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Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldDonald Trump said he would like to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year as South Korea’s leftwing President Lee Jae Myung visited the White House against a backdrop of tensions between Washington and Seoul. Speaking in the Oval Office alongside Lee on Monday, Trump touted his “great relationship” with Kim, with whom he held a series of high-profile but largely inconclusive meetings during his first term in office.“I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong Un in the appropriate future,” the US president said. When asked about the timing of a possible summit with Kim, Trump answered: “I’m meeting a lot of people . . . it’s hard to say that, but I’d like to meet him this year.”Show video infoHis desire for a meeting with Kim was blessed by the South Korean president who said he asked for the US president to play a role “in establishing peace on the Korean peninsula”. “I look forward to your meeting with chairman, Kim Jong Un and the construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf at that place,” Lee quipped.The talks between Trump and Lee unfolded amid friction between the two countries on issues ranging from trade to the US military presence in the Asian nation and the rule of law.In a Truth Social post hours before the meeting, Trump referenced the political turmoil that has enveloped South Korea over the past year, including the impeachment and arrest of former president Yoon Suk Yeol for trying to impose martial law in late 2024. “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there. I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!” Trump wrote. Speaking to reporters before meeting Lee, Trump said he had heard about “very vicious raids on churches by the new government in South Korea” that “even went into our military base and got information”. In the Oval Office alongside the South Korean president, Trump said he had heard about the matter from US intelligence. “It didn’t sound to me like South Korea,” he said. Lee responded that there was a “fact finding investigation” being conducted about the actions of the former president — to which Trump interjected by asking, jokingly, if the special prosecutor’s name was Jack Smith, who brought charges against him during the 2024 campaign for the White House. On trade, the countries agreed last month that Seoul would invest $350bn in the US in return for a 15 per cent tariff on South Korean imports, down from the 25 per cent levy Trump had threatened. “We’re going to get along great because we really sort of need each other,” Trump said in the Oval Office with Lee.But it was unclear how much of the underlying friction was resolved. Neither country released an official factsheet outlining the terms of the July 30 agreement and officials from the two governments have offered markedly different interpretations of what was agreed.On the military front, the Trump administration wants to refocus its assets in South Korea on China, leaving Seoul to take on more of the burden of deterring North Korea.South Korea’s national security adviser, Wi Sung-lac, said last week that his country was willing to increase its defence spending, while Lee has also declared his intention for wartime operational control of joint forces on the peninsula to be transferred from the US to South Korea by 2030.Trump would not say on Monday whether he supported a reduction of American troops in South Korea, but he did add that he would like the US to have ownership over its main military base there rather than have it leased. “We spent a lot of money building a fort, and there was a contribution made by South Korea. But I would like to see if we could get rid of the lease and get ownership of the land where we have a massive military base,” Trump said. Despite the attempt by Trump and Lee to patch over their differences, the US president’s decision to chide Lee on the domestic political environment ahead of their meeting highlighted the hurdles they still need to overcome. Yoon, the former South Korean president, was impeached and suspended from office in December after he declared martial law and dispatched troops to storm the national assembly following a budgetary stand-off with leftwing parties. He was removed from office in April following a unanimous decision by the country’s constitutional court.Yoon is in solitary confinement as he stands trial on criminal charges of sedition. But his hardline supporters have long maintained that his martial law gambit was designed to prevent election meddling by leftist forces aligned with North Korea and the Chinese Communist party.Many have protested with US flags and English-language “Stop the Steal” signs — an allusion to Trump’s allegations of fraud in the 2020 US election that preceded the storming of the US Capitol by his supporters on January 6 2021 — in a bid to win the US president’s support for their cause. More

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldThe writer is director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise InstituteDuring the 2008 financial crisis, the US government spent and risked taxpayer dollars to stop financial institutions and carmakers from going out of business. Those policies were enacted during a crisis and were designed to be temporary. President Donald Trump’s deal to have the government take a 10 per cent stake in Intel is not temporary.Are we in a crisis? Many economists, including me, would say no. But politicians in both parties have claimed the opposite, arguing that the US is too reliant on semiconductors made in Taiwan and exposed to Chinese security threats. Manufacturing leading-edge chips, they argue, should take place in the US.Trump’s recent deal with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD, however, suggests security concerns are being used by the president as a fig leaf for rank corporate shakedowns. In that deal, Trump agreed to allow Nvidia and AMD to sell H20 and MI308 AI chips to China in exchange for the Treasury receiving 15 per cent of the revenue. Security is clearly not the president’s motivating concern.Troublingly, the government might have its eye on equity stakes beyond Intel. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly exploring government stakes in other semiconductor manufacturers that received Biden-era Chips Act subsidies, such as TSMC and Samsung. This all strikes me as not so much a strategic embrace of state capitalism as an opportunistic attempt by Trump to “get the best deal” in one-off situations. The existing deals are worrying enough. But Trump’s actions also create a troubling precedent.Expanded state involvement will create serious challenges for the companies on the receiving end of it. Diverting time and energy from competing in the market to pleasing the president might work in the short term, as Intel’s increasing share price has indicated. But the need for political support could make it harder for the chipmaker to enact needed changes to stay competitive, including politically unpopular moves like closing plants and laying off workers. The pace of innovation will decelerate. Over the long term, this will be a bad deal for the taxpayer. Trump’s escalation of government intervention in the economy makes it important to step back and ask three foundational questions.First, can the US actually achieve the goals it seeks? Building up domestic chip manufacturing would require decades of policy continuity from administrations of both parties. Is this possible when parties are divided, policy is made by presidential whim and long-term corporate planning is limited by the four-year presidential election cycle?Intel, our would-be national chips champion, is struggling, having announced a 15 per cent cut of its workforce last year. It is planning on cutting an additional 20 per cent this year. A fundamental question: why should it get $8.9bn of taxpayer’s money? Are there not better uses of those funds? Second, even if the Chips Act succeeds, will it make America safer and more resilient? Optimistic estimates suggest it could help the US to produce 28 per cent of cutting-edge chips by 2032. In the event that China tried to cut off US access, would the US be qualitatively better off if 72 per cent, rather than 100 per cent, of cutting-edge chips were produced in other nations? Finally: what kind of society does America wish to be? In a free society, advancing and preserving economic liberty is a proper goal of government. Taking unnecessary equity stakes in private companies is a clear threat to that goal. Beyond equity stakes in chip manufacturers, the Treasury secretary has suggested more deals like the Intel one with Nvidia and AMD may be coming. The US reached a deal last month to acquire a 15 per cent stake in rare earths miner MP Materials. Insisting on a golden share to allow Nippon Steel, the Japanese manufacturer, to acquire US Steel is similarly objectionable and troubling. The severe flaws in China’s model of state capitalism are becoming more apparent by the month, with its overcapacity, empty industrial parks, struggling housing market, weak consumer demand and deflationary pressure. It is tragic, then, that so many in Washington seem to believe that the best way for the US to compete with China is to become more like China, with the government playing a large role in shaping the composition of investment, industry and employment. It would clearly be better for the US to double down on its former broad bipartisan consensus: neutral support for business investment, basic research, infrastructure and worker training — and a strong commitment to the rule of law and free markets.  More

