because of the mess that we inherited from the Biden administration.
Caroline Levitt.
Well, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, was asked about the new figures on CNBC News.
He said the report confirmed that the US economy is slowing down.
I didn't know about the number.
You know, I think the economy is weakening.
You know, whether that is on the way to recession or just weakening, I don't know.
And that just confirms what we already thought, kind of.
That's a big revision.
But, of course, this might make a stronger case for the Fed lowering interest rates.
I asked if that was so to our North America business correspondent, Erin Delmore.
I've been watching the market reaction to numbers like this because remember, this is not the first report that shows a weakening, a softening, a cooling, call it what you want in the US labor market.
We saw on Friday that only 22,000 jobs were added in the month of August.
That is a tiny, tiny number.
And we saw the unemployment rate tick upward to 4.3%.
Now interestingly, you would think that that would make investors and business owners think, as you said, it's more likely that the Fed will lower interest rates, And normally that's the kind of thing that businesses love, because it makes borrowing cheaper.
And when it's cheaper to borrow money, it becomes a bit easier to grow.
But actually what we saw is that instead of rising, stocks fell at the end of the week.
And that showed us that investors are even more concerned about the cooling in the labor market, this underlying weakness in the US economy, than they were enticed by the prospect of an interest rate cut.
And this weakness, I mean, is it down to some kind of concern about tariffs, perhaps?
Because, of course, it's quite backward, looking towards the end of the Biden administration as well as the beginning of the Trump one.
Yeah.
You know, tariffs are one of the things that are on the minds of the business leaders and the investors who I speak to.
And to be very particular, it's the uncertainty about tariff policy.
Now, a new president, a new administration, new policies.
That's something that we see in the U.S. sometimes every four years, sometimes every eight.
But President Trump has really upended some of the global economic world order here, issuing a brand new tariff policy very different from what the US has done in past years, and then going back on it and changing those tariff rates pretty significantly.
He's also made significant cuts to federal spending, curtailing immigration and making some big changes in the US tax structure.
We'll be right back.
Now, for its part, the Trump administration is pointing to a few different things today.
One of them.
Again, it's talking about inaccuracies in data coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Labor, something that we've heard from President Trump before.
And again, President Trump ousted that bureau's head recently.
At the same time though, I mean the Trump administration is clearly arguing that things are getting a lot better.
And some evidence, I suppose, at least in terms of sentiment.
The National Federation of Independent Business puts out its small business optimism index, sentiment essentially.
And it does seem to be growing.
It seems not hugely, but it does seem to be going up.
There is a little bit of a mixed picture here in the States.
When we talk about sentiment, a lot of that has to do with business sentiment and also consumer sentiment.
And the reason why we pay so much attention to sentiment is that because a lot of the time, the way people feel is the way they end up acting.
And, for example, consumer spending in the U.S. powers 70 percent.
Thank you so much for having me.
And how they're able to hire and grow and that affects the labor market.
So a lot of these things are tied together.
You know, the tax cut and spending bill was looked at as being good for businesses.
That's something that would cause optimism here.
And it's always good to ground ourselves in the moment we find ourselves in in the calendar.
Roger, it's September.
That's usually a moment when we see a lot of seasonal hiring begin to take place for the holiday season, particularly in sectors like retail or hospitality travel, things like that.
We haven't seen yet if those numbers will materialize.
Certainly, that means we haven't seen if any revisions are in store.
But there are reasons for some optimism here, not least of all a pretty strong U.S. equities market.
Erin Delmore.
So how is US business feeling about all this?
Well, I've been speaking to two small businesses.
Anderson Gibbons is Chief Marketing Officer of Speciality Textile Incorporate in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, and also Julie Robbins, who's the chief executive of Earthquaker Devices.
They make guitar pedals, but they're from Akron, Ohio.
So I first asked Anderson how it was all affecting his business.
Being that we are made in the United States, it has helped our business.
Now, when there was a 145 tariff on Chinese goods, that was a little bit of an Alamo type situation.
Honestly, it was too stressful.
