Friday newspaper round-up: Tariffs, Amazon, Starbucks

(Sharecast News) - Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets. The US president also said he would start charging a 50% tariff on bathroom vanities and a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week, with all the new duties to take effect from 1 October. - Guardian

Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5bn in fines and redress to Prime subscribers to settle a lawsuit by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which accused the retail giant of signing users up for the service without their consent and making it difficult to cancel. In a statement, the FTC said $1.5bn of the total will go into a fund to repay eligible subscribers, on top of a $1bn civil penalty. - Guardian

Starbucks plans to close scores of cafes and sack 900 people in a push to turn around the struggling coffee chain. Brian Niccol, the company's chief executive, outlined the plans in a letter to employees on Thursday. He said the chain would shut locations that were unable to "deliver a warm and welcoming space" or meet financial targets. - Telegraph

The Abu Dhabi royal family is set to buy a stake in TikTok's US business under a deal brokered by Donald Trump. MGX, a fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is nicknamed the "spy shiekh", will take a 15pc stake and gain a board seat, according to multiple reports. - Telegraph

The boss of Britain's biggest mutual has joined Marks & Spencer in calling on the government to make it mandatory to report cyberattacks after it was claimed that UK businesses pay more ransoms than their peers in other countries. The Co-operative Group, which has its headquarters in Manchester and employs 54,000 people, was one of three high-profile victims of cyberattacks in Britain in the spring, while the UK's largest carmaker is in the throes of a �crisis this month. - The Times

A think tank whose backers include British asset managers and investment banks has urged the government to force defined contribution (DC) pension schemes to increase the exposure of their default funds towards UK stocks dramatically, in an effort to rescue Britain's faltering equities market. The report by New Financial and the Capital Markets Industry Taskforce claims that making DC workplace plans allocate between 20 and 25 per cent of all the equity investments within their default strategies towards UK companies, rather than taking "a strictly 'global market-weighted' approach", would be "significantly less challenging or politically charged than mandating the asset allocation of pensions", since workers would be able to opt out. - The Times