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President Donald Trump said he will announce on Monday that the United States will impose 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports, including from Canada and Mexico, as well as other import duties later in the week.“Any steel coming into the United States is going to have a 25% tariff,” he told reporters Sunday on Air Force One as he flew from Florida to New Orleans to attend the Super Bowl. When asked about aluminum, he responded, “aluminum, too” will be subject to the trade penalties.Trump also reaffirmed that he would announce “reciprocal tariffs” “probably Tuesday or Wednesday” meaning that the U.S. would impose import duties on products in cases where another country has levied duties on U.S. goods.“If they are charging us 130% and we’re charging them nothing, it’s not going to stay that way,” he told reporters.Trump’s comments are the latest example of his willingness to threaten, and in some cases to impose, import taxes. Tariffs are coming much earlier in his presidency than during his previous four years in the White House, when he prioritized tax cuts and deregulation. Trump has alternately said he sees import taxes as tools to force concessions on issues such as immigration, but also as a source of revenue to help close the government’s budget deficit.Financial markets fell on Friday after Trump first said he would impose the reciprocal tariffs. Stock prices also dropped after a measure of consumer sentiment declined on Friday, largely because many respondents cited tariffs as a growing worry. The survey also found that Americans are expecting inflation to tick up in the coming months because of the duties.Trump on Sunday did not offer any details about the steel and aluminum duties, or the reciprocal tariffs. Trump previously threatened 25% import taxes on all goods from Canada and Mexico, though he paused them for 30 days barely a week ago. At the same time, he proceeded to add 10% duties on imports from China.Yet on Friday, he said he would also delay the tariffs on the millions of small packages often from fast-fashion firms such as Temu and Shein until customs officials can figure out ways to impose them. The small packages have previously been exempt from tariffs.Trump’s latest remarks stirred immediate worry from some global trading partners.South Korea’s acting president, Choi Sang-mok, called a meeting with the country’s top foreign policy and trade officials on Monday to examine how Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum would affect its industries.The office of Choi, who also serves as the country’s finance minister, said officials discussed the potential impact and Seoul’s possible responses, but specific details of the meeting were not disclosed. The stock prices of major South Korean steelmakers, including POSCO and Hyundai Steel, dropped as the market opened on Monday. South Korea shipped about $4.8 billion worth of steel to the United States from January to November last year, which accounted for 14% of its global exports of the products during the period. Superville reported from aboard Air Force One. Associated Press writer Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report. Christopher Rugaber and Darlene Superville, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
As many organizations implement return-to-office mandates, the debate around RTOs impact on performance and culture intensifies. Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei joins Rapid Response to bust popular myths around in-person work, and reveal the surprisingand somewhat contradictoryintentions of many pro-RTO business leaders. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. There’s so much discussion right now about return to office, RTO, for federal employees and on the corporate level. Amazon, JPMorgan, others calling staff into the office full time. Why has this discussion popped up so much at this moment? I’ll give you my hypothesis, which is that people of a certain age, of a certain income bracket, all uniformly really like to see people when they’re at work. They just like it. They’re used to it when they walk around. It just makes them feel better when the offices are full. It makes them feel like work is going on. And so, if you notice who is calling for these RTOs, the demographic is super narrowlike, by age, by shirt sleeve. I mean, it’s incredible who wants it. I personally believe it’s out of nostalgia. And I’ll tell you why. There is no evidence to support that it actually leads to better results. In fact, all of the evidence points in the other direction. So, what’s amazing to me is these otherwise pretty brutally performance-oriented people are willing to take a performance hit at the altar of their nostalgia. You’ve been resisting this ideathis pullthat sort of statistically, numerically, it’s a bad idea. Can you explain that? There are some places that you might have to do it. If you’re serving customers live and they’re pulling into the driveway, you gotta be there, right? But if you look at all of the evidence and all of the academic research, I don’t think there is any, like not a single study, that says unequivocally return to office helps. What it says is, employees value flexibility to a startling amount. And then what it also says is that productivitynot only does it not go down when you have hybrid work, because that’s really what it is, you know. So many of these places where employees could come in three days a week, and now they’ve changed it to five. The value proposition for the employees just got a lot worse, and the value proposition for the firm got no better. It’s a super curious thing, and every study shows this. And the idea that being in office all the time strengthens company culturelike, that’s just a myth. It’s silly because, again, we’re going from three days to five days. What they like to do is say, “Oh, well, compare it to zero days.” I know very few companies that had all remote. This is typically a three-day-to-five-day thing. And what often happens, the rest of the research shows us, is that when people are there all the time, they come in wearing noise-canceling headphones because we didn’t give anybody a private office. If you did give them a private office, they shut the door. And then if you don’t have a private office, you put on noise-canceling headphones so that you can get work done. Or you can all be on the same Zoom together in the same room, right? With your laptops up, because that’s good meeting maintenance. What we’re doing is forcing people to be together for activities, even when they aren’t needed to be co-located. What you really want to do is bring people together when it’s valuable. Can you give us sort of a snapshot of what’s happening right now? Who’s back? How often? Is it different in different fields? So, most of the headlines are from the CEO who formerly said, “I care about performance. Employees are telling me that they’re going to do better work at three days. Let’s test it.” And everyone who did it saw engagement go up and performance go up. But they still didn’t like it because their sentiment went down. There was a period of like two years where CEOs were grumpy. It was like, ughlike if you got them in private, they just couldn’t