What the Papers Say: O'Leary double windfall; Jamie Dimon says bond market will crack; Trump 50% steel tariff threat
10 am - Good morning from the Business Post newsroom. Editor Daniel McConnell here with your Saturday morning spin through the stories making the headlines in Ireland and across the world.
Michael O'Leary unlocks double Ryanair windfall thanks to share price rise
Ryanair's rising share price over the past month has delivered a double windfall to Michael O'Leary, the Irish Independent reports.
The high-profile businessman has met a key condition to lock in a shares bonus worth around €128m after Ryanair stock closed above €21 for a 28th straight day on Thursday.
As long as O'Leary is still in his job in July 2028, he now has a right to buy 10 million Ryanair shares at €11.12 each – less than half the current value.
The rising share price also pays off in the short term for Mr O'Leary, lifting the value of the 44.1 million shares he already owns.
That stake has increased in value by €128m since the start of May, as Ryanair shares rose from €20.43 each to €23.34 a share by Friday afternoon.
Shares in Hvivo nosedive as it loses key contract and postpones another
Shares in Irish clinical trials company Hvivo plummeted more than 47 per cent on Friday after the group told investors of the cancellation of a 'significant' contract and the postponement of another, the Irish Times reports.
The company, which is listed in London, informed the market on Friday it had received notification of the cancellation of a 'significant human challenge trial', alongside the postponement of another, as well as the cancellation of a 'smaller study'.
The share price closed down just over 46 per cent.
Human challenge trials, where products are tested on humans in a controlled environment, make up a significant portion of the group's business.
Jamie Dimon warns US bond market will 'crack' under pressure from rising debt
Jamie Dimon has warned that the US bond market will 'crack' under the weight of the country's rising debt as he called on Donald Trump's administration to place America on a more sustainable trajectory.
The JPMorgan Chase chief executive said on Friday that he had cautioned regulators: 'You are going to see a crack in the bond market.' He added: 'I'm telling you this is going to happen. And you are going to panic. I'm not going to panic. We'll be fine.'
The warning from the head of the US's biggest bank about mounting risks for the US bond market — which sets borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in debt globally — underscores how Wall Street is growing increasingly uneasy about rising government debt levels.
It comes as Congress is reviewing Trump's 'big, beautiful' budget bill, which if passed is broadly expected to markedly increase the federal deficit.
Donald Trump says he will double steel and aluminium tariffs to 50%
Donald Trump said he would double tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from 25 per cent to 50 per cent in a fresh escalation of his global trade war, the Financial Times reports.
The US president unveiled the increased levies as he touted a $15bn partnership between Nippon Steel and US Steel at a rally in Pennsylvania, promising to erect a tariff 'fence' around domestic metals production. 'We're going to bring it from 25 per cent to 50 per cent, the tariffs on steel into the United States of America, which will even further secure the steel industry,' he told the crowd in West Mifflin.
'Nobody is going to get around that . . . At 25 per cent, they can sort of get over that fence. At 50 per cent they can no longer get over the fence.' The new levies will take effect from June 4, the president wrote in a Truth Social post following the rally. Trump has sought to revitalise America's industrial heartlands by aggressively targeting what he sees as dumping by foreign importers.
In March, he slapped 25 per cent levies on steel and aluminium imports in one of the first broadsides of his global trade war.
Musk exits Trump administration but claims Doge 'just the beginning'
US president Donald Trump praised billionaire Elon Musk's efforts to cut federal spending during a joint press conference in the Oval Office on Friday, as the Tesla chief departs the administration after a chaotic tenure that saw the elimination of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in contracts.
Mr Musk, who headed the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), disrupted numerous agencies across the federal bureaucracy but ultimately fell far short of the massive savings he had initially promised. A White House official said on Wednesday that Mr Musk would be leaving the administration.
"Elon has worked tirelessly helping lead the most sweeping and consequential government reform programme in generations," Mr Trump said from behind the Resolute Desk, as Musk stood to his right, wearing a black Doge hat and a t-shirt that read "The Dogefather" in the style of the movie "The Godfather."
