The UK is still hoping to work out a trade deal with the US - but early reports indicate it's quite a way off.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves recently arrived in Washington DC, and she's warned negotiations will take time.

UK correspondent Enda Brady says the UK economy needs the extra help, but it's unlikely a deal will come by the end of the week.

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US President Donald Trump has spent the past week verbally attacking Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and it's prompted concerns from the markets.

Trump recently claimed the US economy could slow down unless interest rates were lowered immediately - and said that Powell's termination 'cannot come soon enough'.

Sam Dickie from Fisher Funds explains what this could mean for investors.

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Local cheesemakers have voiced concerns about the competition created by supermarket-produced home-brands.

Smaller brands have been forced to scale back on production to reduce their reliance on the supermarkets - in a bid to focus on filling niches that appeal to Kiwi cheese lovers.

The Country's Rowena Duncum explains further.

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Consumer confidence has gone back up - but new data indicates people are also worried about inflation.

The latest ANZ-Roy Morgan survey shows consumer confidence rose 5 points to 98.3 in April - but inflation expectations soared 0.5pts to 4.7 percent, the highest reading since July 2023.

NZ Herald business editor at large Liam Dann unpacked the factors contributing to this data.

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Tonight on The Huddle, broadcaster Mark Sainsbury and Infrastructure NZ's Nick Leggett joined in on a discussion about the following issues of the day - and more!

How do we feel about the fact that we're buying new cars - and paying for their maintenance - for our former Prime Ministers?

Should taxpayers be funding more locally made reality shows?

ACT and National are at odds over the ACC's race-based policies - what do we make of this?

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Now, listen, I hope that this ACC business is a Scott Simpson problem and not a National problem, but I'm starting to get a little worried about it - because this is at least the 3rd case of race-based stuff still happening under National when we thought National was going to put a stop to it.

I mean, with the free GP visits in Hawke's Bay for Māori and Pasifika kids and no one else - at least that stuff could be blamed on rogue public health staff, and it was killed as soon as we discovered it was happening.

And at least with the co-governance stuff that's going on in the Waitakere Ranges - at a stretch, we may believe that the Government didn't know about it. Maybe.

But this ACC stuff, the minister knows about. And even though he was told about it, he's not gonna stop it because as I told you in the Newsroom article, he stands by ACC - and he thinks it's okay.

Now, I reckon this is gonna be just a little disappointing to a whole bunch of voters who put this Government in power to stop this race-based stuff that Willie Jackson and the Labour Party were pushing.

And who would have thought that that directive to the public service that went out last year telling the public servants to stop the race-based stuff was actually going to stop the race-based stuff?

National needs to cut the stuff out. They need to stop this.

They either need to stop it themselves or they need to go along to to Scott Simpson and tell him to stop it, because otherwise, a lot of voters are gonna wise up to exactly what ACT was warning us at the election - which is that National is not actually going to change anything.

National is just Labour in blue clothes. And if you think I'm going too far saying that, just take a look at what is going on. I'll remind you, Nicola Willis has spent more in her last budget than Grant Robertson ever spent. Scott Simpson clearly loves himself a little race-based target.

Now, what did we complain about ad nauseam with Labour? We complained about too much spending, but we've still got that going on. We complained about too much racial division - we've still got that going on. So how is this any different currently?

As I say, National needs to cut this out, or it needs to risk losing voters to its coalition partners, because the coalition partners at this stage are actually taking a tougher line on this stuff.

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New reports indicate Donald Trump is considering slashing tariffs on Chinese goods by more than half.

No announcements have been made yet- but tariffs could reportedly come down to between roughly 50 percent and 65 percent, according to one senior White House official.

Asia Business Correspondent Peter Lewis says China has signalled it's open to trade talks - as officials believe this is the US blinking first in the trade dispute.

"They see it as vindication of President Xi's strategy - which is to hang tough and not to be bullied and not to negotiate under duress."

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