Your Pulse On America: Live And Unfiltered
Americans are spending less at McDonald’s. Fewer container ships are expected at the Port of Los Angeles. Procter & Gamble is raising prices. Mattel is shifting production out of China. Evidence for the economic impact of President Trump’s trade wars is everywhere — except, for the most part, in economic data itself. Consumer spending hasn’t…
President Trump has expressed little interest in fighting climate change. One of his key cabinet officials has even sought to evaluate whether humanity benefits from a warming climate, in a bid to undermine environmental rules. Yet even as he works to accelerate oil and gas production, Mr. Trump’s economic approach may inadvertently reduce greenhouse gas…
If the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before. That’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I…
This time, maybe the stock market is the economy. Financial markets around the world have plummeted in the days since President Trump announced sweeping tariffs, setting off a global trade war. The S&P 500 declined more than 10 percent in two days last week. It swung wildly on Monday amid news of further tariffs and…
Oil is trading at its lowest level in nearly four years. Costs are rising. And Wall Street is growing more worried by the day that President Trump’s trade policies will tip the United States into a recession. The reaction in the oil patch? Silence, mostly. Oil and gas executives, eager to stay in Mr. Trump’s…
President Trump’s global tariffs have sent stock markets worldwide into a tailspin, and the S&P 500 on Monday briefly entered bear market territory for the first time since 2022. Mr. Trump has seemed unmoved by the decline. He signaled on Monday that he had no plans to back off on tariffs, insisting that they would…
The notion that the Federal Reserve will rush in to rescue investors in a crisis has comforted investors for decades. But in the big market downturn induced by President Trump’s tariffs, no Fed rescue is in sight. Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, made that clear on Friday. The tariffs are much “larger than…
Chris Bergen, who runs a commercial greenhouse business in northern Minnesota, finds himself “walking a tightrope” roughly two months into President Trump’s second term. Acute uncertainty about how the administration’s trade and immigration policies will unfold and affect the economy has made him much more cautious about any expansion plans. As one of the country’s…