believe this remote work. Even if they had said, “We’re a hybrid-first location,” they all just resented it. Because they’re paying for all that extra real estate that they’re Well, I actually don’t even think it’s that as much as it is that they just want to see people. It just makes them feel better. Now, of course, this flies in the face of every single international organization in the world. You could only see a subset of the employees in any specific physical geography, but that is just lost. Even the CEOs of international companiesstill, they wanted to see people in their location. And so what happened is, there were a few first movers. And a few big dogs said, “We’re gonna do it, or else.” Made their employees furious. Their research suggests that the best employees are the ones that are leaving. They feel like tough guys because they stood up to the employees. And then the other people who were resentful were like, “Well, look, we have license to do it. He did it. He’s tough. We can do it.” And so I think right now they all feel like they’re getting away with it. Although the early evidencewhen they look at who’s leaving and the productivity gains that haven’t manifested and the engagement scores that have gone downthe early ones who are willing to look, because most people are just saying, “Don’t tell me.” But the ones that are looking are like, “Oops.” So, I expect the pendulum to switch back. They sort of falsely extrapolated that like, well, if three days is fine, why not five? And there are things that they didn’t get about that shift from three to five. Well, yes, so from three days to five days, they thought, I want better performance, and this is the way to get better performance. If I said to you, I have a great idea to improve performance, it’s gonna make my employees less happy and like make them less individually productive. Even if I don’t tell you what my black box idea is, are you going to be psyched to have it happen? The only person wo can push something like this through is an emotional CEO. I could see an argument that it’s better to have one uniform policy for an office as opposed to different rules for different jobs. So, why shouldn’t we make it consistent? We are optimizing on everything except for this blunt instrument. Why are we taking a blunt instrument to our entire employee base? It’s not for performance reasons. It’s for emotional reasons. And, are there parts of itI mean, obviously about like control, trust, all those things sort of Well, I think they, the problem is they reveal that they don’t trust their employees, and they reveal that they are not looking at the data. Because there’s no performance data to support them, and so they reveal two, I think, unpleasant things, which means the employees who have a choice, which are your best employees, they’re looking at their CEOs right now and if they’re not thinking this too shall pass, like my CEO just saw their friend do it and now they’re doing it, but you know, we just got to grin and bear it and it will change. But if they’re like, oh my gosh, my CEO really feels like they believe this, I’m gonna go to a CEO who cares more about performance than this, who wants to win and is not going to indulge their emotions at the expense of our performance. I know you consult with and advise CEOs and business leaders. When you raise this with them, what do they say? This is one of the few issues. . . . So I’m a very direct person and I have learned they can’t handle it directly. So this is an issue where you got to come at it from the side, but even then, otherwise rational people, otherwise performance-oriented people, they justthis is like a third rail. They just say, when we get down to it, they’re like, I just don’t like it.
Category:
E-Commerce
If youve skimmed your feeds today, there’s a good chance youve seen many headlines exclaiming that around two million donuts have been recalled due to possible listeria contamination. However, these headlines are a bit misleading as the recall happened over a month ago. Confused? Heres what to know about the listeria donut recall, whether your morning donut is safe to eat, and why youre just hearing about the recall now. Whats happened? Over the past day, the internet has been flooded with articles about a massive donut recall, with two million of the tasty treats affected. However, though this recall is widely being reported on nowthe second week in Februaryit was actually initiated at the beginning of January and has been completed for some time. The recall centered around donuts that were produced and distributed by FGF Brands. On January 7, FGF initiated a voluntary recall of 60 of its donut products due to fears that they may have been contaminated with listeria. In total, about two million individual donuts were covered under the recall of the 60 products. This included some Dunkin branded donuts. Given the flood of late reporting on the recall, FGF Brands has issued a statement clarifying that the recall now being reported does not implicate anything that is currently, or was recently on the market.” It has further declared that All donuts are completely safe to eat. If the recall is old, why is it being reported now? Food recalls should be taken very seriouslyespecially when they involve possible listeria contamination. This is why so many publications report on such recalls. When a food is recalled, its common for a notice to appear on the Recalls, Market Withdrawals, & Safety Alerts website operated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But thats not always the case. The FDA says no press release was issued about the original donut recall on January 7. As a result, the recall avoided media attention. However, this month, the FDA published an enforcement report about the recall, designating the recall with a Class II status on February 5. It is this enforcement report that the media has picked up on. The FDA classifies recalled products into three categoriesClass I, Class II, or Class IIIbased on the level of hazard the recalled product represents to consumers: Class I recalls involve products that can pose serious adverse health consequences or death. Class II recalls involve products that may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences. Class III recalls involves a product that is not likely to cause adverse health consequences. It can take about a month for the FDA’s enforcement report to appear publicly in its database. And once the class level is assigned, news outlets often pick up on the recall againor for the first time. So are my donuts safe to eat? When it comes to the January recall that has received so much attention today, FGF Brands says, it “was completed over a month ago (early January), and does not implicate anything that is currently, or was recently on the market.” The company also says that no donuts or food surfaces ever actually ended up testing positive for listeria. (The voluntary recall was a precautionary measure.) And given that donuts dont usually last for more than a week at most, its highly unlikely that anyone still has a donut covered under the recall in their possession. Thats why FGF Brands now says that All donuts are completely safe to eat.
Category:
E-Commerce
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