Looking at the news, there was no way at all that we could have made the products and the product inquiries that were happening.
Since then, with all the flip-flopping, I would actually say it's probably hurt us.
Why would that be?
Volatility.
No one, including my customers, knows the rules of the game.
The rules of the game are always changing.
As much as our business has actually increased and there's definitely been certain parts that have remained and have increased.
A lot of my customers are scared.
Like it or not, they built their supply chains with a global footprint in mind and it's really created kind of a stalemate.
I can track my orders based on news articles and tariff-related policies on when I'm going to get large orders and when I'm going to get orders that are frozen.
It's really very hard to plan, I suppose, is what you're saying.
Yes.
Especially in manufacturing.
Generally speaking at STI, it's woven order business.
And so when a new tariff policy happens, mass market furniture retailers switch their buying habits position to that country being affected and thus kind of turning off the domestic valve because we don't have a problem there.
Then, once they figure out that issue, they turn back to the domestic players myself and say, oh my gosh, we haven't ordered.
Let's put the order's in, let's rush it, and it's made a very complicated manufacturing.
Yeah, it sounds like it's been a wild ride.
And, Julie, I guess you've had a similar experience in some ways.
Yes, very much.
So we manufacture guitar pedals in Akron, Ohio.
And in order to manufacture these products, we use over 900 individual components.
And only about 3% of our bill of materials comes from the U.S.
The other 97 comes from about 15 countries.
Over 34 different harmonized tariff codes and none of them are being made in the US.
And I don't see that getting any closer given all of the volatility and uncertainty.
You must have had to have a sort of computer program just to work out what tariff was applying where, I should think.
Yes, it's very challenging to follow all of the the changes, especially because we source most of our components from domestic suppliers.
So they've already been imported.
And in order to do the detective work, to find out Where everything comes from.
It requires a lot of research.
So clearly you both had a difficult time on this.
So Julie, let me pick up on what you've been saying.
Does that mean you have to pass on the costs, because there are costs to the people you're selling to?
Yes, a price increase is inevitable.
However, the volatility makes it very difficult to determine exactly how much we need to pass on.
So for now, we've been absorbing it, but we can only do that for so much longer.
And Anderson, what about on your side?
How much have you said at different times it's not been good for you?
So again, have you had to pass on the custom?
So we haven't.
Where I'm maybe a little bit different than Julie is we built our supply chain in the United States.
All of our yarn comes within 300 miles of our facility. right or wrong.
It was just the supply chain we set up.
And so we haven't seen large price increases from our suppliers, but the volatility due to the same conversations Julie's describing.
Those are the conversations that my customers domestically are having with me.
And so what we have seen is, at STI, Revolution Fabrics In a 10-week order window.
I've had orders where, in one week, I needed to make over 400000 yards a week, which I can do.
And then I've had order weeks where I need to make 90,000 yards a week.
So, people go, okay, Anderson, you're a domestic mill.
Are you going to hire more people?
And I don't have a vision into the future because at 90,000 yards a week –
I only need one shift.
And at 400,000 yards a week, I need to hire like 400 people tomorrow.
Which makes it incredibly difficult, doesn't it, to try and base this out.
And Julie, let me come to you.
How have you worked with this?
I mean, how have you dealt with this?
How have you dealt with your customers?
How do you get everyone to kind of talk together, which is what I imagine you need to do?
We do a lot of surveys of our customers, which are primarily music retailers, and try to understand what they're seeing on their side.
And then we are always revisiting our costs.
We have a weekly meeting to review tariffs and their impact.
And from week to week, things are never the same.
There's always a change.
So it makes it really challenging to plan.
Hiring has been challenging.
In April we had some open positions that we had to pull and we're waiting to hire more people until we have some clarity into the future.
Now, you do a lot of trade, I'm told, Judy, with China and Taiwan.
And China, of course, there is a 55% tariff of the moment.
It has been sitting there pretty much for a while now.
Can you sit back and go?
OK, we think that's pretty much where it's going to be and we can plan on that.
