Category: 3. Business

DUBLIN, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Most of Ireland’s big corporate taxpayers have so far escaped the direct impact of U.S. tariffs, but American trade policies have made the outlook for this critical source of government revenue increasingly uncertain, Ireland’s fiscal watchdog said.

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The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) noted on Wednesday that the pharmaceutical and technology sectors, which together represent about 87% of corporate tax payments from U.S.-owned firms, had avoided U.S. tariffs so far.

PHARMA EXPORTS SURGED AHEAD OF EXPECTED TARIFFS

It added that the data also pointed to a structural increase in exports of an active ingredient used in weight-loss drugs, boosting short-term corporate tax receipts.

However, IFAC warned the sector’s outlook remained “very uncertain”.

Risks include the long-term objective of the tariffs to encourage more pharma manufacturing in the United States.

“Corporation tax revenues from pharma could go up by a lot or down by a lot.”

While there is a clear risk corporate tax could decline in other manufacturing sectors such as drinks and medical devices likely to be directly affected by tariffs, they accounted for just 4% of Irish corporate revenues in 2024, IFAC added.

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(Bloomberg) — Treasuries advanced across the curve after private-sector data signaled a cooling US labor market and bolstered bets on a Federal Reserve interest-rate cut.

The yield on the 10-year fell four basis points to 4.08% after employment figures from ADP Research signaled US companies shed 11,250 jobs per week on average in the four weeks ended Oct. 25. Money markets also added to bets on Fed rate cuts, pricing roughly a 70% chance of a reduction next month, according to swaps tied to policy-meeting dates. A gauge of the dollar was flat after five days of losses while gold gained.

Asian shares edged higher along with US equity-index futures. Advancers outnumbered decliners seven to one on Japan’s Topix Index. Technology firms lagged, with SoftBank Corp. tumbling as much as 10% after selling its entire stake in Nvidia Corp.

The federal government’s closure has elevated the importance of private data, as investors lacked key official indicators to gauge the strength of the American economy. The record US shutdown may end as soon as Wednesday after the Senate passed a temporary funding bill, buoying stocks as investors brace for a flood of delayed data once agencies reopen.

“The biggest near-term catalyst would be a reopening of the government which would buttress current-quarter GDP forecasts but also may release more liquidity into the market, which typically is supportive of stocks,” said the JPMorgan Market Intelligence team led by Andrew Tyler.

ADP figures suggested the labor market slowed in the second half of October, compared with earlier in the month. ADP’s most recent monthly report, released last week, showed private-sector payrolls increased 42,000 in October after declining in the prior two months.

The data come after an array of companies flagged plans to reduce headcount in recent weeks. A report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. showed employers announced the most job cuts for any October in more than two decades, spurring anxiety about the health of the labor market.

“The market will be guided by the general risk vibe and Fedspeak, but we suspect it will be unable to establish consistent directional impetus,” Westpac Banking Corp. strategists Damien McColough and Uma Choudhury wrote in a note.

The reopening of the government now depends on the House, which plans to return to Washington to consider the spending package. It would keep most of the government open through Jan. 30 and some agencies through Sept. 30.

If approved, the bill goes to President Donald Trump, who has already endorsed the legislation.

Back in 2013, which was the last shutdown to affect the jobs report, the government reopened on October 17, and the September jobs report was released five days later, noted Jim Reid at Deutsche Bank.

“So based on that timeline, we could get the September jobs report pretty quickly, not least because the original release was meant to be on Oct. 3, just a couple of days after the shutdown began,” he said. “Early next week is realistic.”

The resumption of economic data releases could make the case for increased wagers on Fed rate cuts. Most economists surveyed by Bloomberg suggest that Fed officials will lower borrowing costs by a quarter-point at their Dec. 9-Dec. 10 meeting. But the central bank’s path remained foggy after Chair Jerome Powell last month said a cut is not a certainty, a sentiment since shared by others at the Fed.

