Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
The United States is again paying for the fallout of its own trade brinkmanship. After years of tariff crossfire with China, soybean prices have sagged, export volumes have struggled to recover, and the federal government is now rolling out a fresh $12 billion bailout to keep farm balance sheets from collapsing. The rescue package is…
The United States is now several months into a naval and financial squeeze on Venezuela that is proving extraordinarily expensive in its own right. By the Pentagon’s own accounting, the operation has already cost roughly $700 m, with the bill climbing by about $9 million every single day as ships, aircraft, and sanctions enforcers remain…
The federal government is dangling unprecedented cash and cultural cachet to fill Immigration and Customs Enforcement ranks, from $50,000 hiring bonuses to a $100 million influencer blitz aimed at gun-rights and military communities. The strategy has delivered a flood of applications, but it has also sharpened questions about who is being drawn to wield that…
Elon Musk is telling high earners that the comfort of a six-figure paycheck may not last in a world where artificial intelligence does most of the work. He is not just predicting job disruption, he is sketching a future in which money itself fades in importance as machines generate almost everything people need. I want…
The race to electrify everything from cars to data centers is colliding with the physical limits of the copper industry. A new S&P Global analysis warns that without a dramatic shift in investment and policy, the world could be short as much as 10 million tons of copper a year by 2040, creating what the…
Gold’s latest rally has emboldened some of the market’s most aggressive forecasters, with one strategist arguing that the metal could surge to levels that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. The boldest call now on the table is that bullion could climb past $8,000 per ounce by 2028, a move that would radically reshape…
The United States has not seen a trade gap this small since the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and the shift is arriving for unusual reasons. A surge in gold shipments, a pullback in pharmaceutical imports, and softer demand for foreign goods have combined to push the monthly deficit in goods and services to…
President Donald Trump is asking Congress to sign off on one of the largest peacetime military spending plans in American history, arguing that the United States must rearm quickly in what he calls “very troubled and dangerous times.” The proposal would lift the Pentagon’s annual budget to $1.5 trillion and reset the political debate over…
Beijing is trying to turn a tropical island the size of Belgium into the world’s newest duty-free playground at the very moment its trade surplus in goods has blown past the $1 trillion mark. The juxtaposition captures how China is leaning on both external demand and tightly managed internal experiments to keep growth on track….
Gold’s blistering rise has turned a traditionally sleepy hedge into the most closely watched asset in global markets, and Ray Dalio is treating that move as a warning siren rather than a victory lap. The billionaire investor argues that the surge reflects deepening stress in currencies, bonds, and stocks, and that ignoring what gold is…