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Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on Trump's latest tariff move: this is how trade wars start
The latest decision by Donald Trump t o double the level of tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from 25 per cent to 50 per cent may have a limited direct impact on Ireland. But the move is of wider importance than just its narrow impact on the sectors involved. And this needs to be understood in Dublin. The first point to note is the obvious one. Despite the ruling of the federal trade court last week that Trump had gone beyond his authority in imposing tariffs without getting the go-ahead from Congress, the US president is determined to push ahead. In choosing the steel and aluminium tariffs, he is focusing on an area which was not part of the federal court ruling - tariffs imposed in a specific sector for national security reasons. For Ireland , the concern here is that pharma and computer chips also fall into this category. In pharma, in particular, the president may soon be in receipt of a report he commissioned which could give him leeway to impose sectoral tariffs. Ireland needs to remain alert to this risk. The second point to note is that Trump's tariff policy continue to be driven in large part by headlines rather than substance. The steel and aluminium tariffs allowed him to trumpet his protection of a key US sector. But in reality there is little space capacity in the sector to take up the slack from a lower level of imports. And prices will rise for the many businesses importing these products. READ MORE The same calculus may apply in the pharma sector – and here it would take American companies a long time to return production to the US market. Tariffs would mean supply disruption and higher prices. But that does not mean they will not happen. The final, and perhaps most concerning, point is what Trump's latest move means for the negotiations between the EU and the US. Brussels has held off from responding to the tariffs imposed by Trump so far – including the first round of steel and aluminium tariffs, hoping to clear the way for a negotiated deal. It would be in Ireland's interests were such an agreement to emerge, avoiding a full-scale transatlantic trade war. Now, however, with the steel and aluminium tariffs hiked to 50 per cent, pressure will grow on Brussels to respond. The EU wants to do a deal , for sure, and there is an argument for it to drag things out a bit longer to see how this latest move plays out. But the EU cannot be seen to be pushed around by Washington. In turn, if it retaliates, this could sour the mood of the talks and lead to further retaliation from Trump. This is how trade wars start. The concern is that the US side still expects unilateral concessions from the EU, while Brussels is preparing for a give-and-take negotiation. Despite Trump's legal power on blanket tariffs being trimmed, significant risks still lie ahead.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on financial regulation: time to spread the net
EU regulators are set to conduct comprehensive stress tests of the non-bank sector, which could begin as early as next year. The non-bank sector includes hedge funds, private equity firms, and other investment vehicles that have grown significantly in size over recent years. The move has prompted fears among these investment funds that new layers of regulation are on the way. But increased scrutiny is the right course of action for two key reasons. The creation of EU banking union in 2014 introduced a much more robust regulatory regime for systemically important banks across the 27-member union, including much stricter rules on lending and capital ratios. This has had the effect of pushing a lot of borrowing and related activities to non-bank entities, which has increased the level of risk in the sector. The stress tests aim to gauge the threat it poses to the wider economy. There is a second and potentially more important reason. Over the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second presidency, he has slashed many of the US financial regulations introduced in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Of particular concern, he has hollowed out many of the federal agencies responsible for regulating the financial system and, in some cases, brought them under the direct control of the White House. Moreover, he is actively using his presidency to promote highly volatile crypto currencies. This all creates risks in the financial markets, as does the fact that Trump's budget bill, now in Congress would, if enacted, add up to $3 trillion to the US national debt over the next decade. It is little wonder that the bond markets are nervous. READ MORE Trump often accuses the EU of over-regulation – and the report by former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi has argued that in some areas of the economy, particularly technology, rules do need to be streamlined. But the events of 2008 show that the bias in financial regulation needs to be towards caution. The costs of failure are just too great. The proposed stress tests of the non-bank sector are thus to be welcomed.
The Journal
2 hours ago
- The Journal
What the hell happened to Google search?
