Australia’s beef industry, which is one of the biggest foreign suppliers to the United States, is likely to keep its exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariff regime. Beef shipped to the US won’t face the new 15 per cent tariffs announced by Trump on Saturday, according to Meat & Livestock Australia managing director Michael Crowley. In November, the US administration announced that beef imports to America would be exempt from tariffs as part of a plan by the government to tackle rising food costs for consumers. With the US beef herd at its lowest in decades, imports from producers such as Canada and Australia have been used to fill the gap. Last year Australia exported nearly 450,000 tonnes of beef to the US.

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News in brief

The potential return of a cohort of Islamic State brides and their children to Australia has become a political headache for the government, with the federal Coalition challenging Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to stop their return.

Making a Nazi salute as a joke is enough to justify sacking an employee with more than a decade of service, according to the Fair Work Commission, after Pacific Rail dismissed a train driver who allegedly performed the gesture to oncoming train crews.

The Gold Coast in Queensland is getting a Trump Tower, and at 91 stories it might end up being the country’s tallest building.

The Australian government has issued a warning for travellers to Mexico following the death of drug lord “El Mencho” in a military raid.

Virgin Australia has reversed earlier plans to make it harder for frequent flyers to climb the all-important “status” ladder and will give regular travellers big status bonuses when they book flights.

Fear-o-meter

David Bassanese, chief economist at Betashares, on Trump's tariffs:

The US Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate many of President Trump’s tariff hikes suggests some of America’s famed political checks and balances remain alive and well.

The reality was that Trump’s long held desire to assault the global trading system through the weapon of tariffs was always legally dubious.

US Presidents simply don’t have the legal power to wield tariffs as a weapon of global coercion in the way Trump desires – the only question is whether the Supreme Court would be cowered into letting Trump get his way. It was not.

Although Trump has quickly used other legal pretexts to reinstitute a 15% across the board tariff, the Supreme Court’s ruling has effectively dealt a body blow to Trump’s tariff strategy.

Even the latest lift in tariffs requires Congressional approval within five months. With Republicans only having a slim majority, the omens are not good. It will only require a few Congressional members to find their backbone in the same way that a majority of Supreme Court judges have done.

Fear & Greed Q+A today

On why AI profits may take a lot longer to flow than markets expect, including the challenges with reliability described in the 'March of the Nines' theory:

 

“The idea is you can get up to 90 per cent reliability, which means you’ve got a cool demo... you can do that with the humanoid robot, for example. Or we’ve had autonomous vehicles for 40 years now. But you don’t want an autonomous vehicle that’s 90 per cent reliable because it’s going to be running over a lot of people, there’s going to be a lot of accidents.

 

So you need what’s called the five nines — so 99.999 per cent. That’s sort of the rough metric that’s used in a lot of instances where products are rolled out. In some cases the bar is much higher. Like if you’re running a nuclear power plant, you’re not happy with five nines — you probably want 10 nines.

But at minimum — if I’m sending an email to you and it’s 90 per cent reliable, that’s sort of okay.

 

And so we get excited about 90 per cent — there’s the demo. But then to actually have something that can be used at a firm like the firm I work at or where you work at, or can be used in your home — because the first time a robot kills granny, the regulators are going to come in and nothing’s going to happen for 10 years — so you need the five nines.

 

And the idea that the length of time it takes to get to 90 is the same length of time it gets you to 99, 99.99 and so on. So when you have this really impressive demo, you’re 20 per cent of the way there."

Greed-o-meter

With Milano Cortina done and dusted, it's time to review the final medal tally at our most successful Winter Olympics yet. And yes, we deliberately included the 15th row.

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