Category: Prices and Inflation

For two years, Wall Street treated artificial intelligence as a tide that would lift every boat. Chipmakers, cloud providers, power utilities, and even speculative startups all rode the same upward current, their valuations swelling on the shared assumption that building AI required enormous, ever-growing capital expenditure. That assumption cracked on a single trading day when…

California drivers face some of the highest state-imposed fuel charges in the country, and the gap has remained large. A combination of excise taxes, sales levies, and other state-imposed costs has turned the Golden State into a case study in how policy can inflate the price at the pump. While many states nudged their gas…

The White House’s decision to suspend duty-free treatment for low-value imports strikes directly at the business model that made Temu one of the fastest-growing shopping apps in the United States. By eliminating the so-called de minimis exemption, which allowed packages valued under $800 to enter the country without customs duties, the administration has removed the…

A steep decline in Canadian visitors crossing the border by land has wiped out billions of dollars in spending that U.S. border communities and tourism-dependent businesses have long counted on. The scale of the loss, estimated at $4.5 billion, reflects a sharp contraction in one of the most reliable streams of international tourism revenue flowing…

President Trump’s reported decision to nominate Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chair is about more than replacing Jerome Powell. It signals a potential overhaul of how the central bank operates, one that could put the White House’s demand for lower borrowing costs on a collision course with a far more ambitious restructuring of…

January’s Consumer Price Index data, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed shelter costs rising 0.2% month over month, a reading that looks tame in isolation but carries outsized weight in the broader inflation picture. That single line item now accounts for roughly a third of the entire CPI basket, which means its direction…

The ratio of total U.S. stock market value to the country’s gross domestic product, a metric popularized by Warren Buffett himself, has climbed well past the levels that historically preceded major corrections. With corporate equity valuations running far ahead of economic output, investors face a pointed question: does the signal still work, and should they…

A growing number of state governments are attacking energy costs and permitting delays simultaneously, betting that faster approvals and price controls can deliver real relief to households squeezed by rising utility bills. California, New York, and Pennsylvania have each taken distinct but converging approaches, while federal lawmakers push parallel legislation that has drawn both praise…

Tech billionaires are directing millions of dollars into California’s state and local elections, with ballot measures, gubernatorial campaigns, and city races increasingly becoming high-stakes contests between concentrated wealth and organized labor, according to recent reporting and campaign-finance filings. The fight centers on a proposed one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires, but the money flows far…

The January 2026 Consumer Price Index landed at 2.4% year-over-year, a number that has prompted fresh questions about how quickly tariffs show up in consumer prices. Modeling from early 2025 had projected that a sweeping reciprocal tariff policy could push the U.S. effective tariff rate up by 13 percentage points, the steepest jump since 1937,…