Will Trump’s progress in Asia last?

0:02Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, October 31st and this is your FT News briefing. Amazon investors had some pep in their step yesterday. And will Trump's trade agreements in Asia stick? Plus, India's markets could be having a Goldilocks moment. I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

0:30Amazon and Apple both released solid earnings reports yesterday. Amazon saw a 13 % rise in revenue last quarter. That was thanks to, you guessed it, booming demand for artificial intelligence, which led to more sales of the company's cloud computing services. Amazon shares surged in after-hours trading yesterday. Apple reported record profits over the past year, and the company gave a bullish outlook for revenue over the holidays. That outlook is much higher than what analysts expected. The company attributes that to a, quote, great start for the latest iPhone model, which launched last month.

1:14U.S. President Donald Trump just wrapped up a week-long trip to Asia, and he was pretty jazzed about it. Here he is on Air Force One talking about his meeting with China's President Xi Jinping. I thought it was an amazing meeting. He's a great leader, a leader of a very powerful, very strong country, China. He also nailed down a trade agreement with South Korea and had a pretty good meeting with Japan's new prime minister, Sanai Takeichi. We had a great trip to Japan, and it was really wonderful. Malaysia, fantastic. A lot's been written about America's progress on trade agreements, especially with Asian countries.

1:54Yesterday's one-year truce with China put an extended pause on a long-running trade spat. The question is, though, will this progress actually hold? The FT's chief foreign affairs columnist, Gideon Rockman, has been writing on this, and he joins me now. Hi, Gideon. Hi. So a lot of groundwork has been laid with U.S. partners in Asia on trade. What happens next? Well, one of the things we've discovered over the course of the nine months that Trump's been in power, that nothing is permanent. But I think that the Trump administration do feel that they've begun to tick off a series of deals They've agreed tariff levels with countries such as Japan, South Korea, and they've got a kind of pause in the trade war with China.

2:39I actually think that when it came to China, what essentially happened is that the US has backed off because China has discovered a very, very powerful weapon in the form of the rare earths and critical minerals. China processes 90 % of the world's production, and they are essential to many aspects of Western industry. I think with the other Southeast Asian and East Asian countries, you're seeing them kind of grin and bear it. You know, the Japanese, the South Koreans are aghast that they're having to pay 15 % tariffs, and they don't like the investment deals that they've been forced to sign with Trump.

3:16But at the moment, they feel like they've got not much option. So Gideon, you said that things with Trump don't tend to last. But you also said that China has the upper hand here with the rare earths, metals, materials. Does that mean potentially that this deal could last because of this new power dynamic? Yes, but of course it takes two to tango. I mean, and the Chinese will also be considering their options here. You know, I was just in China and I think that they genuinely are quite confident. And they've been pleasantly surprised by how powerful the rare earth tool is, and also by their own industry's ability to circumvent American tech restrictions.

3:56For example, the efforts to essentially shut down Huawei, the Chinese telecoms firm and consumer goods firm, have failed. China's developed DeepSeek, which is a kind of Chinese version of open AI, using indigenous tech. And so I think that the threat of restriction of technology exports is less potent than it once was. Plus, Trump is getting in his ear important American companies such as NVIDIA, which are saying, please don't shut us out of this very important market, China, partly because we will then eventually lose ground to Chinese companies. Gideon, let me ask you this. With the Asia trip in the rear view, what's the next big push for the White House?

4:36Everybody, I think, is very interested to see what's going to happen with Venezuela. I don't think they're going to invade, but there is talk of pressure on the Maduro regime up to and including efforts at regime change. So that is a big one to watch. I think that Russia, Ukraine waxes and wanes, as does the Middle East. In his early period, Trump, perhaps encouraged by people like J.D. Vance, the restrainer crowd in the White House, kind of toyed with the idea that maybe you could walk away from the Middle East, walk away from Russia, Ukraine. Trump wanted another summit with Putin. That's off for now.

