Ireland Warns Thousands of Jobs at Risk From Pharma Tariffs
(Bloomberg) -- Ireland plans to use its budget cushion to pump money into infrastructure to protect competitiveness as global trade turmoil and tariffs threaten thousands of jobs in the multinational hub.
Bezos Wedding Draws Protests, Soul-Searching Over Tourism in Venice
One Architect's Quest to Save Mumbai's Heritage From Disappearing
NYC Congestion Toll Cuts Manhattan Gridlock by 25%, RPA Reports
The small, open economy has a strong fiscal position for now, with a huge budget surplus thanks to corporate tax income from US corporates such as Apple Inc. and Pfizer Inc. But with some of that revenue at risk, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said Monday that the government must use that money with an eye on the longer term.
'One of my deep lessons from the aftermath of the global financial crisis is, when capital investment is decreased, the costs mount up in the future,' he said at Bloomberg's Future of Finance in Ireland event in Dublin. 'If our growth outlook does change, we will use our fiscal position to try to maintain and support capital investment and do all we can to avoid cutting it back again.'
The rapidly changing global backdrop is also raising concern for employment. Pharmaceutical tariffs, if imposed by President Donald Trump, are a key worry, with Donohoe warning they could cost the economy 75,000 jobs.
While Donohoe said Ireland remains an attractive destination for investment, both the government and the country's central bank have had to acknowledge the threats. Both recently cut their growth forecasts, citing Ireland's large exposure to US President Donald Trump's volatile trade policies.
The US administration has repeatedly singled out the Irish model, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying Ireland runs a surplus at America's expense. Trump even raised the matter with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin at a St Patrick's Day White House reception.
While Trump's policies have raised new threats for Ireland and Europe, governments are also sensing an opportunity to take advantage and boost competitiveness. Germany is increasing spending, providing a fiscal boost for the region's largest economy, while central bankers and politicians on the continent are talking up the euro's global profile as US policies shake dollar confidence.
'Political events in the US have catalyzed something in Europe and have changed things,' said John O'Toole, global head of multi asset solutions at Amundi. 'Europe is now on a path to reasserting itself and standing on its own two feet.'
Real progress is going to require Europe to do a lot more on issues like improving its capital markets and pools of liquidity. And, according to AIB Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Colin Hunt, Europe's Savings and Investments Union has gained momentum thanks to the 'Make America Great Again' movement in the US.
'We are entering a phase of potentially a lot of investment into the European economy, whether it's the German fiscal spending and maybe other countries will follow,' said Polina Hristova, head of Algebris Investments Ireland. 'We need to be more competitive, we need to invest in innovation, we need to be more resilient. There is definitely the impetus now.'
--With assistance from Jennifer Duggan.
(Updates with comments on Europe starting in eighth paragraph)
Luxury Counterfeiters Keep Outsmarting the Makers of $10,000 Handbags
Is Mark Cuban the Loudmouth Billionaire that Democrats Need for 2028?
Ken Griffin on Trump, Harvard and Why Novice Investors Won't Beat the Pros
The US Has More Copper Than China But No Way to Refine All of It
Can 'MAMUWT' Be to Musk What 'TACO' Is to Trump?
