Maybe you’ve heard: Tariffs are here.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration said it was imposing import tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico. China, the main character in Trump’s first term trade war, was slapped with an extra 10% import tariff. The predictable followed: All tariffed countries retaliated to some degree, with Canada and Mexico agreeing to negotiations that will delay their tariffs.

With that flurry of activity, we entered a new, likely tumultuous era of the global economy. CFOs, buckle up. And keep reading.

Who pays? You think you know about tariffs. But let’s clear up some common misconceptions first. The big one? Who actually foots the bill. 

“With any type of tax or government policy in general, you can see a difference between the person who is legally affected by it and then the person who is economically affected by it,” Erica York, VP of federal tax policy with the Tax Foundation, where she leads tariff and corporate tax policy research, told CFO Brew.

“One easy way to see this is if a tariff gets added to the price of a good, it may be the importer who initially pays the tax to the government, but if they pass that on in the form of higher prices, then it’s the final consumer who ultimately pays,” she added.

For more on how tariffs get paid for, click here.—NP

Last week, major pharmaceutical companies reported earnings for the first time since the inauguration, and executives weighed in on how what’s happening in Washington might affect them.

Trump’s proposed tariffs could be a giant headwind for pharma. Though Trump recently paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the tariff on China still stands, and he’s also floated the idea of placing a 20% tariff on the “rest of the world” (ROW) beyond those three countries. A ROW tariff would affect some countries that are major exporters of pharmaceuticals and immunological products (such as vaccines) to the US, including Germany, Japan, Ireland, India, Italy, and the UK. According to an analysis by PwC, if Trump’s proposed tariffs are enacted with no exemptions, the pharma and life sciences industry’s toll could rise from $90 million to more than $56 billion a year.

In the most recent round of earnings calls, though, executives from this industry appeared unfazed by tariffs. Merck’s CFO, Caroline Litchfield, said the company has “very low levels of manufacturing happening in China, in Mexico and Canada” and would expect “a very immaterial impact” from the most recent round of tariffs.

ROW tariffs, though, could have an outsized impact on Merck: Its cancer treatment, Keytruda, was the best-selling drug in the world in 2024, according to Statista, with a projected $27.2 billion in sales. It’s manufactured in Ireland and Singapore.

Click here for more on how Big Pharma is reacting to tariffs.—CV

It’s 2025, and you know what that means—time to go over what happened in the world of ransomware in 2024.

“I would say 2024 went full-on,” Christiaan Beek, senior director of threat analytics at Rapid7, told IT Brew. “It was a year full of attacks, after attacks, after attacks.”

Cash money. Rapid7’s new report on ransomware in the last year found that, unsurprisingly, the increase in attacks from ransomware gangs spiked again. Potential revenue from attacks could reach $380 million, Rapid7 surmised, based on a median reported ransom payment of $200,000 per attack, meaning there’s a lot of money on the table for those willing to take it.

To Sebastian Straub, principal solutions architect at N2WS, the next year promises to be more dangerous.

“I’m very afraid of the things we’re going to see in 2025, because even if you look at 2024, the attacks were, I know it sounds crazy...minor attacks,” Straub said. “I think we’re going to see tremendously larger attacks in 2025.”

Click here to keep reading IT Brew’s story on the increase in ransomware attacks.—EH