Corporate News:

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Nvidia Corp.’s nearest rival in AI chips, predicted accelerating sales growth over the next five years, driven by strong demand for its data center products. FedEx Corp. expects profit this quarter to improve from a year ago, easing investor concerns about a lackluster holiday season and volatile trade policies. A group of investors led by Macquarie Group Ltd. is expected to acquire infrastructure services business Potters Industries from private equity firm TJC, in a deal valuing the company at approximately $1.1 billion. JD.com Inc. said orders surged nearly 60% during this year’s Singles’ Day event. South Korea’s POSCO Holdings Inc. will buy a 30% stake in Mineral Resources Ltd.’s lithium business in a deal worth $765 million. Sea Ltd.’s quarterly profit missed analysts’ estimates after the company boosted spending to battle competitors in Southeast Asia’s cutthroat e-commerce market. Some of the main moves in markets:

Stocks

S&P 500 futures were little changed as of 9:54 a.m. Tokyo time Hang Seng futures rose 0.4% Nikkei 225 futures (OSE) fell 0.5% Japan’s Topix rose 1% Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.2% Euro Stoxx 50 futures rose 0.2% Currencies

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed The euro was unchanged at $1.1582 The Japanese yen was little changed at 154.24 per dollar The offshore yuan was little changed at 7.1216 per dollar The Australian dollar was little changed at $0.6521 Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin rose 0.3% to $102,892.04 Ether was little changed at $3,419.62 Bonds

The yield on 10-year Treasuries declined four basis points to 4.08% Japan’s 10-year yield was little changed at 1.685% Australia’s 10-year yield declined three basis points to 4.36% Commodities

West Texas Intermediate crude was little changed Spot gold rose 0.2% to $4,135.95 an ounce This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.

–With assistance from Toby Alder and Matthew Burgess.

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday named a longtime regulator of cancer medicines to lead the agency’s drug center, replacing the former drug director who was recently ousted after an ethics complaint.

Dr. Richard Pazdur, a 26-year veteran of the agency, will become director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the FDA’s largest unit. A cancer specialist, Pazdur has previously served in numerous FDA roles, most recently leading the agency’s Oncology Center of Excellence.

Pazdur’s appointment comes just over a week after Dr. George Tidmarsh abruptly departed the agency after federal ethics lawyers began reviewing “serious concerns about his personal conduct,” according to a government statement. Tidmarsh, a former pharmaceutical executive and scientist, had been recruited to the agency by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.

A lawsuit filed early this month alleged that Tidmarsh used his position at the FDA to pursue a “longstanding personal vendetta” against the chairman of a Canadian drugmaker’s board of directors. The two men had previously worked as business associates at several pharmaceutical companies, according to the lawsuit.

Tidmarsh has denied any wrongdoing in media interviews. He did not respond to requests for comment sent by The Associated Press to him and his lawyer.

Pazdur is one of the last remaining members of the FDA’s senior leadership to survive months of retirements, firings, resignations, and other actions by the Trump administration that forced longtime employees out of the agency.

He’ll be tasked with bringing stability to a unit that has been riven by low morale, return-to-office orders and turf battles with other parts of the agency, including the vaccine and biologics center led by Dr. Vinay Prasad.

The FDA’s drug center has lost more than 1,000 staffers over the past year to layoffs or resignations, according to agency figures. The center is responsible for the review, safety and quality control of prescription and over-the-counter medicines.

Pazdur will also inherit several new initiatives announced by Makary, including a voucher program that aims to review drugs that are deemed a “national priority” in just one to two months. Previously, the FDA’s fastest drug reviews required six months.

As the FDA’s top cancer specialist, Pazdur previously oversaw efforts to expedite the approvals of experimental cancer therapies based on early measures, such as tumor shrinkage. That approach has been criticized by many in academia, including Prasad, who spent years publishing papers scrutinizing the FDA’s approach to cancer medicines before joining the agency earlier this year.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

• Significant control over Bathurst Resources by individual investors implies that the general public has more power to influence management and governance-related decisions

• The top 13 shareholders own 50% of the company

• Insider ownership in Bathurst Resources is 15%

Trump has pledged to “unleash” American oil and gas and these 15 US stocks have developments that are poised to benefit.

