Lunch Wrap: ASX dips, Bluescope flexes on Trump's latest steel tariff
ASX wobbles as Trump fires up trade war again
Bluescope flies on steel tariff boost
Brickworks and Soul Patts merge in $14bn deal
The ASX opened the week on a bit of a downer, slipping by 0.2% in the first session of trade.
Blame it on nerves from Wall Street, which pulled back slightly after Donald Trump, never one for a quiet weekend, fired off fresh salvos in his on-again, off-again trade war with China.
This time, Trump's doubling down on steel tariffs, lifting duties from 25% to 50%, which sent tremors through global markets.
The move, which came just hours after he accused Beijing of 'totally violating' trade agreements, threw up a big, flashing question mark for investors: is this trade war reheating?
But amid the news, some stocks surged. ASX-listed Bluescope Steel (ASX:BSL), for instance, shot up as high as 9% this morning before paring back.
Unlike most Aussie exporters, Bluescope makes a stack of its profits in the US. Its North Star mill in Ohio churns out about 3 million tonnes of steel a year for American buyers in the auto, agriculture and white goods sectors.
Elsewhere, Brent crude dipped below US$63 as traders braced for more OPEC+ supply.
It was a reminder that while everyone's focused on China and steel, the real engine room of the global economy, crude oil, still needs watching.
Back on the ASX, sectors like utilities, banks and miners took a hit.
Traders are weighing up what an escalation between the world's two largest economies could mean for Chinese demand, and, by extension, Aussie commodity exports.
In the large caps space, Brickworks (ASX:BKW) and Soul Patts (ASX:SOL) lit up the boards after announcing they'll merge into a $14 billion investment, building products and property giant.
Brickworks jumped 21%, while Soul Patts soared 12.5%. The merger effectively unwinds a decades-old cross-holding setup: Soul Patts owns 43% of Brickworks, and Brickworks owns 26% of Soul Patts.
Under the new structure, a freshly minted company called 'TopCo' will scoop up both, with Brickworks shareholders receiving a 10% premium. TopCo will eventually carry the familiar Soul Patts ticker (SOL) and name.
Elsewhere, on the move was James Hardie (ASX:JHX), up 3% after locking in $3.5 billion in new debt to help bankroll its acquisition of US building materials group Azek.
And, Perenti Global (ASX:PRN) added 4% after winning a five-year, $1.1 billion underground mining contract at Endeavour Mining's (LSE: EDV, TSX: EDV) gold operations in Burkina Faso.
Perenti has been working on site since 2018, and the deal keeps them locked in through to FY26 and beyond.
ASX SMALL CAP WINNERS
Here are the best performing ASX small cap stocks for June 2 :
Security Description Last % Volume MktCap
BYH Bryah Resources Ltd 0.009 80% 9,429,219 $4,349,768
DTR Dateline Resources 0.155 60% 89,869,503 $277,247,109
OSL Oncosil Medical 0.003 50% 100,000 $9,213,164
CRI Criticalim 0.018 38% 36,181,768 $34,949,832
LKY Locksleyresources 0.110 38% 20,163,719 $11,733,333
IIQ Inoviq Ltd 0.600 36% 1,945,378 $49,118,433
OB1 Orbminco Limited 0.002 33% 3,580,335 $3,596,352
FTL Firetail Resources 0.080 33% 3,263,690 $22,801,679
DXN DXN Limited 0.047 31% 2,939,090 $10,753,331
ERA Energy Resources 0.003 25% 700,044 $810,792,482
FHS Freehill Mining Ltd. 0.005 25% 4,846,206 $12,934,111
KPO Kalina Power Limited 0.005 25% 10,300,784 $11,731,879
TEM Tempest Minerals 0.005 25% 210,000 $2,938,119
TMG Trigg Minerals Ltd 0.099 22% 30,718,294 $74,833,461
BKW Brickworks Limited 33.520 22% 1,274,605 $4,207,514,804
BSN Basinenergylimited 0.017 21% 212,461 $1,719,610
BP8 Bph Global Ltd 0.003 20% 200,000 $2,627,462
EAT Entertainment 0.006 20% 28,942 $6,543,930
EE1 Earths Energy Ltd 0.006 20% 32,378 $2,649,821
GLL Galilee Energy Ltd 0.006 20% 185,049 $3,535,964
IPT Impact Minerals 0.006 20% 443,094 $19,776,650
RNX Renegade Exploration 0.003 20% 5,196,477 $3,220,909
TMB Tambourahmetals 0.025 19% 603,441 $2,469,391
NNL Nordicresourcesltd 0.100 18% 735,280 $15,360,960
BCC Beam Communications 0.140 17% 148,117 $10,370,631
Dateline Resources (ASX:DTR) is ramping up exploration at its Colosseum gold and rare earths project in California after fresh data confirmed more breccia pipes could be hiding west and southwest of the old pits. The company is kicking off a new program mid-June, using soil sampling, geophysics, and mapping to zero in on drill targets, with rare earths now firmly on the radar thanks to geological similarities with the nearby Mountain Pass mine.
