Time to wrap up…Donald Trump’s new global tariffs have taken effect at 10%, even though he had threatened a higher rate of 15% over the weekend, providing “some relief” for British businesses, according to a lobby group.After the US president suffered a defeat at the hands of the supreme court on Friday, which struck down his sweeping “liberation day” tariffs imposed last year, he angrily reacted by announcing a 10% global tariff, which he raised to 15% on Saturday in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.The owner of Facebook has agreed to buy $60bn (£44.5bn) of artificial intelligence chips from the US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices despite fears over the vast sums being spent on the AI industry.Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has clinched the five-year deal in which it will also buy 10% of the chip company.

AMD signed a similar pact with OpenAI last year, which was hailed as a vote of confidence in its chips and software, significantly boosting its stock price.A recent series of chip supply agreements underscores the AI industry’s appetite for processors.Meta has separately struck a deal with AMD’s larger rival Nvidia to buy millions of AI chips.The US stock market is rising this afternoon, as the market recovers slightly by a wave of AI jitters from a speculative warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s biggest economy.The latest foreboding is from Citrini Research, a little-known US firm that provides insights on “transformative ‘megatrends’”.

Its post on Substack, which it called a “scenario, not a prediction”, rattled investors by portraying a near-future in which autonomous AI systems – or agents – upend the entire US economy, from jobs to markets and mortgages.Bailey has also said the interest rate cut in March is “genuinely an open question”.He told the committee that he would need more evidence to feel confident about voting to cut borrowing costs at the MPC’s next meeting in March.He voted with a 5-4 majority to hold rates this month.double quotation markWell, we’ll see.

I think at the moment I would say we’re still a little way off (from) the next meeting....It is a genuinely open question at the moment.

Markets are now pricing in a 76% chance of a March rate cut, compared with an 80% chance last week,And back to the BoE, Bailey says that Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s nominee for Fed Chair, is a good pick,double quotation markI do know Kevin, I think he is a strong believer in central bank independence,Turning to the US, the stock market has opened a bit higher today,The blue chip S&P 500 index has risen by 0.

4%, while the tech heavy Nasdaq is up 0.3%.A committee of MPs has stopped short of launching an inquiry into the role of UK trade envoys linked to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s time in the job, to avoid undermining a police investigation into the former royal.Instead, it will write to MPs to start gathering information on the regime so it could potentially launch an inquiry further down the line.Mountbatten-Windsor was trade envoy from 2001 to 2011, and was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office last Thursday.

Files released in the US appeared to show him forwarding sensitive government documents and commercial information to Jeffrey Epstein,The cross-party business and trade committee met today to decide whether to investigate the role of trade envoys, but has decided not to,Liam Byrne, chair of the committee, said:double quotation mark“Given the gravity of the allegations, the committee is of the view that it is essential that [the] parliament that makes the law does nothing to undermine the implementation of the law,“Nothing must now compromise the full and unimpeded process of British justice and the possibility of a fair trial, if and when charges are brought,“The committee is therefore resolved that we should now begin gathering information immediately so that we might stand ready to launch an inquiry into the government regime of trade envoys at the moment the police and criminal justice system action has concluded.

”Insiders have said Mountbatten-Windsor personally asked ministers about getting a bigger government job on multiple occasions, despite senior figures saying he was widely regarded as a liability.Mountbatten-Windsor has in the past denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.Bailey says that the UK appears to be ahead on a number of other economies in terms of investment to improve productivity.double quotation markBut I think Jim O’Neill is right on the point about this hoarding of labor, may well come through in somewhat higher productivity.Pill adds that changes to minimum wage and national insurance have had a particular effect on the employment of young people.

double quotation markI also would agree that some of the deeper structural changes, the fact that many sort of entry level jobs are being affected by AI, I think that is something that perhaps is difficult to manage,The surveys that we see thus far talk about a lot of UK companies, taking up AI as a way of trying to improve productivity,As yet they don’t report that resulted in a large reduction in their willingness or ability to employ labour,But of course, on a forward basis, I think that remains an open question,I also think…there are these issues, about the echo or long lasting effects coming out of Covid.

So, particularly…having your first job is an important part of being able to enter the labour market and be productive.The more difficult that is, can have very long lasting effects.And they do cross with things like health issues, mental health issues and so forth.”Huw Pill, who is the chief economist at the bank, touches on the state of the labour market.double quotation markI think there has been an element of shedding labour that perhaps had been hoarded, in the period, following the end of the furlough, where the labour market was very tight and the difficulties in recruitment were intense.

Bailey adds that evidence that some of this “labour hoarding” is unwinding,There is a reduction of labour, and companies appear to be not hiring,double quotation markWe are not seeing a particular uptick in redundancies,…What we are hearing when we go around the country, is just not hiring,…There is an element to responding to the cost of employment.

Bailey says that the Bank’s expectations of 2% inflation in the late spring “is pretty much baked in”.double quotation markIf you look at the latest number, it was pretty much exactly where we thought to was going to be.…If you look under the lid, goods price is a bit weaker….I think we are seeing some trade effects coming through.I think we’re probably seeing some trade effects coming through from goods pricing from China…Food prices were off a bit more than we expected.

