Welcome to the era of “balanced trade,” at least according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. That’s how the Cabinet member described the outcome of a new trade deal with the United Kingdom, which President Trump announced in the Oval Office on Thursday.

But while it’s the first agreement of its kind since Washington imposed taxes on global imports last month, many details remain foggier than an Earl Grey tea with a splash of milk, leaving its impact in doubt.

Beef Wellington from Washington

Britain was America’s ninth-largest trading partner last year, trailing Vietnam and besting India, but it only accounted for about 3% of all US trade. During that time, the US sent $79.9 billion in goods to the UK and imported $68.1 billion, according to Census Bureau figures, meaning America had a trade surplus of $11.9 billion with its onetime colonial ruler.

Trump’s new deal will only touch on a fraction of that trade relationship. Britain’s car industry will see US tariffs immediately slashed to 10% from 27.5% on as many as 100,000 vehicles per year. A 25% US tariff on steel and aluminum imports announced in March goes to tariff heaven and plane parts will enter the US untaxed as well. The UK, for its part, is removing levies on many US agricultural products, notably beef and ethanol — UK beef farmers are getting a 13,000-ton tariff-free quota to sell to the US. However, the UK isn’t budging on its food standards, the primary obstacle for US exporters, which include a ban on growth hormones that American farmers commonly use in beef production.

In an interview with Fox News, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins conceded that there remain “a lot of details to be worked out.” She will lead a delegation to the UK to discuss the “agreement in principle” next week. But with such a limited deal, there were already questions about just how consequential this “historic trade deal” — in Trump’s words — could be:

• Consumers will get only a limited reprieve as Trump’s 10% blanket tariff on most UK goods will remain in place. “The president has struck a deal that will lower the price of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Jaguars, Aston Martins, Range Rovers, and Minis,” tweeted University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers.
• Economist and Apricitas newsletter author Joey Politano, using US Census data, calculated that global “US tariff rates only fell a total of 0.06%,” adding the UK deal “was nowhere near a major reduction in Trump’s massive trade war.”

British Airways parent IAG announced Friday that is it buying 32 new Boeing planes, after Lutnick said an unnamed UK airline would buy $10 billion worth of the aircraft. IAG CEO Lluis Gallego, however, stressed in an earnings call that the Boeing deal was hammered out before the US-UK trade deal was announced. Additionally, IAG said it was buying 21 planes from Boeing’s European rival Airbus.

One Size Fits Y’all: The UK, with which the US has long enjoyed what both countries termed a ‘special relationship,’ has been angling for trade deals since Brexit removed it from the EU Customs Union, meaning negotiations may have been a tad less quarrelsome than they will be with other nations. Trump even held talks on a “very substantial trade deal” with Britain during his first term. The EU, of note, announced Thursday that it is readying to punch back at the US on trade: Officials said they have identified $107 billion worth of US goods that may be hit with higher tariffs to counter Trump’s announced and enacted duties. Officials also said they will consider launching a World Trade Organization complaint against the US.

Coinbase wanted more options. The leading US crypto exchange says it found them in an agreement to buy Derebit for $2.9 billion, marking the crypto industry’s largest deal to date.

The acquisition, expected to close before the end of the year, would give Coinbase a new revenue stream and help it stretch further into international markets as crypto companies jockey for global dominance.

The buy marks a major step into derivatives: Derebit handled more than $1.2 trillion worth of transactions last year, and it’s the No. 1 platform globally for trading bitcoin and ether options.

Released from the Kraken

The deal ends a months-long bidding battle between Coinbase and Kraken, a rival crypto exchange. Kraken instead bought derivatives broker NinjaTrader last week for $1.5 billion.

While global deal-making fell to a 20-year-low last month, crypto has been a hot spot for M&A as the industry moves fast to take advantage of a pro-crypto political moment. President Trump said he’ll build the US into the planet’s crypto capital and has been swapping out regulators who led a crypto crackdown during the Biden era for friendlier overseers.

The digital-asset industry, flush with funds from post-election investors, has been on a shopping spree this year:

• As of April 23, before Coinbase’s and Kraken’s latest acquisition announcements, the crypto industry had already made 88 deals valued at $8.2 billion, according to Architect Partners. That’s nearly triple the volume of all the transactions made in the sector last year. The industry’s on pace to beat its 2021 record of $17 billion worth of deals.
• Just last month, crypto network Ripple said it’ll acquire prime broker Hidden Road for $1.3 billion and the bitcoin-centric Twenty One Capital went public through a $3.6 billion SPAC merger.

Get It While It’s Hot: The crypto industry is sizzling after a long winter, and companies are making moves fast before it has the chance to cool down. Investors piling into the space bulked up companies’ cash reserves to spend on M&A. Coinbase’s first-quarter revenue climbed on a trading surge, while Derebit’s trading volumes nearly doubled last year from post-election institutional investment. Coinbase, which plans to pay for Derebit with a combination of cash and stock, has the financial wiggle room for more buys this year as it looks to better compete with global leader Binance.

De Beers, caught between a rock and a hard market, is dropping its lab-grown jewelry brand.

The world’s largest diamond producer on Thursday said it plans to shutter LightBox and is in discussions with potential buyers to sell off assets, including inventory.

Diamond Brand in the Rough

The decision aligns with its majority owner, UK-listed Anglo American, restructuring its business from a diversified model to a more focused one. Anglo American plans to spin off or sell De Beers, though timing remains unclear.

In the meantime, De Beers is renewing its identity as a luxury jewelry house by leaning into its high-return natural diamond business after watching prices for lab-grown diamonds decline sharply over the past few years:

• The company said that when LightBox was launched, LGDs were priced at $800 per carat, but prices in the sector have fallen 90% at wholesale since then.
• “The evolution of LGD values in the jewelry sector underpins De Beers Group’s core belief in rare, high-value natural diamond jewelry as a separate category from low-cost, mass-produced LGD jewelry,” the company said in a statement. Element Six, the De Beers subsidiary that produced those types of diamonds for Lightbox, is aiming its synthetic diamond-making toolkit at industrial purposes like producing chips for electronics.

Ethics- and cost-conscious consumers drove the synthetic gem boom that started in the mid-2010s.

Technological advancements made the stones indistinguishable from mined ones to the untrained eye, and they could be bought at a fraction of the cost. A “nice one-carat ideal round lab-grown” would cost $900, compared with the natural equivalent’s price of $5,000, diamond analyst Paul Zimnisky said in an interview with The New York Times.

The boom in synthetics quickly turned to a glut, weighing on prices. Today, one can buy lab-grown diamonds by the kilo, or even a diamond-making machine on China-based online marketplace Alibaba. Natural diamond prices have suffered similar industry dynamics, with prices falling by about 25% after hitting a peak in early 2022. Consumers have been spending more on experiences rather than luxury goods post-pandemic, and the precision of diamond-mining tech has resulted in an oversupply.

Diamonds are forever: While the gems might be losing their cachet as accessories, they could be used as a cache. Researchers have recently found a way to store 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter (roughly 2000 Blu-rays) of data in diamonds, with potential retention of millions of years.