To get a sense of who is truly in control of Bathurst Resources Limited (ASX:BRL), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. The group holding the most number of shares in the company, around 48% to be precise, is individual investors. In other words, the group stands to gain the most (or lose the most) from their investment into the company.

Institutions, on the other hand, account for 21% of the company’s stockholders. Generally speaking, as a company grows, institutions will increase their ownership. Conversely, insiders often decrease their ownership over time.

Let’s delve deeper into each type of owner of Bathurst Resources, beginning with the chart below.

Check out our latest analysis for Bathurst Resources

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it’s included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

We can see that Bathurst Resources does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company’s stock. This implies the analysts working for those institutions have looked at the stock and they like it. But just like anyone else, they could be wrong. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of Bathurst Resources, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Hedge funds don’t have many shares in Bathurst Resources. Crocodile Capital Partners GmbH is currently the company’s largest shareholder with 11% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 10% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 8.6% by the third-largest shareholder. In addition, we found that Richard Tacon, the CEO has 0.9% of the shares allocated to their name.

After doing some more digging, we found that the top 13 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.

Story Continues

From Hollywood reboots and retro car models to vintage fashion, a swath of industries are doing a roaring trade in nostalgia. But there’s a fine line between celebrating your legacy and being stuck in a creative ditch. By failing to embrace fresh ideas, some French brands risk trading their future appeal for the comforts of the past.

Visitors to the French capital can currently see two major exhibitions looking back at the historic achievements of storied brands: Louis Vuitton Art Deco at LV Dream, the luxury giant’s Paris headquarters, and 1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which explores the design legacy of the Orient Express. Both shows mark the centennial of a major art deco exhibition held in the city. There’s plenty of exquisite craftsmanship on display, both by major figures of the art deco movement and by modern-day artisans and designers.

A standout piece from the Louis Vuitton exhibition is a trunk designed for British conductor Leopold Stokowski in 1929, which folds out into a portable desk. This clever feature allowed Stokowski to travel with his documents and sit down to write wherever he happened to be. The piece is emblematic of the brand’s history of innovating to meet the evolving needs of wealthy globetrotters throughout the 20th century. With the advent of cars and transatlantic steamers, Gaston-Louis Vuitton, the grandson of the brand’s founder, oversaw a period during which aesthetics and functionality went hand in hand.

At the Louis Vuitton shop above the exhibition space, you’ll spot an updated version of the Stokowski trunk, the Secrétaire Bureau 2.0. Usefully, it has a wider work surface that’s designed to accommodate laptops – but it seems more likely to grace a collector’s lounge than to travel the world with its owner.

Meanwhile, in the grand hall of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, you can admire the splendid interiors of the new Orient Express. Though the state-of-the-art passenger train includes 21st-century amenities such as wi-fi, it’s ultimately just a homage to the 1920s. It reflects a mindset that locates the future of design in the archives – leaving true innovation stuck at the station.

That’s not to say that past icons can’t be resurrected to break new ground. Renault, for example, has successfully launched updated versions of classic models such as the Renault 5 and Renault 4, with the Twingo next in line. The refreshed Twingo features a design similar to the 1992 original, which sold 2.6 million models over its 20-year production run, as well as all-electric drivetrains. By combining nostalgia-inducing design with significant hardware upgrades, the automaker is making contemporary electric vehicles more appealing to drivers who aren’t yet fully comfortable with the technology.

