00:00The EU is seeing the new U.S. trade demands hollowing out the deals struck by President Trump. Now this had been, you know, hallowed as a fantastic deal of 15% across the board tariff. But now the EU is talking about these digital technology rules, corporate compliance and climate regulations hollowing this deal out. This is concerning. Yes, this has always been the fear. As we know, Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, sealed a trade deal back in July in Scotland.
00:30With a 15% ceiling on tariffs for most goods. Now, even though there was some pushback to that deal, EU countries swallowed it and thought it was the best they could get, essentially, at that time. Now we are reporting just in the last few moments that there is now concern in Brussels about the sanctity of that deal.
00:50We expect that EU ambassadors in Brussels will be briefed by the European Commission later today on some feedback and some discussions they've been having with the U.S. side.
01:01And as you mentioned there, the fear is that the U.S. wants to change the goalposts, as it were, on some issues in this trade deal, mainly on digital regulation.
01:12This has long been a bugbearer of a success of U.S. government, but particularly of Donald Trump, that EU regulation on big tech is too onerous.
01:20So that's one issue that seems to have emerged now as a concern, but also EU rules around environmental laws, for example, climate.
01:29So we do expect, as I say, EU countries to be briefed on this later today in Brussels, but definitely a fear about the next stage in these EU-U.S. trade negotiations.
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