Inoviq (ASX:IIQ) has unveiled breakthrough results for its early ovarian cancer screening test, showing 77% sensitivity and 99.6% specificity across all stages, with no early-stage cancers missed in the study. The AI-powered blood test, which uses exosome tech and runs on high-throughput lab instruments, was presented this week at the big ASCO cancer conference in Chicago. There's currently no screening test on the market.
Firetail Resources (ASX:FTL) has locked in options to acquire two high-grade gold projects in the US, one in Nevada's massive Walker Lane belt and the other near the legendary Homestake Mine in South Dakota. The Excelsior Springs project comes with strong drill hits like 51.8m at 4g/t gold and historic production of over 19,000oz at 41g/t, while the Bella project boasts rock chip samples over 100g/t and sits just 20km from the 42Moz Homestake deposit. FTL is spending just under a million bucks in cash and issuing shares to get the exploration going.
DXN (ASX:DXN) has scored a $4.6 million deal to deliver three modular data centre units to Globalstar in Hawaii by the end of 2025. It won the contract after a competitive tender. The company said the deal puts DXN deeper into the booming satellite and LEO (Low Earth Orbit) comms space, and marks another step in its push into edge-ready data centres.
ASX SMALL CAP LOSERS
Here are the worst performing ASX small cap stocks for June 2 :
Code Name Price % Change Volume Market Cap
ASR Asra Minerals Ltd 0.002 -33% 450,000 $8,299,608
HLX Helix Resources 0.002 -33% 38,970,809 $10,092,581
AJL AJ Lucas Group 0.005 -29% 17,610 $9,630,107
ADD Adavale Resource Ltd 0.002 -25% 2,570,000 $4,574,558
NAE New Age Exploration 0.003 -25% 176,721 $10,637,596
SFG Seafarms Group Ltd 0.002 -25% 159,652 $9,673,198
ATV Activeportgroupltd 0.007 -22% 397,619 $6,164,794
HWK Hawk Resources. 0.014 -21% 2,328,771 $4,605,801
AVE Avecho Biotech Ltd 0.004 -20% 392,525 $15,867,318
AYT Austin Metals Ltd 0.004 -20% 1,000,000 $7,870,957
RGL Riversgold 0.004 -20% 9,200,289 $8,418,563
TEG Triangle Energy Ltd 0.002 -20% 123,824 $5,223,085
VRC Volt Resources Ltd 0.004 -20% 1,896,263 $23,423,890
VBS Vectus Biosystems 0.050 -17% 92,135 $3,196,699
1AI Algorae Pharma 0.005 -17% 1,478,761 $10,124,368
FIN FIN Resources Ltd 0.005 -17% 1,152,420 $4,169,331
GGE Grand Gulf Energy 0.003 -17% 126,288 $8,461,275
JAV Javelin Minerals Ltd 0.003 -17% 1,445,333 $18,378,447
PGY Pilot Energy Ltd 0.005 -17% 4,500,000 $11,898,450
RB6 Rubixresources 0.070 -16% 495,317 $5,100,350
GTE Great Western Exp. 0.011 -15% 2,800,391 $7,380,853
TRI Trivarx Ltd 0.011 -15% 2,491,625 $8,026,124
SHO Sportshero Ltd 0.023 -15% 1,014,939 $19,749,044
LOC Locatetechnologies 0.098 -15% 562,647 $23,539,791
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Singular Health Group (ASX:SHG) has completed a share issue for a placement with Marin and Sons, fulfilling the terms of a follow-on investment from SHG's largest shareholder. Marin and Sons invested $773k at $0.16 per share on May 15, 2024, with the issue of shares approved by SHG shareholders on March 19, 2025.