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Connectez-vous pour accéder à votre portefeuille
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Digital Trends
28 minutes ago
- Digital Trends
Windows has a major AI problem, and it's pushing me closer to Apple
Just over a year ago, Apple Intelligence was announced. It continues to be somewhat of a 'meh' affair compared to other rival products like Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Gemini. What was not 'meh' was the support for Apple's generative AI bundle, which extended all the way back to the M1 silicon introduced in 2020. Even the fresh batch of AI features — such as live translations and intelligent Shortcuts — are fully supported on the machines that will soon be five generations old. I can't say the same about Windows and its AI-powered rebirth with the Copilot package. Before confusion ensues, let me clear things up. Recommended Videos Copilot is a suite of AI features, just like Gemini or Apple Intelligence. Then we have Copilot+ machines, which is a branding for PCs that meet certain hardware-level requirements to enable AI-powered features on Windows laptops and PCs. Here's the weird part. A healthy bunch of Intel silicon launched in 2025 — even those in the powerful 'H' class — don't meet those AI processing requirements. All of it has created a weird kind of divide in the Windows ecosystem where certain advanced AI features are locked to a handful of cheaper machines, even if you paid a much higher price to get a laptop with a far more powerful processor. Oddly, it's not just the hardware, but the software experience that now feels different. Copilot+ is not merely AI hype Before we get into the hardware limitations, let's break down the features. Copilot+ machines require a powerful hardware chip for AI acceleration to enable certain features, down to the OS level. For example, in the Settings app, Microsoft is pushing its own Mu small language model (SML) that runs entirely on the NPU. The NPU on a chip, however, must meet a certain performance baseline, something not even Intel and AMD silicon launched in 2025 fulfill universally. Let's start with the AI-powered Settings app interactions. It can now understand natural language queries and make suggestions so that users can directly take action with a click. If you type something like 'My screen doesn't feel smooth,' the Settings app will show a dialog box underneath the search bar, where you get an actionable button to increase the refresh rate and make the interactions smoother. Apple is chasing something similar and has implemented it within the Spotlight system in macOS Tahoe. Next, we have Recall. It's like a time machine system that takes snapshots of your PC activity in the background and analyzes them contextually. In the future, if you seek to revisit or find something, you can simply type a natural language query and find a record of the activity, complete with a link to the webpage or app you were working with. It almost feels magical, and you can read more about my experience here. The crucial benefit is that a healthy bunch of Copilot+ AI features will run on-device, which means they won't require an internet connection. That's convenient, but in hindsight, it's a huge sigh of relief that all user activity remains locked to your device and nothing is sent to servers. Copilot+ hardware also enables a bunch of creative features such as Cocreator and Generative Fill in Paint, Super Resolution, Image Creator, and Restyle in the native Photos app. But there are a few that are meaningful for day-to-day PC usage. With Click to Do in the Snipping Tool, the AI analyzes the text and image on the screen, somewhat like Google Lens and Apple Intelligence. You can select text, look it up on the web with a single click, send email, open a website, summarize, rewrite, and take a wide range of image actions such as copy, share, visual search in Bing, erase objects, remove background, and do more — without ever opening another app. On the more practical side of things, we have translated Live Captions that cover over 40 languages. The translation and captioning happen in real-time and work during video calls and video watching, too. Finally, we have Windows Studio Effects, which can perform chores such as automatic frame adjustment, portrait lighting tweaks, switch background effects, minimize noise, and even make gaze adjustment. The Copilot+ hardware wall Even if you splurge $4,899 on a Razer Blade 18 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and Nvidia's top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 5090 graphics, your beastly gaming laptop still won't be able to run the Copilot+ features in Windows 11. That's because the NPU on this processor can only manage 13 TOPS, but a pint-sized $800 Microsoft tablet with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor can handle all the exclusive Copilot+ features just fine. It's disheartening, because the Copilot+ experiences in Windows 11 are meaningful OS advancements. Most of them, at least. I have used a few of them extensively, and they feel like a practical evolution. Yet, depriving machines that merely miss out on a powerful NPU, despite packing plenty of compute and graphics processing power, is simply unfortunate. Microsoft has laid out tight hardware requirements for machines that can bear the Copilot+ badge — 256GB of storage, 16GB DDR5 RAM, and a processor with a dedicated AI accelerator chip that can output a minimum of 40 TOPS performance. That's a bottleneck from both ends. First, there are still a healthy bunch of machines that ship with 8GB of RAM, and that too, the DDR4 type memory. Take, for example, the Asus Vivobook 17, which costs $700 and ships with 8GB of DDR4 memory on the entry-point configuration, even with the variant that packs a 13th-generation Intel processor. Let's say you pay up to reach 16GB of RAM. Despite that added stress on your wallet, you are still limited by the RAM type and won't be able to run Copilot+ tools on the machine. It's worth mentioning that there are a LOT of Windows machines that still pack 8GB of RAM, and even when they go up to 16GB capacity, they