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During the Covid pandemic, millions of workers quit their jobs
Fast forward to 2025 and many workers are staying put, while businesses are putting the brakes on hiring or firing
Economic uncertainty has made both employees and employers nervous

Casarsaguru | E+ | Getty Images

Millions of workers left their jobs during the “Great Resignation” of the Covid-19 pandemic, but economic insecurity and uncertainty have once more turned the tides of the labor market toward the “Great Stay.”
Economists coined the term to refer to fewer employees leaving jobs, and fewer employers hiring or firing new workers.

“We had this ‘Great Resignation’ just a couple of years ago,” Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, told CNBC. But now, “workers aren’t going anywhere,” she noted.
“They’ve got their dream job, which is probably partly at home, maybe with a big salary pickup … And what we actually see in the data is very low turnover, which is very unusual in the U.S.,” she added.
“I call it the ‘Great Stay.’ People are staying put. They’re not leaving. And they’re staying put in things like IT and software development, where you would normally see a lot of turnover,” she noted.

Likewise, Richardson said firms were putting hiring decisions on hold “because they’re uncertain about the road ahead, not necessarily because they’re trying to reduce their headcount.”
Describing the trend as a “no-hire, no-fire market,” Richardson said the momentum is clearly slowing in terms of hiring, although initial U.S. jobless claims — a proxy for layoffs — are still near historical lows.

“We think it’s no-fire, no-layoff [environment] right now because firms are so reluctant to let people go, because it took so long in the U.S. to get them back.”

The turnaround from the “Great Resignation” is dramatic: the Covid-19 pandemic ended the longest employment and economic expansion in U.S. history, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with around 50.5 million people quitting their jobs in 2022, up from 47.8 million in 2021.
But there are signs that the U.S. jobs market is cooling; nonfarm payroll growth came in at a slower-than-expected 73,000 in July, the latest data from Aug.1 showed, while the unemployment rate ticked higher to 4.2%.
The weak report could provide an incentive for the U.S. Federal Reserve to lower interest rates when it next meets in September, economists said.

UK seeing similar shift

A similar trend was seen in the U.K., where the number of job vacancies rose to a record 1,172,000 over the August-October 2021 period, according to the Office for National Statistics. By the second quarter of 2022, the total number of job vacancies had reached 1,295,000, the ONS said.
Fast forward to 2025 and the latest U.K. jobs data, released mid-August, showed the country’s labor market continued to cool with job vacancies falling by 5.8% to 718,000 between May to July in 16 out of 18 industry sectors, according to the ONS.
It added that “feedback from our Vacancy Survey suggests some firms may not be recruiting new workers or replacing workers who have left.”

Shoppers pass along the high street in Maidstone, UK, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The U.K. economic inactivity rate — reflecting the number of people aged between 16-64 who are not in work and not actively looking for work — was estimated at 21% in April to June 2025, the ONS said.
“Business hiring has been continuously dropping for the past 3 years, with recent dips spurred in part by higher labour costs from tax rises and the minimum wage hike, as well as overall economic uncertainty,” noted Monica George Michail, associate economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research think tank.
“Meanwhile, falling inactivity and rising unemployment are increasing the supply of labour.”

Neil Carberry, the chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, told CNBC that Britain was also seeing a “Big Stay” trend, with firms reluctant to go on a hiring spend until they have a better understanding of the trajectory of the U.K. economy, which has been experiencing lackluster growth.
“The truth is, jobs are created by businesses, and the engine of job creation is growth … Unless you get business in a position where they want to hire in the United Kingdom, you’re not going to get anywhere,” he told CNBC.
“On the market at the moment, it’s quite odd. Permanent recruitment has been low for two or three years now, and it hasn’t quite come back [since Covid-19], but businesses are just, like, sitting there with a hand over the button. So what lots of our members say is that they can see what they’re going to do, they just want a bit of confidence to do it.”
— CNBC’s Jeff Cox and Greg Iacurci contributed reporting to this story More

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