Good morning and welcome to your wrap of the latest business and political headlines from around the world.
First up, Europe and Canada have hit back at a fresh round of US tariffs on all imports of steel and aluminium coming into the country.
Canada’s government has announced retaliatory tariffs on more than US$20 billion worth of US goods. It is the biggest foreign metals supplier to the US, the BBC reports.
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said: “This is going to be a day-to-day fight”.
The European Union has announced retaliatory tariffs of its own on $28.3b worth of US goods, with the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen saying such levies were “bad for business”.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s president has said her government won’t announce any measures in response just yet and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the UK would “keep all options on the table”.
President Donald Trump, in response to the prompt retaliatory measures announced overnight, said: “What ever they charge us with, we’re charging them.”
Sir Keir Starmer.
To Pakistan, where the country’s military says it has ended a standoff with separatist militants who hijacked a train and took hundreds of people hostage in the southwestern province of Balochistan.
The military’s spokesperson Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said 21 hostages and all 33 insurgents were killed during the clash, Reuters reports.
The Baloch Liberation Army blew up a railway track and fired at the Jaffar Express Train yesterday as it travelled from Quetta to Peshawar.
In a statement released on Wednesday local time, the BLA threatened to start executing hostages unless authorities met its 48-hour deadline for the release of Baloch political prisoners, activists and missing people it says were taken by the military. The BLA said on Wednesday night it had killed 50 passengers.
Balochistan is Pakistan's largest province and the richest in terms of natural resources, but it is the least developed. The BLA is fighting for the region's independence.
Moving now to the ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Ukraine and Russia that are being brokered by the US.
Donald Trump has told reporters “it is up to Russia now” after Ukraine agreed yesterday to a 30-day pause in fighting.
Al Jazeera reports that Russia has remained tight-lipped on the ceasefire deal, saying only that it was waiting for a briefing form the United States.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said it expects the US to take “strong steps” if Russia rejects the temporary truce.
Volodymyr Zelensky.
Looking at the key financial news this morning, the Bank of Canada has cut interest rates by 25 basis points but has raised concerns about the possible impacts of the country’s trade war with the US.
The central bank’s reduction of its bench mark interest rate to 2.75% marks caps off 225 basis points worth of cuts in the space of nine months, making it one of the most aggressive central banks globally.
"We ended 2024 on a solid economic footing. But we're now facing a new crisis," Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem told a press conference.
The bank said a protracted tariff war with the US could lead to poor GDP growth and higher prices, which would make it difficult to decide where rates should go next.
To the US, where annual inflation has eased to 2.8% in February from 3% the previous month, which was slightly below forecasts of 2.9%.
The decline comes as higher shelter costs were offset by cheaper airline fares.
Core inflation, which strips out more volatile items like energy prices, increased to 3.1%.
The latest inflation data has fuelled expectations the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates unchanged at its meeting next week while it monitors the economic impact of the trade war.
Finally, the company behind ChatGPT has revealed it has developed an artificial intelligence model that it says is good at creative writing.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in a post on social media that the unnamed model was the first time he’s been “really struck” by the written output of one of the startup’s products, The Guardian reports.
He said he was not sure when it will be released.