LET'S SAY YOU want a list of Irish ministers. So you google it, of course. The fact that it's its own verb sums up pretty neatly Google's total dominance of online search. 'I'll Bing it,' said no-one, ever. (Sorry, Microsoft.) is the world's most used website . Ninety percent of internet searches go through the company's search engine. It's the front door to the internet, and a navigational tool on which we have become entirely dependent. Who among us has typed out a url in the last decade? Whether you have an Android or an Apple phone, that's Google search you're using when you open your browser. But something has gone wrong. Search for 'Irish ministers' and the top result is… Pat Breen? ( The Journal checked this on several users' desktop browsers with the same result.) Breen was never a minister. He was a junior minister – and that was a while ago now. He lost his seat two elections ago, in 2020. A government website with a full list of current government ministers is quite a bit down the results page. Pat Breen, the Platonic ideal of an Irish minister, according to Google. Google Google Sponsored posts The utility of the search engine has been particularly eroded when it comes to anything that could be sold to you, with top results likely to all be from companies that have paid to skip up the ranking to a position where they would not have organically surfaced. These paid-for top results, which take up more and more space on the search engine results page, are also partly based on your browsing history rather than what you are currently looking for. So a search from an Irish location for 'the best place to buy children's shoes', for instance, can contain sponsored top results for (a) shops that don't sell children's shoes or (b) British online-only retailers. (Good luck buying children's shoes without trying them on.) There are useful results amid the debris of sponsored links and below the paid-for top table, but it feels like harder work than it once was to find them. This isn't helped by the fact that sponsored links are not very visually distinct from organic results. It's hard not to click on them. Ads on search are how Google makes most of its money. ChatGPT's challenge to Google And then, of course, there's the new AI Overview that, for the past year, has appeared in response to certain types of queries. Now, the integration of AI into search is about to be turbocharged as Google goes on the offensive against ChatGPT. It may not be its own verb yet, but for many people, OpenAI's chatbot is becoming as automatic and intuitive a go-to as Google. Liz Carolan, a tech consultant and author of The Briefing newsletter, says that while Google hasn't shared data on the drop-off in people using its search engine, all the signs are that the switch to ChatGPT has been 'profound'. Where once we would have googled, 'what time is the Eurovision', now we are asking chatbots. So Google is becoming a chatbot too. In May, Google began to roll out the next step up from AI Overview. AI Mode, which has been launched in the US, will deliver customised answers to users' questions, including charts and other features, rather than serving up a lists of links. These answers will be personalised based on past browsing history. You will even be able to integrate it with your Gmail account to allow further personalisation. At first, AI Mode will be a distinct option in search, but its features and capabilities will gradually be integrated into the core search product, Google has said . Carolan says this will be as fundamental a change to how we interact with the internet as the original arrival of Google search. 'Instead of navigating between links, we're going to end up using a single interface: a chatbot querying the websites that exist and delivering back to you its interpretation of that, in a conversational style,' she explains. An example of an AI Overview result in Google. Google Google AI nonsense The first problem is, Google's AI results can be nonsense . Kris Shrisnak, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties working on AI and tech, says people need to understand one fundamental point about the large language models (LLMs) on which chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google's Gemini AI are based: they are not designed to be accurate. 'When they're accurate, they are coincidentally accurate,' Shrisnak says. 'They're accurate by accident, rather than by design.' For example, Carolan recently wanted to check how many working days there are in June. Google's AI-generated top result helpfully explained that there are 21 working days and no public holidays in June. If you specify 'in Ireland', Google says there are 22 working days and no public holidays. Both answers are wrong. There are 20 working days in June, and the first Monday is always a public holiday. ChatGPT didn't know that either. It counted the bank holiday twice. Google isn't planning to take Monday off. Google Google 'It's just blatantly inaccurate,' Carolan says. 'People are relying on it, and it's giving them inaccurate information.' Aoife McIlraith, managing director of Luminosity Digital marketing agency, says Google had almost certainly released its AI search product sooner than it wanted to. 'There's huge pressure on them. It's the first time they actually had competition in the market for search. It will definitely get better, but it's going to take some time,' McIlraith says. Google defended AI Overviews, telling The Journal that people prefer search with this feature. It said AI Overview was designed to bring people 'reliable and relevant information' from 'top web results', and included links. Advertisement Enshittification Even setting aside the incorporation of undercooked AI answers into results, Google's traditional search product does not seem to be working as well as it once did. Journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term 'enshittification ' in 2022 to describe the pattern whereby the value to users of platforms – be it Amazon, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter – gradually declines over time. Doctorow argued that platforms start by offering something good to users (like an excellent search engine), then they abuse their users to serve business customers (search results buried under ads), and then they abuse both users and business customers to serve their shareholders. Documents released in 2023 as part of a US Department of Justice antitrust case against Google gave a rare insider view of the top of the company, revealing that in 2019 there were tensions over the direction of search. The documents suggested a boardroom struggle over whether Google's search team should be more focused on the effectiveness of the product, or on growing the number of user queries (a better search engine would mean fewer queries, and therefore fewer ads viewed). In one email, the head of search complained his team was 'getting too involved with ads for the good of the product'. Google said this weekend that this executive's testimony at trial had 'contextualised' these documents and clarified the company's focus on users. 