Why is Trump behaving like a bully over tariffs? Because he can | Gene Marks
Why is Donald Trump so obsessed with tariffs? If you ask me, it’s because America is so freaking huge. California’s economy is bigger than the entire UK’s. Texas’s is larger than all of Canada’s. Florida’s is larger than all of Mexico’s. In its entirety the US economy is about eight times larger than both the Canadian and Mexican economies … combined!Trump is a bully sitting on top of the world’s biggest bully – the American economy
Offshore worker Robbie Robson was bludgeoned to death on an oil rig. Was it a random attack or does the industry have questions to answer?
In October 2022, Robbie Robson, 38, a British offshore worker, travelled to Qatar for an eight-week contract in the oilfields of the Persian Gulf. Robson was handsome, ambitious, and determined to do well by his family. The job was an attractive opportunity: after years working on vessels, and as a pipelayer, he was pursuing safer and more lucrative positions piloting the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that are used to monitor underwater structures. It was a long stint away, but at least he’d be back to enjoy Christmas in South Tyneside with his partner, Kristie Graham, 39, her daughter Willow, 10, and Sefa, their 17-month-old son, in the new house they’d just bought.Until then, his home would be the Seafox Burj, a three-legged jack-up rig planted in the shallow waters of the Al-Shaheen oil field, 80km from land
Chemicals, cars, Man Utd: has Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos got the formula wrong?
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire chemicals magnate behind Manchester United, is a man who likes a beer. He considers this important enough to include in the eccentric mission statement pictogram he devised to “capture how Ineos works, and why”.The Ineos Compass, which he devised in 2022, includes a dizzying array of words and phrases, divided between those that Ratcliffe likes (“a beer”, “out of the box thinking”, “doggedness”) and those that he doesn’t (“politics”, “losing money”, “people who get on the bus”). If there are clues to Ratcliffe’s vertiginous rise and recent troubles they might be here.Ratcliffe became one of Britain’s wealthiest men after building a chemicals empire from the £84m purchase of a single Belgian oil refinery in 1998
Network Rail fined £3.75m for health and safety breaches that led to death of track workers
Network Rail has been fined £3.75m for health and safety breaches that led to the death of two track workers in south Wales in 2019.The workers were killed when struck by a train after starting an “unnecessary maintenance activity” on the south Wales mainline while it was still being used, with no lookouts posted to warn them.Network Rail had pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety Act 1974 after a prosecution brought by the rail regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (Orr), before the multimillion-pound fine was handed down on Friday at Swansea crown court. It was also ordered to pay costs of £175,000
Rollback on diversity policies ‘risks undoing decades of progress’, says Co-op
A rollback of diversity initiatives in the UK risks undoing decades of progress, the CEO of the Co-op group has warned, as US multinationals scale back commitments.Companies including Amazon, Disney, Google and Meta have begun abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the US as the president, Donald Trump, reverses government anti-discrimination measures.This month in the UK, BT reportedly cut DEI initiatives from its bonus scheme for middle managers, while saying it remained “committed” to diversity principles.The Manchester-headquartered Co-op, which employs nearly 60,000 people in the UK, is the UK’s first big retailer with a female CEO, CFO and chair.The group’s CEO, Shirine Khoury-Haq, said DEI was true to Co-op’s founding principles and that it would continue to champion fairness having seen the benefits
UK could face Trump VAT tariff hit; pound hits 2025 high – as it happened
US retail sales slumped and steep tariffs from the White House may be in the works. Perhaps things might not go so well for the global economy in the next few months?James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, an investment bank, said it was a “subdued start to 2025 in the US economy. Blame it on the weatherman? Certainly fires in Los Angeles and cold weather elsewhere may have affected consumer spending. But maybe there’s something else, he asked:Could tariff worries also have played a role?In trying to rationalise this outcome, we know that consumer confidence did fall quite a lot in January, largely on a sense that prices were going to rise on tariffs (big rise in price expectations and the responses showing it was going to be a worse buying environment for big ticket items – which are often imported).We will need to wait until the February data to see if this is the start of a more cautious consumer trend or indeed whether it was simply a weather-related pull back and we get a subsequent big gain
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