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Hello, and welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm David Harper. And coming up on this edition...
Any steel coming into the United States is going to have a 25 % tariff.
Aluminum, too. 25%.
The latest tariff announcement from President Trump.
And this time, it's affecting steel and aluminium producers the world over.
We'll ask how far the impact is likely to be felt.
Also, how serious is a cyber attack?
In future, we might be grading major tech disruptions in the same way that we grade hurricanes.
And if you're the sort of person who likes to add your two cents to a discussion, beware that the US could be phasing out the one cent coin.
Back to the White House first, though.
And Donald Trump has announced he's going to impose 25 % tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports.
It's the latest escalation in a series of trade conflicts now bringing in the metal sector worldwide.
And in addition to these measures, President Trump has also said he would unveil new reciprocal tariffs on imports from countries that impose levies on US exports.
That's expected later this week.
Now, while the aluminium and steel tariff will apply to all countries, it's likely to be steelmakers in Canada, Mexico and China that are going to take the biggest hit.
Laura Bicker is the BBC's correspondent in Beijing.
China's foreign ministry has not wavered in the last two weeks.
It has said repeatedly that it does not, it opposes these tariffs and also that it would like Washington to negotiate and enter dialogue.
That has been the repeated message from the foreign ministry and it was repeated again today in the latest briefing.
I think what we're seeing is the tariffs that Beijing has imposed will have a very limited impact on American firms.
It seems designed, it seems calculated to form a response that says, yes, we will fight back.
However, we are also leaving the door open to negotiate.
We are also leaving the door open to Washington to negotiate and enter dialogue.
That has been the repeated message from the foreign ministry, and it was repeated again today in the latest briefing.
I think what we're seeing is the tariffs that Beijing has imposed will have a very limited impact on American firms.
It seems designed, it seems calculated to form a response that says, yes, we will fight back.
However, we're also leaving the door open to negotiate.
We're also leaving the door open for talks.
So it does seem China wants to enter talks, wants to do a deal.
But so far, last week we heard that the two leaders were going to talk.
We heard from the White House spokesperson that there was going to be a call between President Xi and Donald Trump.
That call did not happen.
Laura Bicker with some of the Chinese response.
Well, the debate around the reasons behind Donald Trump's tariff announcement will go on.
Right now, what concerns us the effect it will have on the steel and aluminium industries and the people that rely on them?
Nehmalia Kumar is Professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University and the former head of strategy at Tata Steel.
I asked him if this really is going to have a positive effect on the domestic US steel industry.
It is true that with the tariffs, imports will fall and domestic production will increase.
But because imports will fall and they have tariffs associated with it, the domestic producers increase prices.
When they increase prices of steel in the market, it makes some of the uneconomic production that was existing in America suddenly economic.
you see, because the imports are coming in with tariffs, so they're higher priced and the domestic manufacturers are being now given a protection.
So they also increase prices.
And this, both of these factors, the price increase makes some of the production today, which is, you know, not operational in America, operational again, because it becomes profitable to do so.
We're talking about the impacts particularly on countries like Canada and Mexico that border the US.
And there's an awful lot of cross -border manufacturing with US manufacturers in the auto industry for example setting up factories in places like mexico how's how's this going to affect their logistics so basically you know one of the things we have to remember is that it's not so easy to put tariffs
in today's words and track them carefully because you know as you said the global supply chain runs and especially between let's say us canada and mexico the global chains are extremely integrated so how much who consumed of what steel and what form it came back in is not always clear.
You see, so the steel may go into what you call from USA to Mexico or from Mexico to US and then come back into their countries as cars or finished products.
So it's not always so clear to track what the impact of this is on prices.
And a lot of this will be down to the minutiae of exactly how this is enforced.
Now you have hit the nail on the head.
We still don't have enough information of how these tariffs are going to be implemented, who's going to be given an exemption but part of it is true that it is a negotiating strategy for him he does want to increase domestic production of steel and aluminium which will happen by the way uh but the thing
is it's only at what cost to the consumers and at what stage the consumers will start giving a pushback in which case he starts folding some of his cards this this uncertainty obviously isn't going to be welcomed by steel and aluminium producers the world over but the situation as you say the details
we still don't know but if if companies that are producers around the world what will they be thinking at the moment?
This is still a significant market for people in, say, India and China.
Actually, the biggest exporters are China, Mexico and Canada.
But after that, India, Italy, Germany, South Korea, you know, these are all big exporters of aluminium and steel to the US also, relatively to their size of the market.
And so, you know, they will be hurt to some extent.
But you have to also remember, you know, he's putting this across the world tariffs.
So it's harder to evade them.
For example, the oil tariffs, the Russian oil was banned in Europe, but it's now all coming through India to Europe.
And, you know, suddenly India has become a big exporter of oil to Europe because they're taking the raw crude from Russia, then refining it and sending it to Europe as Indian oil.