'The changes we launch to search are designed to benefit users,' Google said. 'And to be clear: the organic results you see in search are not affected by our ads systems.' Carolan says it's impossible to know exactly what has happened within Google's algorithm, but the quality filters that were once in place to keep low-quality results further down the ranking seem to be struggling to hold back the tide. Visibility on Google can be gamed using certain practices known as search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the reason why, for example, online recipes often contain weird, boring essays above the list of ingredients. All publishers use SEO, but the quality of search results is degraded when low quality websites are able to abuse SEO to boost their Google ranking. 'Maybe investment within search engines are going more towards AI than they are towards just sustaining the core search product,' Carolan says. 'It's very hard to say because all of this is happening in very untransparent ways. Nobody gets to see how decisions are being made.' McIlraith says it's widely believed in her industry that recent changes to Google's algorithm – in particular an August 2022 update called, ironically, 'Helpful Content' – have corrupted results. She believes this is having a bigger impact in smaller markets such as Ireland, with more . websites appearing in Irish users' results, for example. 'A lot of people in my industry have been shouting about this, particularly in the past 18 months,' McIlraith says. Google said it makes thousands of changes to search every year to improve it, and it's continuously adapting to address new spam techniques. 'Our recent updates aim to connect people with content that is helpful, satisfying and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web,' it said. For what it's worth, Shrisnak doesn't use Google now, favouring DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine based on Google that feels a lot like the Google of old. It doesn't collect user data (and is capable of correctly identifying the current government of Ireland). What happens next? Google says AI is getting us to stay where it wants us: on Google. CEO Sundar Pichai has suggested that AI encourages users to spend more time searching for answers online, growing the overall advertising market. Google says AI Overviews have increased usage by 10% for the type of queries that show overview results. Soon, Irish users are likely to see advertising integrated into AI Overview. The company is telling advertisers this will be a powerful tool, putting their ads in front of us at an important, previously inaccessible moment when we are just beginning to think about something. But AI raises existential questions for the production of content for the web as we know it, both in its ability to generate content and as it's being applied in search. In the jargon of digital marketing, the problem is known as 'zero click'. You ask Google a question and get an answer – maybe an AI-generated one – without ever having to click on a blue link. McIlraith says: 'The biggest challenge for all of my clients and the wider industry is that Google is flatly refusing to give us any data around zero click. We cannot see how much our brand is showing up in search results where no click is being attributed.' Until now, there was an unwritten contract: websites provided Google with information for free, and benefited from Google-generated traffic. This contract is broken when Google morphs into a single interface scraping the web to feed its AI in a way that negates the need to click through links to websites to find information. 'The challenge then really becomes, why would I create content?' McIlraith says. 'Why would I create content on my website just for these AIs to come along and scrape it?' Already there are challenges to ChatGPT's practices, with publishers led by the New York Times suing OpenAI over its use of copyrighted works. News/Media Alliance, the trade association representing all the biggest news publishers in the US, last month condemned AI Mode as 'the definition of theft'. 'Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,' the alliance said. 'Now Google just takes content by force.' Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled about this by US tech news website The Verge last week. He said AI Mode would provide sources, adding that for the past year Google has been sending traffic to a broader base of websites and this will continue. He did not give a definitive answer when asked by whether a 45% increase in web pages over the past two years was the result of more of the web being generated by AI, stating that 'people are producing a lot of content'. Carolan speculates that in the single interface, linkless future, with the business model of web publishing broken, the risk is that the internet starts to eat itself: regurgitating AI slop rather than sustaining the production of original material. The information Google's AI Mode and ChatGPT and the rest are feeding off will then degrade. Late stage enshittification. AI search itself may improve, but these improvements will be undermined by this disintegration of the information environment. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... Our Explainer articles bring context and explanations in plain language to help make sense of complex issues. We're asking readers like you to support us so we can continue to provide helpful context to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Learn More Support The Journal
