The color of the day is gold
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Recruitment, development, career transition. LHH, a beautiful working world. Discover recruitment solutions at LHH.com slash beautiful. Getting U.S. citizenship as an immigrant is usually a long and difficult process, unless, of course, you can just buy it.

From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshour in for David Brancaccio. First, shares in Nippon Steel closed up in Tokyo today. That is after Nippon's deal to buy U.S. Steel finally crossed the finish line. There are some unusual aspects to the arrangement, though. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer joins us now live to elaborate. Hi, Nancy. Good morning.

So the two companies announced that President Trump has approved this partnership. There's something kind of unique about it, though, something called a golden share. What is that? Yeah, this is something the Trump administration insisted upon. The golden share gives this administration and future presidents a stake in the merged companies and considerable power. In a post on X, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Nippon can't

transfer production or jobs outside the U.S. or close or idle plants longer than normal without the president's permission. Ludnick says there are other protections around things like sourcing of raw materials and workers' salaries. Now, speaking of workers, it seems the United Steelworkers Union is not too happy about all of this. How are they responding?

Yeah, the union posted a letter yesterday about the merger during the presidential campaign. President Trump said he would block the deal. And the letter says the union is disappointed that Trump, quote, reversed course. The letter also points out that its current contract expires in September of next year. And the union is, quote, prepared to engage the new owners. Marketplace is Nancy Marshall-Genzer. Thank you so much. You're welcome.

A website is now live for what President Trump calls a gold card. That is where you can pay for a fast lane to U.S. legal residents and citizenship. The price tag, $5 million. Aside from that, we don't have a ton of details on the program. Marketplace's Savannah Peters has more.

The Trump administration says its gold card would replace the existing EB-5 visa program, which offers green cards to foreigners who can prove they've made big investments in U.S. businesses that helped create jobs.

The gold card doesn't seem to have an investment component. It's just about paying money to the U.S. government. Julia Gillette with the Migration Policy Institute says it's not yet clear President Trump has the legal authority to create a new visa category without Congress getting involved, or whether there's much demand. Because you have to be really extraordinarily wealthy for this to be attractive.

Stan Boyker is with the American Enterprise Institute. He says most people with $5 million to throw around are doing pretty well in their own countries. If you wanted to hit $10 billion in revenue a year, which is less than 1% of our budget deficit, you need 2,000 buyers per year.

I'm Savannah Peters for Marketplace. President Trump has said 15,000 people have signed up for the gold card at trumpcard.gov. That does not mean 15,000 people have paid $5 million, though. The website doesn't require proof of finances, but 15,000 are at least interested, according to the president.

The trade war between the U.S. and China, despite a truce, continues to show up in China's economic data. Factory production there hit a six-month low last month. U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods are now 55 percent. By the way, that is with the truce. At the same time, shoppers inside China are doing much better than expected. Retail sales there were up 6.4 percent year over year.

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A Canadian shipbuilder wants to make ice-breaking ships in Texas. The company Davie Shipbuilding last week announced plans to invest a billion dollars in this project. The icebreakers would be for the U.S. Coast Guard to use in the Arctic. The deal comes amid a bipartisan push to revive the domestic shipbuilding industry in the U.S. Reporter Daniel Ackerman has more on what that would actually take. There was a time when U.S. shipbuilding was the envy of the world.

During World War II, the U.S. had an extremely dominant shipbuilding industry in the sense that it built more ships than basically anyone else. Brian Potter is a senior infrastructure fellow with the Institute for Progress, and he says after the war, the industry... Kind of got dismantled. There was all sorts of emergency shipyards, and they all basically got closed down. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is now full of waterfront offices and art galleries.

Meanwhile, countries like China ramped up their shipbuilding, says Thomas McKinney, a naval architect at the University of Michigan. They invested heavily in that. Now they are the largest shipbuilder in the world with almost, I think, around 60% of the market.

McKinney says with that economy of scale, plus cheaper labor, Chinese builders can make ships at less than one-fifth the cost of U.S. builders. So from a price competition perspective, no one is going to come to the U.S. to build a container ship or a bulk carrier. Still, U.S. lawmakers want to boost shipbuilding for national security. A bill in Congress would offer tax breaks for investing in shipyards. But revitalizing the industry won't happen overnight.

One challenge is the workforce. It's hard to hire people. Cynthia Cook is a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She says many shipyards are in places with extreme weather or high cost of living. So each location has its own challenges in terms of workforce issues.

One key to solving those issues? A guarantee that the government is going to need a lot of these ships. We do need that constant demand signal. You're never going to be really efficient building one of anything. Matthew Paxton is president of the Shipbuilders Council of America. He says shipbuilding is complex, so it helps when yards can lock in contracts for a series of vessels at once. That's where we can get really efficient. We'll invest our facilities, we'll invest in our workforce.

The good news, says Paxton, is that increased shipbuilding is a priority that's remained full steam ahead across presidential administrations. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. And in New York, I'm Sabree Beneshour with the Marketplace Morning Report from APM American Public Media. Hey there, it's Bridget, co-host of Million Vazillion, a podcast that answers your kids' big questions about money. There's a lot of talk about tariffs lately, so how do you explain such a complex topic to kids?

Of course. A tariff is an extra charge or tax that countries put on goods that are made somewhere else, like in another country. It also goes by the name of duty. Duty. Join us as we break down that extra tax governments add on stuff that comes from other countries. Listen to Million Bazillion wherever you get your podcasts.