So, you know, the thing is that there will also be some adjustments on the part of the steel producers across the world if they feel there are certain loopholes which can be exploited.
because in the face of pressure, Trump may grant a few countries exemptions, in which case you will see that the production is routed through those countries then.
But regardless, that will also increase the price because you have to ship it from one place to another place, then to back to the other place.
Looking at U .S. domestic producers, but also producers elsewhere in the world, investment in something like a steel production site is something which is measured over decades.
Are people really going to adjust in a great level Because they'll probably be aware of the fact that in four years' time, we might be looking at a completely different situation.
Also, you have to remember that currently, there isn't a great excitement of expanding steel production for a very simple reason, that China has a huge surplus.
See, China, they built all the steel in 1990s.
They went on a complete rampage in terms of increasing steel production in the early 2000s.
And since then, the Chinese economy in the last 10 years has tanked.
So they are not consuming the same amount of steel and aluminum and construction as they were doing 10 or 15 years ago, which means that they have a lot of excess capacity in China.
And because of the lower costs, they are able to flood the markets overseas.
So many countries, in fact, including India, I know, where, you know, people were pushing for and have managed to get that the Chinese steel will be either given a tariff, higher tariff, or there'll be some quotas placed on them.
So some of this story might change also that instead of tariffs, as they did under the Biden administration, some countries agree to certain quotas that we will not export more than this quantity into USA.
I presume we're still waiting to hear, as we say, waiting to hear the full details.
But is this something which just affects the kind of raw steel products or is this going to affect manufactured goods moving around the world as well?
It seems for the moment, again, we don't have the details, my friends.
It seems for the moment it's on raw steel and aluminium and aluminium products and steel products, but not things that are consuming steel and aluminium and then being, you know, refurbished like cars or something, having extra times.
It doesn't seem like that.
Having said that, if the prices of steel and aluminium go up, then it will work its way through the finished product also.
Nirmalia Kumar, former executive at the Tata Group, just giving us a little bit of his take on what we've heard in terms of steel tariffs.
Rachel Winter, investment manager at Killican Co.
is joining us here on World Business Report this afternoon.
Hello to you, Rachel.
Hi there. Having a look at the market's reaction, not just to this, but every time we hear an announcement like this from President Trump, it has an effect.
It does. So actually today we have seen an increase in the share prices of domestic US steel producers because they stand to benefit from less competition.
So their shares are all up today.
The wider market hasn't had a huge impact in either direction.
So the S &P 500 has not experienced a great move today.
So at the moment, it doesn't appear this news is having a big impact on the wider market.
Presumably because we're not sure entirely what the impact is likely to be yet.
That's part of it. And in the past, Trump has threatened tariffs and then withdrawn them quite shortly afterwards.
So I don't think people know exactly how long these new tariffs will be in place for.
Interesting. We'll be back with you, Rachel, a little later in the programme.
In the meantime, though, is a tech failure at a multinational corporation that puts their customers offline for a few hours worse than a cyber attack at a small company that leaks personal data onto the web?
We hear about major disruptions to IT systems all of the time, and it's difficult to assess which of them cause the most damage, not least if you're the insurance company that's got to pay out for the losses involved.
We may, though, have an answer.
A UK organisation, the Cyber Monitoring Centre, has introduced a five -point scale to measure the severity of a cyber disruption.
Kieran Martin is the chair of the CMC's technical committee and I asked him how it would work.
You may remember a very, very serious incident in South London's hospitals last year.
That would have been a Category 2 out of 5.
That's relatively low.
we're not trying to measure the awful human cost of disruption to health care because people will have suffered as a result of that.
But because it was spread fairly narrowly across a massive organization like the NHS, its financial cost was relatively low.
If you then take the accidental crowd strike outage because we measure accidental cyber disruptions as well, which was around the same time in 2024 that was about a category three because it was so broadly impactful it affected so many different businesses and organizations the only reason that that stopped
being higher was that because it was an accident the cause of it was figured out fairly soon and it could be fixed what we might call a malicious crowd strike so if that had gone on for longer because you couldn't have stopped it would have gone further up the scale and so you can have sort of very
what you might call broad but shallow sort of impacts, which can add up to a lot.
You can have narrow and deep impact.
But we're learning all the time.
And one of the things I think we're learning is that actually, while we talk a lot and regulate a lot for data security, it's actually those attacks, often those ransomware attacks that you hear about, that actually lock organizations out and cripple their ability to run.
They're the ones that are really expensive, disruptive and harmful.
You mentioned how useful a classification like this would be to the insurance industry there could be quite a quite a significant financial impact on the category that is that is given it could depend greatly on on payouts and things who actually decides what category an attack would fit into well the technical
committee which i chair has the final say and the team at the cyber monitoring center which is a not -for -profit It is funded by insurers and others, but it's a not -for -profit organization.