But services prices…didn’t come off as much as we thought they would.Megan Greene, who is a member of the monetary policy committee (MPC) and has voted consistently for hold on interest rates, says she has three concerns that she would want to see addressed before she votes for a cut.double quotation markEmbedded in our central forecast is a nifty handoff where we hit our inflation target sooner and wager growth and inflation expectations come off just as the impact on fiscal policy on inflation sort of flips…I am little bit worried about that handoff not going as planned.She says she would like to see further indications of wage growth continuing to come off, as well as inflation expectations for businesses and households.The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, is now appearing in front of the Treasury Committee to talk about the Bank’s decision to hold interest rates at 3.

75%.Bailey says that the bank is now expecting inflation to come back to around the 2% target “sooner than we were expecting”.It is now “very reasonable” to expect that it will be around the target in the April number that is released in May, he says.UK inflation slowed to 3% in January.Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at the broker Hargreaves Lansdown, says the Meta/AMD deal indicates the AI arms race has “shifted up another gear”.

double quotation markComing hot on the heels of Meta’s recent Nvidia agreement, the message couldn’t be clearer: AI infrastructure is priority number one.Meta is locking in supply, diversifying away from a single vendor, and doing whatever it takes to make sure its AI ambitions aren’t bottlenecked by chips.For AMD, this is a vote of confidence in its next-generation AI hardware – but having to give up a 10% stake suggests it could be struggling to generate organic demand.That said, delivering solutions at this scale is a new test.Designing competitive chips is one thing; manufacturing, deploying and supporting them in volumes this large is another.

…Zooming out, this deal underlines just how dominant Nvidia still is,,,AMD had to sweeten the agreement with a potential equity option – something you simply don’t see Nvidia needing to do to secure demand,Nvidia remains the clear top dog in AI chips, with unmatched scale, software, and customer pull.

AMD is making progress and carving out a role, but with Nvidia’s results due tomorrow, we’re expecting Jensen Huang to once again remind the market who’s in charge.”Meta 🤝 AMDToday we’re announcing a multi-year agreement with @AMD to integrate their latest Instinct GPUs into our global infrastructure.With approximately 6GW of planned data center capacity dedicated to this deployment, we’re scaling our compute capacity to accelerate the… pic.twitter.com/a6lNWsfRciMeta has agreed a multi-billion dollar chip deal with Advanced Micro Devices, in which it could also buy a 10% stake in the business.

The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has agreed to buy $60bn of artificial intelligence chips from AMD,It is the latest blockbuster deal in the AI space, as companies pour billions of dollars into developing their AI tech,Meta has separately struck a deal with AMD’s larger rival Nvidia to buy millions of AI chips,AMD will supply six gigawatts’ worth of chips to Meta, starting with one gigawatt of the company’s forthcoming MI450 flagship hardware in the second half of this year, AMD chief executive Lisa Su said,Meta also plans to buy central processors (CPUs), including a variant that will be customised for the social media platform’s needs.

The custom CPU will be tuned to deliver powerful performance while keeping energy consumption as low as possible, Su said.The deal will include two generations of AMD’s CPUs.Su said:double quotation markSo no question Mark [Zuckerberg] is very, very ambitious in what he wants to accomplish, and we want to use every aspect of our technology to really help Meta to accomplish that.…Meta is making a big bet on AMD.Meta also gets a performance-based warrant as part of the deal, giving it the option to acquire up to 160 million AMD shares in tranches at an exercise price of $0.

01 as it buys processors,Shares in AMD are poised to jump when the US market opens, with the stock up 10% in pre-market trading,The stock market looks pretty stable for now – the UK’s FTSE 100 is now only down by 0,07%, and the Stoxx Europe 600 is up slightly by 0,1%.

Futures for the US stock market were up 0.4%.Investors will be watching the US market open closely in a couple of hours, after a gloomy report on AI risks triggered a sell-off in software stocks yesterday.The report, which was published over the weekend by the research firm Citrini, imagined a world in 2028 in which rapid advances in machine intelligence boost productivity, but could spark human job losses, weigh on consumer spending and hit stock indexes.Shares in the tech giant IBM also suffered yesterday, although that was off the back of AI startup Anthropic saying its Claude Code tool can help modernise Cobol, an old programming language that runs on IBM computers.

Boomer programmers our jobs are safe no one will ever bother to learn COBOL now all the cool kids learn pYtHoN,Claude: Hold My Beer,$IBM falls 11% pic,twitter,com/Jw9bwzbFTiSome of Britain’s biggest banks have been the worst performers in the FTSE 100 today: shares in Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest and Barclays are all down between 1.

5-2%.There are concerns growing around the health of the credit market, especially after Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the American bank JPMorgan, said that there was a risk of bad loans in the banking system.When asked about fierce competition in the financial industry, Dimon said that he was starting to see parallels with the era before the 2008 financial crisis.He told investors:double quotation markUnfortunately, we did see this in ’05, ’06 and ’07, almost the same thing — the rising tide was lifting all boats, everyone was making a lot of money.Adding that while JPMorgan was not willing to make riskier loans to boost net interest income, he said:double quotation markI see a couple people doing some dumb things.

They’re just doing dumb things to create NII.Kathleen Brooks, of the broker XTB, said that these fears are now being echoed across the Atlantic, but it could well be an over-reaction.double quotation markFears about credit quality are also weighing on banks in Europe and is it is dragging the index lower.HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest are all sharply lower today, as Dimon’s fears echo across the Atlantic.Intesa San Paolo, ING Group and Allianz are also weighing heavily on the European index