Unfortunately, we can't, and there are some big caveats.
One is that there is a 301 investigation into semiconductors.
A lot of the electronic components that we use which are not manufactured in the US fall under that category.
And so until that investigation concludes, we can't be certain what our tariff situation will be.
Although there does seem to be some semblance of stability in some of the tariffs, we've also seen them swing widely, For example, implementing an additional 50 tariff with very little notice a few weeks ago on aluminum.
So as soon as we think we have it figured out, something else changes significantly.
Makes it difficult.
Anderson, looking forward now, say to the next six months, to a year, what do you expect and how is it going to affect your business?
You know, at STI Revolution, I see a bright future for our business.
We had a viable textile business in home decor before the tariffs went in place.
Like it or not, you can buy – better, prettier textiles made in Asia at better pricing.
But due to the consumer wanting choice, that is where STI has really adapted to the time.
If I didn't have two oceans on the side of me and it didn't require more inventory, I don't know if STI would be in business.
So it's overall, it's a benefit is what you're saying.
You're actually doing better as a result of this.
Correct.
However, it gets interesting here, right?
So a similar investigation.
President of the United States highlighted Furniture-specific tariffs.
An investigation, 50-day investigation.
What two weeks ago?
So that would help a lot of my traditional furniture manufacturing customers, but it would hurt my retailers.
Anderson Gibbons there along with Julie Robbins.
Well, let's find out about the market impact really of all the news we've been talking about.
George Conboy, chairman of Brighton Securities, based in Rochester, New York, joins me now.
George, thanks for being with us.
Well, first of all, that news about the jobs, the revising of the quite long ago figures, i suppose you could say, but a sense really of how the economy is or isn't strong.
How have the investors been responding to that, Marcus?
We're happy with that today, Roger.
You know, it's always like a buffet.
Investors go up to the buffet and sometimes they want growth and sometimes they want lower interest rates.
And today the vote was for lower interest rates.
And we have a new all time high on the S&P 500.
Close to that on the sorry, new high on the Nasdaq.
Close to that on the Dow and the S&P.
So clearly people are thinking that this is almost certainly going to happen.
There's been a lot of pressure, obviously, from Donald Trump.
The meeting, I think, is in a week or two, isn't it?
That's right.
What's the percentage that people are putting their money on?
You know, at this point, I think if we see a 25 basis point cut, the markets will be disappointed.
They'll look and hope for a 50 basis point cut.
But I don't think that the Fed wants to go there.
You're likely to get 25 bips and that won't move the market very much.
OK well, let's talk about the other major story that's dominating the airways today, of course, which is what's happened in Qatar, with the Israelis launching an air raid effectively on Doha, the capital.
Now, oil prices almost automatically react to trouble in that part of the world.
Earlier, I saw that they'd gone up by about 1%.
I think, Brent Crude, what are you seeing and what do you think is going to happen?
Yeah, about 1%.
I don't think it's going to be much beyond that, Roger.
I checked the calendar today.
It's not 1973, and OPEC can't just jack up the price the way they want to.
Everybody who pumps oil and there are a lot of countries are going to pump all they can and sell it regardless.
So that's going to keep any price increase from being material.
Okay, George, thanks so much for being with us.
George Conboy there of Brighton Securities.
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.
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for 15 a month is back, so I thought it would be fun.
If we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal.
So there goes my big idea for the commercial.
Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Now, Apple is a company never given to understatement, so its latest event unveiling its tech offerings was described as ore-dropping.
What was unveiled was a new, slimmer iPhone Air model with a high-density battery, and the CEO, Tim Cook, called it game changer.
Our intention was to make an iphone that feels like a piece of the future powerful, yet so thin and light it seems to disappear in your hands.
Well, there's also the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 17 Pro, and a new version of the AirPods Pro wireless headphones, and a blood pressure monitor in its latest Apple Watch.
Or dropping?
Well, joining me is Max Chafkin, tech reporter and co-host of Everybody's Business podcast.
Max, thanks for being with us.
What did you think of what was laid out year?
