This message is brought to you by Newveen.
How would you invest if you knew the future was watching?
At Newveen... This isn't a theoretical question, it's a perspective that comes from navigating 125 years of market cycles.
Using foresight to innovate and adapt to the changing needs of investors, and remaining steadfast in the pursuit of lasting performance.
Newveen. Invest like the future is watching.
Visit newveen .com slash future to learn more.
Investing involves risk.
Principal losses possible.
Good morning from the Financial Times.
Today is Friday, April 18th.
And this is your FT News Briefing.
The US' trade war is cooling energy cooperation and Japan's Trade Minister got a firsthand look at Donald Trump's negotiating tactics.
While he was in the air, flying from Tokyo to Washington, Trump went on to social and said that he would be joining the meeting.
Plus, the search for alien life got a major boost this week.
I'm Mark Filippino and here's the news you need to start your day.
China has stopped buying liquefied natural gas from the U .S. For more than 10 weeks now, there haven't been any shipments between the two countries.
And it's a signal that Trump's trade war has spilled over into the energy sector.
China has imposed a 49 % tariff on US gas, which makes the stuff just too expensive for most Chinese buyers.
The freeze in imports raises a lot of questions about a multi -billion -dollar expansion of gas facilities in the US and Mexico.
Chinese companies now want to renegotiate their contracts.
Japan's top trade negotiator was in Washington this week.
Tokyo is the first major capital to kickstart tariff negotiations with the Trump administration.
Which makes Japan a bit of a guinea pig, as my colleague Leo Lewis has said.
He's here with me now.
Leo, get me up to speed here on the position that Japan was in going into these talks.
So when this all started, Japan thought that it was in perhaps a decent position with the US.
It's the biggest provider of foreign direct investment into the US.
It's got a lot of its big companies, Toyota and so on, have got factories in the US that they've invested in over years.
And of course, there's a very long standing security treaty, which makes Japan basically America's closest ally in Asia.
That said, when the so called reciprocal tariffs were announced, Japan found itself on the business end of a 24%, so called reciprocal tariff that's on top of already very substantial 25 % tariffs on automobile imports, steel, and aluminium.
And so it went in very hard trying to convince the US that it should be first in line to negotiate with Washington.
And what's the reaction been to these tariffs from people in Japan?
Yeah, so it's a very complicated situation for the Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba.
He faces a public that when polled have said well actually you know Japan should be enacting countermeasures at the same time Japan knows exactly how vulnerable it is to a really big change in the kind of global order it needs America for its security it needs America pushing for a global rules -based trading system and so in a way it knows that the way that Trump goes about negotiations is going to put Japan in the are under those conditions that negotiators went into the White House this week.
What came out of the meeting?
So the main decision was really to continue talking.
The Trump side hasn't laid out exactly what their ask is.
They've made it clear that they don't like the idea of big trade deficits with other countries like Japan.
But they haven't exactly clarified what it is that they think that would completely address that and what it is that they really want.
So Japan was going into this just as curious as everyone else.
This was exploratory as much as it was going there with a fixed agenda of what Japan might be able to offer.
It's pretty clear that there was some discussion about Japanese defense spending.
There does seem to have been discussion on some of the issues that we had been told to expect would come up, namely, American agricultural exports to Japan and Japanese investments.
So Leo, you mentioned that Japan is sort of one of the first countries to come to the negotiation table with Trump's team.
What lessons can other countries learn from its experience?
Well, the big lesson is that you should expect the unexpected, and that came in really pretty spectacular style in these meetings.
So Ryo Sei Akazawa, the leader of the Japanese delegation, had gone there expecting to sit down with Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary and with Jameson Greer, the US trade representative, which indeed he did.
But while he was in the air, flying from Tokyo to Washington, Trump went on to social and said that he would be joining the meeting.
Now, that was not something that Japan knew was coming, nor had expected.
The slightly surprising thing really is that the Japanese negotiator, he's not a great figure of Japan.
He's certainly not the prime minister or even the finance minister.
And yet Trump wanted to be in the room with him and that I think has been interpreted a number of ways, including the fact that, you know, the Trump camp for all of its hard talk does actually want deals to be done.
And I think that was the message that Japan's taken out of this and possibly was a lot of other countries could probably take out of it as well.
Leo Lewis is the FTS Tokyo bureau chief.