In today's Break It Down, host Tylah Tully explains the latest developments in Sweden, where the country is looking at potentially removing a ban on uranium mining. Aura Energy (ASX:AEE) has interest in uranium projects in Sweden, and is working with the coalition to get the ban lifted.
At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Singular Health Group and Aura Energy are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
12 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Trial date set for Patrick Stephenson, accused of murdering Ballarat mum Samantha Murphy
A trial date has been set for the man accused of murdering Ballarat mum Samantha Murphy. Patrick Orren Stephenson, 23, is scheduled to face a Supreme Court trial for the alleged murder on April 8, 2026. The trial is expected to last approximately six weeks, with pre-trial arguments for the prosecution and defence expected to begin in November 2025. Stephenson has pleaded not guilty to Murphy's alleged murder. Ms Murphy, a mother-of-three, went for a run on the morning of February 4, 2024, through the Canadian State Forest and was never seen again. Despite several searches across the Ballarat region, including the Enfield State Park, Canadian State Forest and Buninyong Bushland Reserve, there has been no trace of the mother. Stephenson was arrested and charged with her murder a month later. Mr Stephenson was transported from Melbourne Assessment Prison to Enfield State Park, south of Ballarat, where excavators were used to dig up an undisclosed area. This is the second time the 23-year-old was escorted to the bushland by police, though the mum's remains are yet to be found. Police have not disclosed what led them to return to the search site, and it is not suggested Mr Stephenson's visit indicates he knows where Ms Murphy's body is. In June last year, Murphy's iPhone, credit cards and driver's license were recovered in a teal case from the bottom of a dam in Buninyong. According to police, her phone was in near-perfect condition when it was found.
SBS Australia
19 minutes ago
- SBS Australia
Chief NT minister rejects independent Aboriginal death-in-custody probe
Listen to Australian and world news, and follow trending topics with SBS News Podcasts . TRANSCRIPT Authorities push back on calls for an independent inquiry into an Alice Springs death in custody The UN demands an independent probe into deaths at Gaza aid points A new call for flares to be allowed back at Australian football games The Northern Territory's chief minister has rejected calls for an external inquiry into the death in custody of a young and mentally disabled Aboriginal man. Federal Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy says an independent death in custody probe might be warranted. A lawyers' group has also called for an independent probe to investigate the Northern Territory government's failure to provide its duty of care to the man, who was on the NDIS and under state care. But Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro says police investigations of deaths in custody are appropriate, and that people can have full confidence in officers to do their job. The United Nations has called for an independent probe into civilians being harmed trying to access food in Gaza, after dozens of people were reportedly killed at an aid distribution point. Palestinian health officials say at least 27 people died and more than 90 were injured after Israeli forces fired on people waiting at the aid site for humanitarian assistance in Rafah. The Israeli army says it fired near a few individual suspects who left the designated route, approached its forces and ignored warning shots. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric says there should be an immediate and independent investigation into the events to establish what happened. "The basic needs of the population in Gaza are enormous and are not being met. Israel has clear obligations under international humanitarian law to agree to and facilitate humanitarian relief for all civilians who need it. The unimpeded entry of humanitarian assistance at scale must be restored immediately." Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof says his coalition government will become a caretaker administration after populist nationalist MP Geert Wilders pulled his ministers out of the cabinet in a dispute about a migration crackdown. The decision means the Netherlands will have a caretaker government when it hosts a summit of leaders from the NATO military alliance in three weeks. The announcement has completed a day of political turmoil in The Hague, sparked by Mr Wilders' decision to turn his back on the ruling coalition. Mr Wilders says he told the Prime Minister his party was not willing to embrace his ideas of halting asylum migration, for which he had demanded immediate support last week. "I just informed the prime minister that I will withdraw the PVV ministers from the cabinet and that we can no longer bear responsibility for this. I signed for the strictest asylum policy, not for the downfall of the Netherlands. And our responsibility for this cabinet therefore also ends at this moment." A new report suggests Australia's charity sector has grown, driven by increasing demand. The 11th edition of the Australian Charities Report says 70,000 more people were employed in the not-for-profit sector in 2023 compared to the previous reporting period, which is 10.7 per cent of Australia's workforce. The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission regulates the sector, and Commissioner Sue Woodward says the additional staff is the result of trying to match greater demand for services, especially in food banks and crisis accommodation services. She says those organisations consistently report that cost of living pressures are driving higher demand, sometimes stretching capacity to the point where people seeking help have to be turned away. An influential economic organisation has commented on Australia's housing debate, urging governments to relax zoning restrictions to ease home prices. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development argues that easing zoning restrictions will strengthen competition and productivity, and raise housing investment to reverse the decline in affordability. The OECD says Australia's gross domestic product will grow at 1.8 per cent this year, down 10 basis points from its prediction in March as Donald Trump's tariffs hit demand for Australian exports, especially if China experiences a marked slowdown. The Paris-based policy forum says Australia needs to fix stagnating productivity growth and make housing more affordable to improve its outlook in the long term. To sport, Socceroos veteran player Milos Degenek says he wants to see flares allowed back at Australian football games, saying travelling teams now have it too easy due to fans being over-policed. Football Australia strictly bans flares and other pyrotechnics in and around stadiums, with perpetrators facing hefty bans. Degenek says the Socceroos have played before plenty of hostile crowds over the years in various World Cup qualifying campaigns. He says Australian fans aren't given the scope to return the favour.
ABC News
19 minutes ago
- ABC News
Why do societies collapse and what does it mean for us?
Does every society have a use-by date? The fact that we're not bumping into Aztecs or Byzantines around the place does suggest that they all end at some point. States can slowly decline and fade, or morph into new entities, while a few simply collapse in on themselves. "This is something which has haunted even the most powerful of empires," Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live. "It's natural to look over our shoulders at the wreckages of the past and wonder if we're going to end up the same way." Human history stretches back around 300,000 years, but we only made the move from hunter-gatherer communities to states about 5,000 years ago. Dr Kemp, whose upcoming book is Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, calls a state "a set of centralised institutions that impose rules on and extract resources from a population in a territory". They appeared in Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) before spreading around the world and becoming modern day "Goliaths" like the United States and the People's Republic of China. All states across history have eventually ended and a societal collapse is perhaps the most dramatic coda. It's "when you have multiple systems of power all go down. Not just the state but also the economy and potentially the population [as well]", Dr Kemp says. And for anyone worrying about the imminent societal collapse of Australia, there's a bit of good news. "It's actually surprisingly rare for all [of a state's] systems to go down at once," Dr Kemp says. One of the best examples in history of societal collapse is perhaps one of the least known. Around the year 1000, Native Americans created a city called Cahokia on the Mississippi River near today's St Louis. This was the first proper city in the present-day United States. With 10,000 to 15,000 people, Cahokia was bigger than many European cities of the time, including London. It was a place of kings and elites overseeing a great experiment in urbanism. But when Christopher Columbus and other Europeans started arriving in the Americas from 1492, the city had disappeared and no comparable cities replaced it. "Within about 150 years, it starts to fall apart," Dr Kemp says. Coinciding with a period of drought