What if brands such as Louis Vuitton and the Orient Express reclaimed their status as cutting-edge innovators in travel, while staying true to their legacy? Perhaps we’d enter a new golden age of travel – one that pairs timeless elegance with genuine progress. The 2026 christening of the Orient Express Corinthian, the world’s largest sailing yacht and a partnership with LVMH, could be a groundbreaking moment for the sector. Combining luxury amenities and destinations that are often out of reach for conventional cruise ships, it will be charting new waters for hospitality, while still evoking the Old World glamour of the Orient Express. Fresh ideas such as this are why these brands rose to prominence in the first place. 

Simon Bouvier is Monocle’s Paris bureau chief. Fancy more from the French capital? Check out our City Guide. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

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China is going to win the artificial intelligence race, says Jensen Huang. At first glance, it is easy to assume Nvidia’s billionaire founder is just talking his book. Nvidia does stand to gain the most from any narrative that encourages the US to step up its investment in AI or ease regulatory restrictions on its development, thus boosting demand for Nvidia chips. But does he have a point?

Not long ago, about a fifth of Nvidia’s data centre revenue came from China. Its fortunes depend on a steady stream of orders for its chips from governments, cloud providers and AI research labs around the world. The fear of China pulling ahead in AI reinforces that demand.

Still, Huang’s warning may hold some truth. AI development has started shifting from being limited primarily by high-end chip availability to being constrained by electricity supply.

A GPT-4 model can use up to 463,269 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to research by academics at the University of Rhode Island, University of Tunis and Providence College. That is more than the annual energy consumption of more than 35,000 US homes. This demand reflects the expanding share of AI workloads in data centre electricity consumption. Global use of electricity by data centres is projected to more than double by 2030, and will reach about 1,800 terawatt-hours by 2040, enough to power 150mn US homes for a year, according to Rystad Energy.

As a result, the price and availability of power will increasingly determine the pace of AI progress. Here, China has a head start. Last year, it added a record amount of renewable energy capacity, mostly from new solar and wind installations. Solar power alone expanded by about 277 gigawatts, while wind contributed about 80GW, bringing total new renewable capacity to more than 356GW, far exceeding total capacity in the US.

This renewable surge is part of a bigger plan. Beijing has linked industrial policy to its efforts to reinforce the national grid, developing large solar projects in Inner Mongolia, expanding hydropower in Sichuan and building high-voltage transmission lines to move cheaper inland electricity to coastal demand centres.

Local authorities are also granting preferential electricity rates to companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance to boost local AI computing. These subsidies help to offset the lower efficiency of domestic chips from Huawei, allowing China to train AI models at a lower overall cost.

Meanwhile, in the US, wholesale electricity costs have been rising, with prices today as much as 267 per cent higher than five years ago in areas near data centres. But investment in many types of renewable projects, including large-scale wind and solar, fell in the US during the first half of the year, reflecting policy shifts and regulatory uncertainty. The White House has also detailed an executive order ending subsidies for wind and solar power.

Some argue that China’s energy advantage cannot fully compensate for its lag in chips and models. Indeed, Nvidia’s H100 and Blackwell graphics processing units remain ahead of Chinese alternatives such as Huawei’s Ascend 910B in terms of memory bandwidth and performance.

That imbalance would have been critical in the hardware-dominated phase of technological competition, when access to advanced chips powering computers and smartphones determined who led entire industries. The US, for example, curbed Huawei’s ascent by restricting its supply of high-end chips starting in 2019.

Yet the difference today is that energy has now started to scale faster than transistors: chip performance gains have slowed to single digits while China’s renewable generation continues to expand at double-digit rates each year. Declining electricity costs expand the amount of computation that can be purchased for the same budget, and expanding grid capacity allows models to be trained more frequently for longer durations.

The race to master AI is new but it is part of a centuries-old story. Throughout history, every technological superpower has risen on the back of cheap energy. Cheap, abundant coal powered Britain’s Industrial Revolution. In the US, oil and hydroelectric power fuelled its dominance in manufacturing and military technology during the 20th century.

The battle to control AI is often framed as a contest for chips and the controls that govern them. But power will belong to those who can keep the AI models running.

june.yoon@ft.com