The European Central Bank cut its benchmark interest rate yesterday by a quarter point.
It's now down to 2 .25 percent.
The decision to cut was unanimous.
Central bankers are worried about slowing economic growth, plus all the uncertainty surrounding Trump's tariff plans.
And speaking of the US President, Trump lashed out at Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell on on Thursday for not lowering US interest rates quicker.
I don't think he's doing the job, he's too late, always too late, a little slow and I'm not happy with him.
Let him know it and if I want him out, he'll be out of there real fast, believe me.
The Fed has so far kept interest rates on hold this year.
Powell said on Wednesday that tariffs will make it difficult for the Fed to hit its sweet of low inflation and high employment.
E .T., get your phone ready because it's looking more and more like we're not alone in the universe.
Astronomers say they found signs of life on a planet more than a hundred light years away.
Here to give me the scoop is my colleague, Clive Cookson.
He covers other worlds for the FT. Hey, Clive.
Hi, Mark. So, give me the details of this latest discovery.
What did scientists find?
This group of astronomers used the new James Webb Space Telescope to examine the atmosphere of a distant planet.
It's called K2 -18b.
And it's 124 light years from Earth.
And that is such a long, long way.
It's about a million, million, million kilometers.
What they were looking for was molecules in the atmosphere that would be signs of biology, molecules that could only be produced by living organisms, and they found them.
Tell me what's so special about this planet K2 -18 b, aside from you know, name that's straight out of Star Wars.
Nothing like it exists in our solar system it's about eight times the mass of Earth and it is believed to be covered in a liquid water, one huge ocean.
And it's got a rich atmosphere which is composed mainly of hydrogen.
The astronomers have given a name to it, this type of planet called Hysian, which stands for hydrogen, allied with ocean.
and a Heisean world has very different chemical properties.
And what the astronomers think they've found is that it contains four organic carbon containing molecules which they say could not be produced by any non -biological process.
In other words, they must have been produced by life.
So Clive, we're talking molecules here.
What about intelligent aliens?
Like are we going to find Chewbacca on this planet?
We won't. I suppose we could find a submarine, a marine Chewbacca, because the important thing to remember, Mark, is this is an ocean planet.
And it's a bit like Earth's early oceans say 3 billion years ago, but it's impossible to say whether within that ocean, there might be a complicated food chain with predators and all sorts of weird marine creatures.
But the point is that as far as we can speculate, if they exist, they've stayed within the water.
So Clive, aside from now putting an image of submarine Chewbacca in my head, which seems awesome, where does the search for alien life go from here?
The search for alien life has never been more active in my lifetime.
It's proceeding on several fronts.
One is a bit like this, looking at the atmospheres of distant planets and with better and better telescopes and instruments there there are more and more observations coming in, so we might find other planets that have signatures of biology.
Then Jupiter has some icy moons and beneath the ice, there are supposed to be oceans.
And those oceans might be the closest thing we have in the solar system to the sort of ocean world that we've been talking about on K2 -18b.
And that's just signs of life.
Then the other possibility is we'll detect a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, either radio or laser, or using some exotic technology.
That's another sort of search. But one of these, I am confident, will produce positive results, let's say by 2060.
Clive Cookson is the FT's senior science writer.
Thanks so much, Clive.
Thank you, Marc. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes.
This has been your daily FT News Briefing.
Check back next week for the latest business news.
The FT News Briefing is produced by Sonia Hudson, Fiona Simon, Lulu Smith, Ethan Plotkin, Kasia Brusayen, and me, Mark Filippino. Our engineers, Joseph Salcedo.
We had help this week from Edwin Lane, Katya Komkova, and Michaela Tandera.
Additional help from Michael Lello, Peter Barber, David De Silva, and Gavin Kalman.
Our executive producers, Topher For temple.
Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio in our theme song is by middle for music To remind you that sixty percent of sales on Amazon come from independent sellers here's Tracy from Lilly's of Charleston Hi, y 'all we make barbecue sauce hot sauce and specialty popcorn They get help from Amazon to grow their small business faster They handle all our shipping and logistics, which is a big help.
All up. Have a great day, Tracy.
Hot stuff, Tracy. Ooh, honey.
Shop small business on Amazon.
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.
It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.
He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too.
Ah, really? Thanks Capital One Bank guy.
What's in your wallet?
Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank Capital One N A Member FDIC.