still rely on the DDR4-type memory. Now, it's time to address the elephant in the room. The silicon situation. The latest from Intel is the Ultra 200 series processor family, which is bifurcated across Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake lines. These Ultra 200 series processors are available in four formats: V-series, U-series, H-series, HX-series, and H-series. Out of the four brackets, only the V-series processors support Copilot+ experiences on Windows 11. Even the enthusiast-class H and HX series processors don't meet the NPU requirements, and as such, they are devoid of the Copilot+ AI features. As perplexing as the situation remains with Intel Core 200 series silicon, the situation with AMD and its Copilot+ readiness isn't too different. At the moment, only AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series processors fall under the Copilot+ bracket. That means if you invested in a top-shelf AMD silicon in the past few years, or even aim to build an AMD gaming rig this year, you either lose out on Copilot+ perks or must pick from the Ryzen AI 300 series line-up. Even older Macs do better The situation with Copilot+ is weird because it has created fault lines in the Windows 11 experience that don't make sense, neither from a price perspective, nor from a firepower angle. It even makes one feel bad about spending a fortune on a top-tier Intel processor, only to find it locked beyond next-gen AI features in Windows 11 because the NPU isn't up to the task. The only other option is to pick a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-series processor. But in doing so, you run into the compatibility hurdles that come with Windows on Arm. Plus, the GPU limitations rule out gaming or other demanding tasks where you need a powerful GPU. Right now, it seems like Copilot+ is a bag of serious caveats. And as Microsoft's team comes with more AI-first experiences, the gulf within Windows 11 is only going to widen. An $800 Copilot+ machine will run native AI experiences that even a powerful desktop won't be able to handle in the near future. The situation within the Apple ecosystem is just the opposite. Even if you have a nearly five-year-old M1 MacBook Air, you can run all the Apple Intelligence features just fine. Now, one can argue that AI is not the deciding factor for picking up a laptop. But as companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google deeply integrate AI packages such as Copilot, Siri, and Gemini across their OS at the native level, these AI features will essentially serve as a key computing evolution. Google has already given us a glimpse of how tightly interweaving Gemini across its Workspace tools can flesh out, and somewhat similar is the progress of Apple Intelligence within maCOS. But when it comes to the OS-level AI progress, it's Microsoft that finds itself in an odd place where a huge chunk of Windows 11 users are going to feel left out, while macOS users will move forward just fine even on aging hardware.
Bloomberg
32 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Lotus Plans to Keep Making Cars in UK After Plant Closure Report
Automaker Lotus said it has no plans to end production in the UK following an earlier report that it will shut its plant in the country. 'We are actively exploring strategic options to enhance efficiency and ensure global competitiveness in the evolving market,' the company said in a statement. 'Lotus Cars is continuing normal operations, and there are no plans to close the factory.'
Fox News
42 minutes ago
- Fox News
Trump touts success of Iran strikes and attack's initial damage assessments during 23rd week in office
President Donald Trump continued to brag about the success of the U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities and visited the Netherlands for the NATO summit this week. The U.S. launched strikes late Saturday targeting key Iranian nuclear facilities, which involved more than 125 U.S. aircraft, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine told reporters Sunday. Following the strikes, Trump said in an address to the nation that the mission left the nuclear sites "completely and totally obliterated." But days later, a leaked report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, published by CNN and the New York Times, cast doubt on those claims, saying that the strikes had only set back Iran's nuclear program by several months. Meanwhile, the U.S., Israel and Iran's Foreign Ministry have all said the three nuclear sites that U.S. forces struck have encountered massive damage. Still, Trump has said he won't hesitate to launch additional strikes against Iran – should Tehran seek to beef up its nuclear program again. Here's also what happened this week: Trump attended the NATO summit in the Netherlands on Tuesday and Wednesday, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian leader said in a post on X on Wednesday that the two "covered all the truly important issues" as the U.S. has sought to broker a peace deal to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. NATO allies – all but Spain – agreed Wednesday to boost defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Trump has long advocated for NATO allies to ramp up defense spending to between 2% and 5% GDP – and has made it clear that European nations need to shoulder greater responsibility for the security of their continent. Trump pressed lawmakers to get his sweeping tax and domestic policy bill to the finish line on Thursday, labeling the measure the "single-most important piece of border legislation ever to cross the floor of Congress." "This is the ultimate codification of our agenda to – very simply, a phrase that's been used pretty well by me over the past 10 years, but maybe even before that – make America great again," Trump said at a "One, Big, Beautiful Event" at the White House on Thursday. Meanwhile, Republicans are scrambling to reform and pass the measure ahead of Trump's July 4 deadline, following Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough's determination Thursday that several Medicaid reforms in the sweeping tax passage did not follow Senate rules and must be removed.
