Chief-Exec.com

Gold jumps and dollar slides as global trade faces new Trump tariff threat
Gold rose and the dollar fell on Monday after Donald Trump deepened uncertainty over global trade by imposing a new 15 per cent tariff following a landmark US Supreme Court ruling that his previous policy was unlawful. The US president responded to Friday’s ruling from America’s top court by announcing a flat-rate tariff on the country’s trading partners, which is set to come into force on Tuesday. The new duty relies on the 1974 Trade Act and will allow Trump to set import restrictions for up to 150 days. In its ruling, the Supreme Court said that the president had exceeded his authority in using emergency powers to impose his “liberation day” tariffs last year. Trump’s launch of his trade war last April convulsed currency, bond and equity markets but stocks, powered by the AI boom, have since recovered to hit record highs. In early London trading on Monday, gold, a haven asset, rose 0.6 per cent to $5,133 a troy ounce while the dollar weakened 0.3 per cent against a basket of its peers. Financial Times, February 23

Zelensky says Putin has started WW3 and must be stopped
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to send out a firm message of defiance. When he spoke to the BBC on the weekend in the government headquarters in Kyiv, he said that far from losing, Ukraine would end the war victorious. He was firmly against paying the price for a ceasefire deal demanded by President Vladimir Putin, which is withdrawing from strategic ground that Russia has failed to capture despite sacrificing tens of thousands of soldiers. Putin, Zelensky said, has already started World War Three, and the only answer was intense military and economic pressure to force him to step back. "I believe that Putin has already started it. The question is how much territory he will be able to seize and how to stop him … Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves." BBC news, February 22

Iran agreed secret shoulder-fired missile deal with Russia
Iran agreed a secret €500mn arms deal with Russia to acquire thousands of advanced shoulder-fired missiles in its most significant effort to rebuild air defences shattered during last year’s war with Israel. The agreement, signed in Moscow in December, commits Russia to deliver 500 man-portable “Verba” launch units and 2,500 “9M336” missiles over three years, according to leaked Russian documents seen by the FT and several people familiar with the deal. The Verba is one of Russia’s most modern air-defence systems, a shoulder-fired, infrared-guided missile capable of targeting cruise missiles, low-flying aircraft and drones. Operated by small mobile teams, it allows ground forces to quickly create dispersed defences without relying on fixed radar installations that are more vulnerable to strikes. The leaked details of the Iran-Russia deal have emerged just as Donald Trump has assembled a vast US military force in the Middle East, threatening Tehran with strikes unless it accepts curbs on its nuclear programme. Financial Times, February 22

Gunmen run riot in World Cup city after Mexico kills cartel boss
Mexico has assassinated the head of the country’s most powerful cartel, prompting violent unrest in Guadalajara, the second-largest city, where visitors were warned to take shelter. Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, 59, grew up in poverty selling avocados before rising to become the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which traffics cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl into the US. He had a $15 million bounty on his head and was killed after the Mexican government came under pressure from the Trump administration to adopt a more forceful approach to the cartels. The Times, February 22

UK job vacancies ‘fall to lowest level since pandemic’
The number of job vacancies in the UK has tumbled to the lowest level in five years, research suggests, falling to levels not seen since the pandemic. The number of jobs being advertised slid by 3 per cent in January to 695,000, according to the job search site Adzuna, marking the first time advertised vacancies have dropped below 700,000 since January 2021. Graduate jobs fell below 10,000 for the first time since Adzuna began tracking this in 2016. The research comes days after official figures showed unemployment in the UK had risen to a five-year high of 5.2 per cent, at a time when wage growth is slowing and concerns are increasing that young people are bearing the brunt of the slowdown in hiring. The Guardian, February 23

Paris court to review Nicolas Sarkozy's request to merge sentences in graft case
A Paris criminal court will on Monday examine former president Nicolas Sarkozy's request to merge two sentences for convictions in separate cases related to graft and illegal campaign financing. The one-term president from 2007 to 2012 has faced a series of legal challenges since leaving office, receiving two definitive convictions in recent years. "A request to merge sentences is an extremely routine procedure in this situation," his lawyer Vincent Desry told AFP. France 24, February 23