Apple does this and every year we hear more or less the same pitch, which is this device is the device that changes everything.
It's almost at this point like they're playing the hits.
I will say that I think it's gotten harder for Apple to kind of create these moments.
You know, as our smartphones have gotten better, it's gotten harder to tell you know one model to the next.
I actually had to look on my own phone to see, well, did I have the 14 or the 15?
I wasn't even sure.
And what they're trying to do with this Air, this thinner model, is create some kind of differentiation as well as, I think, give some buyers of the cheaper smartphones a reason to maybe trade up.
They're actually holding prices more or less the same on their entry-level model and on most of the models, in fact.
And you have to think they're eating some costs that have gone up because of the tariff.
So this is an effort to sort of raise prices in a way without actually raising prices.
Yeah, because they're getting competition from China, aren't they, all the time?
Well, yeah, that's the big thing.
I mean Apple had this amazing business in China selling iPhones, and basically Chinese-branded phones have been getting better and better over the last few years and that's really taken a bite not just out of Apple in China but of Apple's overall business.
And it's the kind of thing where, especially amid a trade war, amid all this uncertainty, it creates just an additional layer of risk for this company.
Yeah, and how do you make something different?
Exactly what you were saying.
I mean foldable phone.
That's sort of been something they're trying, but Samsung's been there for a while, hasn't it?
Well, Apple has, because of this dynamic I mentioned, they've been really focusing more on services.
If you listen to their earnings calls, not the product releases.
What they're talking about is services.
So that's iCloud, the cloud storage.
That's Apple Music.
That's all these things.
That's where more and more of their revenue is coming from.
And that's a really good thing, because it makes them less dependent on creating these sort of, you know amazing game-changing, awe-dropping products.
The flip side of that is, as you make it more about the software, it's harder to convince people to upgrade, that they need a new phone.
So, again, so that's why we're seeing like, you know, the— the much thinner phone and all that.
We'll see if it actually makes much of a difference.
The phones are pretty thin already.
Max, thank you for being with us.
Max Chufkin there, tech reporter and co-host of Everybody's Business Podcast.
Now the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Until a few years ago were known predominantly as a luxury Caribbean tourist destination.
The water here is phenomenal.
It's full of life.
Turks and Caicos is exceptionally beautiful.
Don't you wish you were there?
Well, that's from an advert from the tourism board.
But of course it doesn't necessarily reflect reality, at least not at the moment, because alarming levels of violent crime have rocked the once sleepy British overseas territory.
Last year it recorded 48 murders which, given its population is less than 50000, gave it the worst murder rate per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean.
With record-breaking numbers of holidaymakers almost 2 million actually visiting Turks and Caicos in 2024, the crime doesn't yet appear to be affecting tourism.
But with figures like this, it's carefully crafted paradise image.
Could now be at risk.
Let's speak to Gemma Handy, a reporter based in the Caribbean.
Gemma, thanks for being with us on World Business Report.
So what is going on here?
What is at the root of this problem?
Well, that's a great question.
Honestly, I think it's a very complex issue.
Basically, the islands have just seen monumental foreign investment in the last few years.
When I first moved there in 2006, I lived there for six years.
It was really on the cusp of monumental economic change.
It was just coming onto the radar of rich travelers and investors.
There was more money coming in than I'd ever seen before.
And I think in a lot of ways, the sort of social framework just hasn't kept up.
You know, back then, everybody knew everybody.
People left their doors unlocked.
You'd leave your car keys in the ignition in case somebody needed to move your car.
You know, if someone broke into your house, you probably knew who it was.
So it's, you know, it's interesting.
Honestly, I wrote this article with a really heavy heart.
It's a place very dear to me.
I do have to say that the crime is restricted to a couple of residential communities.
That's not to say that tourists are immune, but they are generally safe.
Now, some people have pointed to Haitian refugees coming in outsiders, I suppose, and that that's what's at the core of it.
Is that likely?
Well, that's a good point.
Honestly, it depends who you speak to.
Some people think it's horribly unfair.
