Flagship

Trade war grows more pugilistic

The simmering global trade war flared Wednesday as both Canada and the European Union announced retaliatory tariffs after US President Donald Trump’s duties on metal imports took effect. Trump vowed to hit back at Brussels, indicating a future escalation. Some countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea, chose not to retaliate immediately and instead focus on trade talks. “The trouble with trade wars is that once they begin they can quickly escalate and get out of control,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board warned. The conflict has deepened uncertainty for policymakers, too: Canada’s central bank cut interest rates Wednesday, citing a “new crisis,” and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said “established certainties about the international order have been upended.”

Investors look beyond new US inflation data

Consumer prices in the US rose less than expected last month, providing a brief moment of relief for investors and consumers worried about the economy amid the escalating global trade war. The data prompted a slight rebound on Wall Street, but did not eliminate economists’ fears over the long-term effects of US President Donald Trump’s trade policy. Against that backdrop, February’s numbers feel like “old news,” one analyst said. Some companies have already begun preemptively raising prices to head off possible tariff impacts, indicating that inflation will tick up, ING experts said. The uncertainty could also lead businesses to put investments and hiring on ice “until there is greater clarity — hence the growing talk of potential recession.”

Larry Fink’s inflation prediction

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said Wednesday he “would not be surprised to see elevated inflation over the next five months” as US President Donald Trump’s trade policies start to sink in. For now, Fink is not overly concerned by plunging stock prices. “Having [the market] fall 7% after the dramatic rise for the last 30 years is a blip,” Fink told Semafor’s Liz Hoffman. “The question is, is it going to fall another 8%? That’s a possibility… every CEO I talk to, we’re starting to talk about a more fearful economy.” At the same event, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said, “I don’t think the average American... changes what they’re going to do because they read about tariffs… But I do think companies might.”

China summons Walmart over pricing

Beijing admonished Walmart after the US retail giant reportedly pressured Chinese suppliers to lower prices to offset the cost of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The dressing-down underscored the bind that companies with global operations are in: Raising prices for American consumers could hurt business, but it’s hard to get suppliers to come down instead, The Wall Street Journal noted. The latter approach also risks government ire in places like China, where officials are not afraid to intervene. Other firms, like Target, are shifting supply chains away from China, while others, like Honda, are moving production to the US — which is what Trump wants.

Trump puts pressure on Moscow over truce

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday talked up his hopes that Russia would agree to a temporary ceasefire with Ukraine, adding that envoys are heading to Moscow this week. Analysts have suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin may try to drag out negotiations in a bid to win concessions, but Trump threatened “devastating” financial penalties if the Kremlin does not quickly agree to peace. Even if Trump brokers a truce, Russia has a history of using ceasefire agreements with Ukraine “to regroup, amass resources, and launch new attacks,” The Counteroffensive wrote, underscoring Kyiv’s need for security guarantees.

India trains young people to work abroad

India’s government is paying to equip young people with the skills they need to snag high-paying jobs — outside of India. A new “upskilling” academy offers courses and recruiting help, including German and Japanese language classes for prospective nurses and farmers, respectively, The Straits Times wrote: Germany and Japan are among the countries desperate for skilled workers, while many young, educated Indians are struggling to find a job at home. Helping more people get hired abroad is also a boon for India’s economy, officials say, because of remittances. The country is consistently the world leader in remittances; Indians living overseas sent an estimated $129 billion home in 2024.

US Education Dept. cuts workforce

The US Education Department began eliminating almost half its workforce, making it the latest federal agency affected by US President Donald Trump’s efforts to aggressively downsize the government. The layoffs, first reported by Semafor, are a step toward shutting the department down, Trump’s new education secretary told Fox News, though that would likely require Congress to get involved. The layoffs come as federal test scores showed US reading and math skills at record lows. Trump officials say the poor metrics signal how the department has failed, but deep cuts could threaten the future of such standardized tests, which provide crucial data for understanding — and improving — American education, The New York Times reported.