World leaders to present joint approach to AI at India summit close
Dozens of world leaders and ministers are expected to deliver on Friday a shared view of how to handle artificial intelligence, wrapping up a five-day summit focused on the technology. It comes a day after OpenAI chief Sam Altman told the meeting in New Delhi that the fast-evolving sector needs regulation "urgently". Frenzied demand for generative AI has turbocharged profits for companies, while also fuelling fears about the impact on society and the planet. Altman, CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, has called for oversight in the past but said last year that taking too tight an approach could hold the United States back in the AI race. "Centralisation of this technology, in one company or country, could lead to ruin," the 40-year-old said on Thursday. "This is not to suggest that we won't need any regulation or safeguards. We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies." France 24, February 20

Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot
Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants. Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”. Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption. “We’ve already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months],” said one senior AWS employee. “The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable.” Financial Times, February 20

Investors pour record sums into European stocks
Global investors are pouring record sums into European equities, as a desire to reduce exposure to the US meets growing optimism over the state of the region’s economy. European stocks are headed for their highest ever monthly inflows in February, following two consecutive record weekly flows of about $10bn, according to data from EPFR, which tracks ETF and mutual fund flows. The continent’s blue-chip Stoxx Europe 600 index has punched through a series of record highs this month, as have indices in the UK, France and Spain. European bourses have benefited from big investors’ desire to diversify away from Wall Street and its massive technology sector, which has been buffeted this year by concerns over a potential AI bubble. “It’s a lot of global investors wanting to diversify away from an expensive US market,” said Sharon Bell, senior equities strategist at Goldman Sachs, adding this was particularly the case for US-based investors looking overseas. “Europe as an equity market offers a different exposure … there’s less tech.” Financial Times, February 20

UK reports record-breaking budget surplus of £30.4bn in surprise boost for chancellor
The UK government has posted the biggest ever budget surplus, official figures show, after a large increase in self-assessment and capital gains tax receipts. In a boost for the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in the run-up to her spring statement next month, public sector finances recorded a surplus of £30.4bn at the start of the year, according to the Office for National Statistics. This was double the surplus recorded in January 2025. The figure is the largest January total since records began in 1993 and much higher than the forecast of £24bn made by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s official forecaster, and a poll of City economists. Paul Dales, the chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said: “The economy started the year looking a lot healthier and will give the chancellor something positive to point to in her fiscal statement on 3 March.” The Guardian, February 20

Trump says world has 10 days to see if Iran agrees deal or 'bad things happen'
US President Donald Trump says the world will find out "over the next, probably, 10 days" whether the US will reach a deal with Iran or take military action. At the first meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington DC, Trump said of negotiations with the Islamic Republic about its nuclear programme: "We have to make a meaningful deal otherwise bad things happen." In recent days, the US has surged military forces to the Middle East, while progress was reported at talks between American and Iranian negotiators in Switzerland. The Iranian government has told the UN Secretary-General that it will regard US bases in the region as legitimate targets if used in any military aggression against Iran. Tehran's UN mission said in a letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres that Trump's rhetoric signalled a real risk of an attack - but it said Iran did not want a war. Democratic lawmakers, and some Republicans, have voiced opposition to any potential military action in Iran without congressional approval. In his remarks, Trump noted that Special Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who is also Trump's son-in-law, had "some very good meetings" with Iran. "It's proven to be, over the years, not easy to make a meaningful deal with Iran," he said. "Otherwise, bad things happen." BBC news, February 19

UK blocking Trump from using RAF bases for strikes on Iran
Sir Keir Starmer is blocking a request by President Trump to allow American planes to use British bases to attack Iran, telling him that it would be in breach of international law. In a rift with Washington, the prime minister is understood to have told Trump that the UK would not allow the use of British facilities at Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, which is home to America’s fleet of heavy bombers in Europe. Under the terms of long-standing agreements with Washington, these bases can only be used for military operations against third countries that have been agreed in advance with the government. The move prompted Trump on Wednesday to withdraw his support for Starmer’s deal to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. The Times, February 19