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Daily Finance & Markets Brief · July 25th
storyflo · finance and markets
Jul 25, 2026 · 4 min listen · Last updated July 25, 2026
From storyflo. This is your daily audio brief. Mason. July 25th. Markets desk — five stories, watch the tape, ignore the noise. Let's get into it. First, from Morning Brew. What to know about Trump’s latest tariffs. Hey, I wanted to fill you in on the latest with Trump's tariffs.
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What to know about Trump’s latest tariffs
Hey, I wanted to fill you in on the latest with Trump's tariffs. So, the US just slapped new tariffs on 60 trade partners, including China, Canada, and the EU, which account for 99.4% of US imports. These tariffs range from 10% to 12.5% and replace a temporary 10% tariff that was set to expire.
The new tariffs have some exceptions, like oil, natural gas, and goods not produced in the US, which are exempt. And items like aluminum and steel that already face import taxes won't get hit again. The Trump administration says these countries have failed to curb forced labor, which is the reason for the tariffs.
The EU and other countries are not happy about this, with Australia calling the tariffs "completely unjustified" and the EU saying they're "not really grounded." Brazil's also planning to appeal to the World Trade Organization. In the US, some small businesses are suing to stop the new levies.
Economists are worried about the impact of these tariffs, along with other factors like war-induced energy price spikes and rising AI spending, which are all contributing to inflation anxiety. And to make things more complicated, the US is planning two more waves of tariffs on excess manufacturing and the EU's fines against US tech giants.
For listeners who want low-fee crypto exposure, our markets partner Kraken supports Bitcoin — link in show notes.
Hey, so there's this huge divorce payout in South Korea. Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, was ordered to pay his ex-wife, Roh Soh-yeong, around $640 million. That's a massive settlement, and it's being called the "divorce of the century." Chey's worth around $5 billion, and he's made a fortune selling memory chips, which are used in Nvidia's products.
Chey's SK Hynix affiliate just made its US market debut, and he's been posting photos with other tech big shots online. Roh, on the other hand, is the daughter of a former South Korean president who was imprisoned for corruption. The two were married for decades, but Chey left her in 2015 for a younger woman.
The divorce proceedings took a decade, and during that time, Chey's net worth skyrocketed thanks to the AI boom. Roh argued she was entitled to more of his wealth, but the court used an earlier valuation to make its decision. Either side can appeal to South Korea's Supreme Court, according to the Wall Street Journal.
For listeners who want low-fee crypto exposure, our markets partner Kraken supports Bitcoin — link in show notes.
Somewhere right now, an employee is getting an automated flag for spending too long away from their keyboard. Another is being scored on keystroke volume. And another is having their Slack tone analyzed by an algorithm to determine whether they are a retention risk. None of this is science fiction. It is a normal day at a growing number of companies, and it is making everything worse.
I have spent more than 15 years researching workplace culture and employee well-being, and what I am watching unfold with AI-powered surveillance is one of the most self-defeating trends in modern management.
AI may finally make ‘women’s work’ valuable. But will women benefit?
For years, economists have predicted that artificial intelligence would hollow out the labor market. Machines would write the code, analyze the contracts, draft the emails, and automate the work that once defined white-collar status.
What would remain, they argued, would be the human skills that machines can’t replicate: caregiving, teaching, coaching, mentoring, relationship-building.
That sounds, at first glance, like a victory for women.
After all, women dominate many of those professions.
Humanoid War Robot Gets Advanced AMD-Powered AI Brain
At the start of February, we began tracking startup Foundation Robotics after publicly available news reports and X posts suggested it could become one of the first US companies to deploy humanoid robots on the modern battlefield.
TIME later reported that the company's robots had been sent to Ukraine for testing and evaluation, raising the prospect that these war bots could soon reach the front lines in Eastern Europe.
Our February 2 report, "Watch: Russian Soldiers Surrender To Gun-Wielding Robot; Humanoid Warfare Nears," and our February 3 report, "AI's Next Frontier Is Physical As Humanoid
Bill Gates Ignored Repeated Warnings And Met Epstein Thirty Times
Roughly thirty meetings took place between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein between 2011 and 2014, even after foundation staff repeatedly warned about the reputational danger.
The review, commissioned by the Gates Foundation and conducted by WilmerHale, found no evidence of payments or illegal activity, but confirmed the volume of contact.
Board leaders responded by tightening vetting, conflict‑of‑interest rules, and escalation
Beer is the world’s most widely consumed alcoholic beverage, but much of it comes from a relatively small group of companies.
This visualization, via Visual Capitalist's Melissa Garside, ranks the world’s 40 largest beer brewers by production volume using data from the BarthHaas Report 2024/25.
Together, these brewers produced 42.7 billion U.S. gallons of beer in 2024, equal to 86.3% of global production.
AB InBev dominated the global beer industry in 2024, producing 13.1 billion U.S.
The 'Projects' That Could Ignite The Next World War
The most dangerous geopolitical developments of 2026 are not necessarily the weapons that have already been fired, but the systems being constructed in anticipation of the next crisis. Across Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, governments are committing extraordinary resources to military production, strategic infrastructure, weapons procurement and long-term defence planning, creating a global security environment in which preparation for war has itself become one of the defining features of international politics.
A federal appeals court rejects Trump's bid to keep in place the $100,000 H-1B visa fee
- Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee was blocked by a federal appeals court.
- A lower court ruled the H-1B visa fee is a tax requiring Congress's approval, not the president's.
- Very few had paid the new fee as employer demand for the visa reduced dramatically.
President Donald Trump's plans for H-1B visas are running into legal roadblocks.
A federal appeals court on Friday refused to revive Trump's $100,000 fee on new H-1B work visas, dealing another setback to the administration's effort to dramatically raise the cost of hiring highly skilled foreign workers.
The Boston-based 1st US Circuit Co
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