5:12But the dossier is not going to leave his desk. He's going to have to make difficult calls for the next few months and possibly years. That's the FT's Gideon Rockman, Chief Foreign Affairs Columnist. Thanks, Gideon. Pleasure.

5:30The Federal Reserve cut rates on Wednesday, but the rest of the week has been fairly quiet in central bank land. both the Bank of Japan and European Central Bank kept rates on hold yesterday. The head of the BOJ, Kazuo Ueda, had a cautious tone during yesterday's press conference, and it led investors to believe that the central bank won't raise interest rates until next year. The end fell sharply against the U.S. dollar in response. The European Central Bank also kept rates on hold. The ECB finished up a recutting cycle a few months ago. It described the outlook for inflation as, quote, broadly unchanged.

6:07Consumer prices rose at 2.2 % last month. And while we're talking about Europe, we found out yesterday the eurozone economy unexpectedly grew by two-tenths of a percent last quarter. French output expanded at the fastest pace since 2023, while Germany and Italy failed to grow in the third quarter.

6:32India is experiencing a boom in initial public offerings, and that's with relatively cool market conditions. The FT's Jennifer Hughes is describing it like Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold, just right. And she's here to tell us more. Hi, Jen. Hey there. So, Jen, give us a sense of how well India's IPOs are doing at the moment. Well, we've seen a lot of IPOs in India this year. It's been relatively steady, but it's picked up recently. We've had a couple of really big deals, a billion dollar plus each, which is decent for any market, but really big for India. Yeah, let's talk about those other markets.

7:08IPOs are doing really well in New York and Hong Kong. Can you explain what makes the situation in India different? Well, often you get IPO booms when markets are rising or hitting the headlines for something like records. so in New York at the moment you've got the S &P 500 hitting record highs on a semi-regular basis in Hong Kong which is the number three market after New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq you've got the Hang Seng is up like 28 % this year so you've got that kind of momentum that buzz that often encourages investors to look at IPOs and encourages companies to come out and sell their shares.

7:46India's different because the MSCI India, which is probably the broadest measure of the market, is up 4%. So it's not an IPO rally here. Yeah. And I think one of the other reasons the IPO boom that India is experiencing is surprising is because the country is facing some really challenging market conditions. Well, year to date, I mean, there's lots of bits and pieces, but some of the main ones are we had the short conflict with Pakistan early in the year. They had the trade worries the same as everybody else did when we had Liberation Day in April. But India has been hit pretty hard by tariffs.

8:24I mean, the headline rate is 50 percent and there's politics in that. And now we've got the H-1B visa issue with the U.S. as well, which is going to be hitting Indian IT firms. So all in, it's not a very positive economic backdrop. What does this all suggest about the future of India's capital markets? Is the outlook positive or are there concerns about inflated valuations? For now, it's okay. I mean, this is why I like this market because it felt like the Indian market was kind of maturing and growing up steadily. If stock exchanges have sort of been moving up the IPO league tables in recent years, 10 years ago, you wouldn't have seen India in the top 10 IPO destinations.

9:05And now you're seeing it in the top five in recent years. So it could all go a bit crazy from here. we could get crazy pricing, overvalued companies. All of these things can still happen. But for now, that's not what we're seeing. Jen Hughes writes for the FT's Lexcom. Thanks so much, Jen. Thank you. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back next week for the latest business news. The FT News Briefing was produced this week by Lucy Baldwin, Sonia Hudson, Victoria Craig, Fiona Simon and me, Mark Filippino.

9:40Our show is mixed by Kent Militzer and Kelly Gary. I want to say a special thanks to Ethan Plotkin, who started out producing our Swamp Notes podcast and then went on to be an FT podcast jack of all trades. Ethan is going on to host a podcast of his own over at Reuters. So Ethan, best of luck, but you know, not too much luck. We had help this week from Peter Barber, Michael Lello, David Da Silva, and Gavin Coleman. The FT's acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges, and our theme song is by Metaphor Music.

10:11Thank you.