In a polarized world, where do people find their happiness? Semafor, in partnership with Gallup and in coordination with the World Happiness Report editorial team, will present the latest data and insights at The State of Happiness in 2025: A World Happiness Report Launch Event, exploring key themes around kindness, generosity, and policies that enhance well-being.

Join Costa Rican Ambassador to the US Dr. Catalina Crespo-Sancho, Finnish Ambassador to the US Leena-Kaisa Mikkola, Icelandic Ambassador to the US Svanhildur Hólm Valsdóttir, special guest Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and more to explore the report’s key themes around kindness, generosity, and happiness and policies that enhance well-being.

March 20, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

Addis Ababa mayor courts controversy

The first female mayor of Addis Ababa has sparked a national row over her plan to beautify the city. Adanech Abebe’s administration is spending $560 million demolishing and replacing the Ethiopian capital’s shanty towns as part of the prime minister’s modernization push, which has also seen the creation of a new airport and a science museum. But Abebe’s plans have caused thousands of shanty town residents to be forcibly evicted to apartment blocks on the city’s outskirts: “They gave us less than a week to pack up our lives and leave,” one evictee told the Financial Times. Abebe is unrepentant, saying that everyone affected was compensated: “Addis Ababa means ‘new flower’,” she said, “and we need to make it live up to its name.”

Local London news gets a boost

The city of London is witnessing the rise of a new kind of local news coverage. The shuttering of the London Evening Standard’s print edition in September left the UK capital without a city-centric newspaper for the first time in 200 years. But with the local papers gone, several small-scale online publications have sprung up to fill the gap, The New Yorker wrote. One digital outlet, run by Jim Waterson, formerly of BuzzFeed and The Guardian, covers such hyper-local goings-on as e-bike accident rates and community cinemas: The UK’s national papers are all in London, but as Waterson said, “if a national pitched [his kind of story], it would be, ‘Oooh… that’s too London.’ And yet there’s millions of people who want to know.”

Total lunar eclipse this week

The night sky this week will be graced with a total lunar eclipse, with skygazers across the Americas primed for the best views of the phenomenon. Total lunar eclipses happen when the Moon, Earth, and Sun line up: As the Moon moves through Earth’s shadow, it turns red — hence the moniker of “Blood Moon” — as the Sun’s light passes through our planet’s atmosphere and bends toward the Moon. How red it looks depends on Earth’s atmospheric conditions at the time and how far the Moon is inside Earth’s umbra, or shadow, Sky & Telescope noted. The best viewing hours will be from around midnight Eastern time on Thursday into the early hours of Friday.

March 13:

• The International Energy Agency releases its monthly oil market report.
• Deutsche Bank reports its latest earnings.
• The 2025 World Single Distances Speed Skating Championships begin in Norway.

A new exhibition charts the journey of an Eritrea-born artist who fled war at age 16. Ficre Ghebreyesus, who died in 2012, once described painting as “the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place.” His work has garnered posthumous acclaim, and his first European solo show at London’s Modern Art gallery demonstrates how his paintings juxtapose the joy of his home life with the horror of war, The Guardian wrote. Ghebreyesus crafted “a visual language for displacement, of insistence, of affirmation despite loss, loneliness, mourning and grieving,” one Ethiopian-American painter said.

The CEOs of two of the world’s largest energy companies — Amin Nasser of Saudi Arabia’s Aramco and Sultan Al Jaber of the UAE’s ADNOC — both touched on a similar theme at the oil and gas industry’s annual CERAWeek conference: Humanity must not choose between renewables and fossil fuels, Semafor’s Mohammed Sergie reported.

“We can all feel the winds of history in our industry’s sails again,” Nasser said. The overall message wasn’t exactly “drill, baby, drill,” but Al Jaber concluded with: “Let’s make energy great again.”