Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
President Donald Trump is betting that sweeping new tariffs can revive U.S. manufacturing, shrink the trade deficit, and even tame inflation, all without inflicting serious damage on growth. A growing body of analysis suggests that is a very optimistic read of how trade taxes work in the real world. Instead of delivering a clean win,…
The Federal Reserve’s delicate balancing act is getting harder, not easier. Richmond Federal Reserve President Tom Barkin is warning that the United States now faces meaningful risks on both sides of the central bank’s mission, with inflation still not fully tamed and the labor market showing early signs of strain. His message is that the…
The United States has crossed a threshold that many economists once treated as a distant warning, not an imminent reality. With federal obligations now measured in the tens of trillions of dollars, Janet Yellen is arguing that the country is edging toward a line that earlier generations of policymakers hoped never to test. I see…
The claim that Joe Biden personally slapped a $25 million bounty on Nicolás Maduro has raced across social media, but the reality is more bureaucratic and more rooted in decisions that began before he took office. The reward on the Venezuelan leader grew out of long running U.S. narco terrorism charges and a standing State…
US copper futures have punched through to a fresh record, the first new peak since the summer’s tariff-driven spike jolted metals markets and forced manufacturers to rethink their cost assumptions. The latest leg higher reflects a powerful mix of tight supply, resurgent industrial demand and financial momentum that has turned the red metal into a…
New York City’s congestion pricing experiment has delivered the kind of numbers that usually live in planning textbooks, not on real streets. Traffic into the core has dropped by the tens of millions of trips, speeds are up, and the air is measurably cleaner, all while the city quietly banked hundreds of millions of dollars…
The White House is trying to convince voters it is “laser focused” on the cost of living at the very moment its own tariff strategy is being forced into a rethink. After months of escalating trade measures that helped push up prices on everyday goods, President Donald Trump is now pausing some increases and floating…
The United States is suddenly positioning itself not just as the world’s largest oil producer, but as a potential gatekeeper of the planet’s biggest reserves. By moving aggressively into Venezuela after the fall of Nicolás Maduro, Washington is trying to turn a onetime adversary’s buried wealth into long term leverage over global energy flows. I…
Extreme heat is no longer just a public health warning, it is quietly eroding American paychecks and the broader economy. New economic research points to multi-trillion dollar losses in global output from rising temperatures, and a growing body of U.S. data shows that heat is already cutting into wages, hours, and productivity. The headline figure…
Oil prices are sliding again, and for critics of President Donald Trump that has become a convenient shorthand for predicting an economic comedown. The argument is simple: if crude is falling, it must be a sign that demand is weakening and growth is about to crack. The former Treasury official I am focusing on is…