Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
President Donald Trump promised that an aggressive tariff campaign would shrink the United States trade gap with China and restore leverage over its biggest rival. Instead, the country he targeted most has just posted the largest trade surplus in modern history, while American consumers and manufacturers shoulder what analysts describe as the biggest tax increase…
The clash between the White House and the central bank has moved from simmering tension to open confrontation, and the latest volley came from inside the Federal Reserve itself. Minneapolis Fed leader Kashkari has framed the Trump administration’s threats against Jerome Powell not as a legal dispute, but as a direct attempt to seize control…
Affluent Americans are no longer content to let large balances languish in checking accounts that barely pay interest. As rates have risen and bank failures have grabbed headlines, they have been quietly shifting billions into vehicles they see as safer, more flexible, and more rewarding. The pattern is clear: traditional deposits are shrinking at the…
President Donald Trump’s push to cap credit card interest at 10 percent has jolted the country’s biggest lenders, which are now openly weighing whether to mount a coordinated counterattack. At the center of that debate is JPMorgan Chase, whose top finance executive is warning that the proposal could upend profits, reshape consumer credit, and trigger…
World Liberty Financial’s quiet march toward a federal bank charter has turned a niche crypto experiment into a live test of how far a sitting president’s business interests can reach into the regulated banking system. The firm’s push to become a trust bank is colliding with unresolved questions about conflicts of interest, regulatory independence, and…
The Pentagon’s scramble to expand weapons production is converging with a broader bet on commercial tech, and few relationships illustrate that shift more vividly than the one between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk. Rather than a single dramatic summit, their interaction is unfolding through factory tours, cost-cutting task forces and AI experiments that…
Big bank stocks sold off sharply after President Donald Trump floated a hard ceiling on credit card interest, a political sound bite that instantly translated into billions of dollars in lost market value. The reaction underscored how a single comment about capping rates can rattle a sector that has grown dependent on high-cost plastic to…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is using a high profile trip to Elon Musk’s Starbase complex to sharpen his attack on what he casts as a timid, process bound Pentagon culture. Framing the visit as a test of whether the defense establishment can keep pace with commercial rocketry, he is signaling that the era of slow…
Wall Street is once again confronting a full‑blown crisis of confidence as the Department of Justice’s criminal probe into the Federal Reserve detonates across trading desks. The renewed “Sell America” stampede is pushing investors out of U.S. assets and into havens, reviving a pattern that many hoped had been buried with earlier bouts of political…
The United States military has quietly locked in a sweeping artificial intelligence partnership with Elon Musk’s startup xAI, positioning the company’s Grok models at the center of a new generation of battlefield and bureaucracy tools. The arrangement, struck with the Pentagon and the revived War Department, folds a private frontier AI system into some of…