and flood, the city was entirely abandoned. "All the key power structures you would associate with a modern state fell apart … [and] much of the culture changed as well," Dr Kemp says. "But even more interesting is that the people there seem to intentionally forget about this experiment with urbanism … There are no oral traditions, no stories about it. "It's almost like they wanted to forget about it and leave it to rot in the swamps of the Mississippi." After centuries of European domination, Rome — or the Western Roman Empire — fell in the 5th century. Rome was sacked by Germanic Visigoths in 410, and then in 476, Germanic leader Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus. It seems to fit the brief of a societal collapse. The military fragmented. The economy plummeted. Trade broke up into local levels. The elites fell apart. But Dr Kemp says it's a much more complex case than say, Cahokia. "Some power structures did continue … The ideological basis of Rome, which by that stage was the church, actually continued to grow in power. It became the connective tissue across all of Europe after Rome fell," he says. "Many of the cultures, customs and even garbs that the Romans had were carried on by the [new] Germanic rulers." And in Dr Kemp's eyes — even with Pax Romana and all those aqueducts — the collapse of Rome wasn't necessarily a tragedy. He explains the Roman model: Conquer a territory. Use the riches and resources of the new territory to conquer more territory. Repeat. And he says meanwhile, most of the benefits of the empire were channelled back to the capital. "It was a very large-scale pyramid scheme," Dr Kemp says. "Its collapse was in many ways a good thing for a lot of people. If we look at skeletons in Latin Europe after the fall of Rome, people seemed to get taller and healthier. "So I think we've been handed down a set of stories which have emphasised collapse — and probably overemphasised how bad it is." Dr Kemp and his colleagues have crunched the numbers and found the average life span of a state throughout much of history has been 326 years. But there is a big range on either side of this number. For example, the Byzantine Empire lasted for 1,000 years, while China's Qin Dynasty lasted for just 15 years. And the largest states, or "mega-empires covering over a million square kilometres", were more fragile, with an average life span of 155 years. From Rome to Cahokia to many other examples of collapse, Dr Kemp says there's one key culprit. "We tend to get a bit too preoccupied with looking at big external shocks," he says. These can be things like plagues or enemies at the gates, which can be part of, but not the whole story. "You find that different societies handle these [external shocks] pretty well, but then they seem to become weaker … This is largely due to the fact that inequality seems to increase over time." So Dr Kemp calls inequality "the master variable behind crisis and collapse". On the flip side, after picking through the details of states from the Hittites to the Spanish Empire, Dr Kemp has a theory about what gives a state longevity. "Democracy and inclusive institutions seem to be the big things that encourage states and societies to often last longer." He cites research from Yale University that looked at how different societies coped with the Late Antique Little Ice Age of 536–660, when three different volcanic eruptions led to cooling temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere. It found that some societies were more resilient to temperature swings than others — and that a big predictor of resilience was how democratic and inclusive their institutions were. So of the world's roughly 200 countries, which is next in line for a societal collapse? "It would be very easy for me to say one of the countries in the Horn of Africa … Or Yemen for instance, which is in a state of civil war," Dr Kemp says. "But today when we do have a collapse, such as the collapse of Somalia or Afghanistan, it tends to be very short-lived. Resources are mobilised to make sure that a new state is propped up very quickly." Instead, Dr Kemp paints a picture less about individual states collapsing, but the possibility of something far bigger. He is much more concerned about the "world as a whole", given we all live in a "global, interconnected system". "If we're really thinking about a global collapse, then the things we have to start worrying about today are things like nuclear war, climatic change and dangerous new technologies," he says. "All of those, once again, are built upon large systems of inequality." And he says, while we can't put clear numbers on the likelihood of this kind of a collapse, the possibility of a "catastrophic" global event in the coming century has him worried.