The premier himself has actually called on Haitian community leaders to do more to stem the violence.
It's a bit of a controversial topic.
That said, there are boatloads of migrants coming in regularly.
And honestly, they have done for many, many years.
But I think there has probably been an increase in the last couple of years.
Haiti lies less than 100 miles away as the crow flies.
It's always had boatloads of migrants coming in.
There are a lot more coming now, I believe.
Some say with guns, too.
So whether that violence is spilling over to Turks and Caicos is a possibility.
I think you know.
The tourism minister says you know what we call a gang mentality is often a call for belonging.
So maybe there's that kind of aspect behind it, too.
So very briefly, what are they going to do about it?
Because they need tourists to come.
They're not going to come if they can see this kind of thing.
They do.
So, yes, they're very, very keen to get a grip on this.
They've put in a whole slew of measures.
There's been temporary curfews.
They've bulldozed some informal settlements that police say harbour criminals.
They're cracking down on places that sell alcohol and they've put increased search powers for police.
On top of all of that, they are putting in more mentoring programmes for young people too, to try to really kind of arrest this problem at its core.
Gemma, thank you so much for being with us.
Gemma Handy on the trouble in the Turks and Caicos.
Now, the idea behind prison apart from punishment and deterrence, of course is that those who've done their time don't want to come back, because keeping someone in prison is expensive.
But in England and Wales nearly a third of prison leavers end up back inside after committing further crimes, costing the government around 24 billion a year.
The BBC's Sarah Rogers has been speaking to ex-offenders working with a charity that thinks it has part of the solution.
Right, you'll have to press that button there.
And this is the kitchen and the living room.
That's Matty.
He's been in and out of prison for years.
But today he's shown me around his new home, communal living for ex-offenders, part of a scheme run by charity Recycling Lives in the north of England aimed at stopping people like him committing more crime.
I don't want to go back to prison, but if you've done the crime you've got to face up to consequences and do it.
Matty's tried going straight, but with no money, job and with addiction still gripping him, it never stuck.
I had a traumatic childhood.
Ended up getting on drugs at a young age.
I was just going out committing crime.
Nearly a third of offenders in the UK re-offend, according to government figures.
And, along with creating more victims, it's an economic headache costing the taxpayer 24 billion a year.
But reintegrating can be hard.
Anna Caldera from the charity Catch 22 helps ex-prisoners navigate the basics.
If you don't have a bank account, you don't have access to any income.
You know, you don't have access to benefits.
You're unable to pay for an accommodation.
It does support with reducing reoffending.
And that's something we always need to have at the back of our minds.
The UK government says its support helped 10,000 former prisoners open bank accounts last year.
But having an account is one thing.
Earning money to put in it, that's a real challenge.
In prison, inmates can work with wages around $10 to $20 a week.
And that covers the basics like soap and phone credit.
It's really rare to save.
Now that's where Recycling Lives is hoping its programme can make a difference.
The charity partners with big companies like British Gas to employ prisoners whilst they're still serving their sentences.
They dismantle electronics for recycling.
You scan it through and send them over for dismantling. but he doesn't get to keep all of his wages.
I'm Alistair Jackson, I'm the chief executive of Recycling Life.
40% is put in a savings account.
That then means that they've built up a pot of money.
Now, when you work on a Recycling Life programme, only 5 of the people we work with go back to prison.
The catch, the programme's only in seven out of more than 140 prisons in the UK.
But it worked for Naomi Winter.
So I've been in prison since I was a kid.
When I got out and I started working this full-time job, I'd never had a full-time street job.
As for Matty, he left prison with 3500 in savings, now has a place to stay and is working in the charity's community workshop.
I'm getting my family back and that means more to me than anything.
Helping people like Matty stay out of prison isn't just about a second chance for him.
It could also play a part in saving billions in costs and preventing more victims.
Sarah Rogers reporting there on efforts to keep ex-prisoners as ex-prisoners rather than current prisoners.
That's it from World Business Report.
For me and the rest of the team, bye-bye.
Thanks for listening.