We decide, we don't claim to have any legal standing.
When we set out what the categorization is, we will put out a detailed note on the evidence base for that, why we've reached the decision that we have.
People can use it if they wish.
And I hope it's not just the insurance industry that benefits from it, but actually corporate cyber defenders, policymakers, and indeed the general public.
Because at the moment, there's a really immature debate about cyber incidents when it comes to things like data breaches.
Very often we just talk about the headline number of records, which is a pretty useless measure for actually evaluating the severity of cyber incidents.
So I think it will have broader use beyond insurance.
You mentioned a comparison to the classifications we give to hurricanes.
And that has become part of people's understanding of the impact of a hurricane because it's an international.
us to doing is one country and one set of impacts.
So it's the UK and its financial impacts.
Now, if it is seen by the UK, which is, of course, a big financial services centre across the globe, if this is seen as useful in the UK, if other partners and other countries wish to engage with it, we'd be more than happy for that to happen.
But for now, I think it is useful just to apply in one country.
There are complications from multinational companies and so forth.
But the engagement we've had with the UK financial industry think and tells us that you know if we do a good enough job there is use for this in one country but if it is successful here I would expect hopefully um other countries to try to partner with us and develop the whole process a bit further Kieran Martin from the cyber
cyber monitoring centre here in the UK a little reminder you can contact us on whatsapp or send us a voice note plus 44 330 678 3033 we would love to hear more about how you fear your job could be affected by import tariffs.
This is World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
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Now to China, where the latest figures show a dramatic decline in the number of people getting married.
Figures in 2024 dropped by more than 20 % on the year before.
The figures have been a bit of a roller coaster in recent years, rising from 2005 to a high point in 2013, then a decline with only a slight uptick in 2023.
The latest numbers, though, are a record low.
So what's causing this volatile attitude to marriage in China?
And what is the impact in a country already worried about an ageing population?
Well, Jakob Funk -Kirgeghor is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and has been looking at this situation.
Thank you very much for joining us.
We should say there have been government initiatives from China to encourage people to get together.
Have these not really worked?
Well, I think the numbers speak their own very clear language on that one.
I mean, we clearly did have a rebound in 2023.
But that is mostly associated with late marriages that were postponed during the COVID lockdowns in China in the preceding years.
And now we're back to what is a long term declining trend of well over the last 10 years.
So it's fair to say, during which, by the way, the number of marriages in China have collapsed by nearly 50%.
So it's fair to say that whatever they're trying to do in China to encourage more marriages simply isn't working.
What is it that's causing the figures to drop though?
Why are people less interested in getting married?
I mean, I think that there is clearly a combination here.
There are fewer younger people in China in the traditional marriageable ages.
We also have a situation where the group of the age cohorts in which, because of the effects of the one -child policy, where you have a very significant surplus of younger eligible or marital age men in China is there as well.
Then you have the slowdown in the economy.
You have clearly concerns about the housing market, where you have these interlinkages between marriage and family formation.
You can't really get married in China if you do not have your own apartment.
Well, given the volatility in housing prices where the desire to purchase real estate in China has clearly gone down in recent years, that has clearly also, in my opinion, negatively affected the desire to get married.
And then there is simply just broader concern about consumer confidence in China, where people are not as confident about the future as they were maybe five or ten years ago.
And as a result, they choose to stay single.
Interesting. We should say that this, I mean, you mentioned the aging population being a factor.
This isn't just a problem in China.
there are many, many countries in various parts of the world that are experiencing this problem.
Yes. I mean, this is, if you like, a global phenomenon.
And we do have globally an increase in the number of singles.
Now, in many other countries, in Europe or the United States or other advanced economies outside of Asia, you can...
Jakob Funk, Kierkegaard, thank you very much for joining us from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Let's rejoin Rachel Winter now, because alongside these stories, we're keeping an eye on this grand AI summit taking place in France beginning today.
We heard from Anne Bouveraud from France saying it marked a moment of true global openness and encouraging more countries to participate in developing AI.
She's also highlighted the potential and some challenges.
Now is the time to act together for shared progress.
We must reconcile the digital transformation and the ecological transition.
We also need, in terms of the transformation of jobs, to help ensure that it augments jobs and doesn't replace them.
Anne Bouverow, who is President Macron's envoy there.
Rachel, I mean, there are many, many countries at the moment trying to jump on the AI bandwagon, really, and say that they're going to be the new leading light.
Yeah, and it's great to see an AI summit happening outside of the US.
To date, it has really been these big US tech companies that have really driven this growth in AI.
So, it is great to see that Europe is getting involved and initiating a summit of its own.
We've also, looking back at some of the market's information, seen a shares jump for BP today.
Yeah, so BP, the big oil company, has had a really difficult couple of years.
