Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
The headline numbers say the United States is still growing, yet daily life feels like a grind of higher prices, fragile jobs, and constant anxiety. That disconnect is not a mirage. It reflects an economy that is not collapsing all at once, but instead slipping into and out of trouble sector by sector, in a…
The United States now carries one of the largest public debt loads in history, and the raw figures are staggering enough to dominate headlines and campaign ads. To understand how that burden really compares with other nations, I need to look past the shock value of trillion‑dollar numbers and focus on scale, structure, and global…
California’s decade of surging tax receipts has allowed Governor Gavin Newsom to expand programs, promise ambitious climate investments, and backstop struggling cities without confronting the full cost of those commitments. That era is now colliding with slower growth, volatile capital gains, and a state budget that has swung from record surplus to deep deficit in…
Blue-collar employment is slipping even as political leaders and executives celebrate a manufacturing revival. The latest data show a net loss of 59,000 production and nonsupervisory jobs, a setback that undercuts the promise that reshoring and industrial policy would reliably lift working-class employment. I see a widening gap between the rhetoric of factory comebacks and…
America’s economic strength is often framed in terms of stock indexes, quarterly GDP, and the latest jobs report, but the real engine runs far deeper than those headline numbers. Beneath the surface, the country’s productive power depends on how it treats workers, educates children, manages risk, and turns research into usable technology. To understand the…
President Donald Trump is sharpening his focus on legal immigration, urging cuts to visa programs and arguing that the current system is buckling under its own weight. His push to slim down pathways into the United States is framed as a response to pressure on public services and border management, even as business groups and…
By 2040, climate pressures that Scientists currently project over much longer timelines could collide with local vulnerabilities to make parts of several U.S. cities effectively unlivable. As global temperatures race toward 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2040, the combination of extreme heat, flooding, and rising seas raises the risk that daily life in…
President Donald Trump is recasting Washington’s approach to Venezuela with a mix of military pressure, legal brinkmanship and sudden outreach to President Nicolas Maduro. The shift replaces years of mostly rhetorical confrontation with a more kinetic and unpredictable strategy that reaches from Venezuelan airspace to potential land operations. It is a new phase that could…
America’s debt pile has grown so large that it now shapes every conversation about interest rates, markets and long‑term growth. To understand whether that trajectory ends in a full‑blown crisis, I find it more useful to compare the United States with other heavily indebted countries than to argue in the abstract about “too much” borrowing….
Professional investors are starting to talk about gold in numbers that once sounded outlandish, with a new Goldman Sachs poll showing a significant share of institutions bracing for prices near $5,000 an ounce as soon as next year. That bullish sentiment lines up with the bank’s own formal forecasts, which already point to a powerful…