The wider market has risen a lot in the last couple of years, but shares in BP are down 17%, so investors have become a bit impatient with this weak performance.
But today it was announced that an activist investor called Elliot has taken a stake in BP, and I think the shares are up on the hopes that Elliot will try and shake up the company and improve that performance.
Possibly one to keep an eye on.
Rachel, thank you very much.
We'll see if we can come back and have a chat to you before we finish today.
but we want to talk about coins and in particular the question as to whether in the US the penny may have finally dropped.
The US Treasury Secretary has been told to stop minting one cent coins or pennies as they are widely called by President Trump in an announcement on social media.
Why? Well it's mainly because it's costing far more than one cent to make each one cent coin and let's be honest what can you buy for one cent in the US in 2025?
Clifford Thees is Professor of Economics and Finance at Shenandoah University and an expert on coins and the economy.
Thank you very much for joining us live here on World Business Report.
This was a question we were asking around the office.
Is there anything that you can buy for one cent in the current age?
No you can't even buy a penny candy.
Minting one cent coins or pennies as they are widely called by President Trump in an announcement on social media.
Why? Well it's mainly because it's costing far more than one cent to make each one cent coin.
And let's be honest, what can you buy for one cent in the US in 2025?
Clifford Theese is Professor of Economics and Finance at Shenandoah University and an expert on coins and the economy.
Thank you very much for joining us live here on World Business Report.
This was a question we were asking around the office.
Is there anything that you can buy for one cent in the current age?
No, you can't even buy penny candy for a cent any longer.
It's a real shame. So this decision to kill off the penny, the one cent coin, the US isn't the only country to have done this.
Other countries have abandoned their smallest denominations.
Canada, was it within the last 10, 15 years or so?
That's correct. Canada, they dropped the penny and they'd rounded.
Not on the individual item, but on the total of items that you'd buy so that maybe your total bill came to 562, well, that'd be rounded down to 560.
Or if the bill came to 564, that would be rounded up to 565.
And on average, everybody broke even.
And so there's no real, real major disruption.
I mean, we've got used to seeing these sort of $2 .99, $5 .99 prices, but realistically, it doesn't make a major impact on what you're buying in an everyday basis.
So over here in the US, where we're still on the English system, you buy gasoline by the gallon, and it's quoted to 0 .9 of one cent.
But no one can charge you 0 .9 of a cent?
No, no. It's, you know, a marketing gimmick.
And we'll get over the marketing.
We were talking about this around the office as well.
And actually, in some Western countries, we think it's maybe a little strange to abandon small coins.
But actually, when you look at currencies around the world, one of our colleagues was talking about Somalia, where the lowest denomination you can get is a thousand shillings.
It's not unusual to have quite valuable banknotes or coins at the bottom of the currency list.
Right. Now, countries that have hyperinflation, they'll have what they call a currency reform.
Well, they'll drop zeros, maybe three zeros or even six zeros in some cases.
And countries like the US and even you fellows over there in Great Britain, we've had moderate rates.
You buy gasoline by the gallon and it's quoted to 0 .9 of one cent.
But no one can charge you 0 .9 of a cent.
No, no. It's a marketing gimmick and we'll get over the marketing.
We were talking about this around the office as well.
And actually, in some Western countries, we think it's maybe a little strange to abandon small coins.
But actually, when you look at currencies around the world, one of our colleagues was talking about Somalia, where the lowest denomination you can get is a thousand shillings.
It's not unusual to have quite valuable bank notes or coins at the bottom of the of the currency list.
Right. Right. Now, countries that have hyperinflation, they'll have what they call a currency reform.
Well, they'll drop zeros, maybe three zeros or even six zeros in some cases.
And countries like the US and even you fellows over there in Great Britain, we've had moderate rates of inflation.
It's nagging. And we like our legacy pointage.
And so we try to make that work.
But eventually, even a low rate of inflation catches up.
And now we have the smallest denomination of currency unit in the world.
And it's not worth it to our clerks at counters to be counting out pennies.
And for our customers, even though they're not being paid, their time is still valuable.
And so this wastes our time.
Very true. True. We should say that President Trump has talked about stopping minting the coins.
It doesn't mean they're going to disappear overnight.
Correct. He doesn't have the power to change the coinage, but he's not mandated to mint the coinage.
So he has the prerogative to turn off the minting of the penny.
Is it likely to get, I mean, as you say, we have a bit of an attachment to our coins and there's a sort of symbolic nature to it.
People, maybe even if it's not true, people might perceive that prices are going up because they don't have pennies in their pocket.
Is there likely to be any pushback to this?
Yes. A lot of people are very nervous about being shortchanged.
They might suspect that the little bias will work against them.
in the rounding. And only after some use of rounding will they get comfortable with it.
It's just kind of inevitable.
