A national program called Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) is meant to help federal workers forgive their student debt after a decade of government service. But staffing shortages and other operational problems have left many of these workers behind.

‘Stuck and unsure’

PSLF, established in 2007, eliminates the “federal student debt of government and nonprofit workers after 10 years, or 120 qualifying monthly payments,” said CNBC. The program was largely successful in the past: About 1.2 million people had their student loans forgiven, according to the Brookings Institution. But new government evaluations are “reducing the number of qualifying payments and pushing those individuals further away from debt cancellation,” said CNBC.

The changes revolve around a Biden administration buyback rule that gives borrowers with deferred payments a “chance to recover lost time” toward paying off their loans, said The Washington Post, because “time spent in forbearance or deferment typically doesn’t count” toward PSLF. “Coding errors” cited by the Trump administration have led to a “backlog of roughly 82,000 applications,” leaving “borrowers stuck and unsure.”

Program ‘already in shambles’

Overall, the student loan repayment system is “more confusing and chaotic during President Donald Trump’s second term,” said The 19th. Experts believe policy shifts like the buyback-rule changes “have broken a student loan system that was already in shambles, leaving nearly 45 million borrowers, disproportionately women, in financial and emotional distress.” At the same time, the White House has promised up to $60,000 in student loan forgiveness for people who join Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“After nearly a year of hearing nothing, I sent all of my documentation to the Student Loan Ombudsman,” Christine Archer, a federal prosecutor in Hendricks County, Indiana, told The New York Times. “The entire packet was returned as ‘undeliverable.’” Archer graduated law school in 2014 and “tried 22 times over the past 20 months to erase her debt,” said the Times. Archer assumes that the government does not keep proper track of her payments, so she keeps her own records at home. “My husband knows that if the house burns down and he has to pick between getting the wedding album or the student loan file, that he should take the student loan file.”

President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade wars were intended to reduce the U.S. trade deficit. It is getting bigger instead. The gap between imports and exports hit $100 billion in August, a sign that Trump is losing ground on a signature policy.

What did the commentators say?

The latest trade deficit report marked a “17-month high, after also rising significantly in July,” said The New York Times. The last time the gap reached $100 billion was in March 2025, before Trump launched his “Liberation Day” tariffs — later struck down by the Supreme Court — and this fall’s trade war with Canada. But U.S. imports “hit a record $420.8 billion” in August. The United States is “just as dependent as ever on foreign-produced goods,” said Christopher Rupkey, the chief economist at FWDBONDS, to the Times.

The trade gap has actually been “gradually increasing in fits and starts” for most of the last year, said Sabri Ben-Achour at Marketplace, driven in part by the artificial intelligence build-out. It is also a consequence of foreigners investing in “all kinds of American stuff.” The trade number is driven by foreign investors using their dollars to “invest in our companies, lend to our government and buy our assets,” said John R. Puri at the National Review. U.S. officials should “treat that preference as a compliment.”

The $100 million milestone suggests the president’s economic agenda is “failing on his own terms,” said Steve Benen at MS NOW. Trump’s trade deficit is “now larger than at any time during Joe Biden’s presidency.” The importance of the import-export gap may be “exaggerated,” but the president has also argued that “this is a metric that matters.” That makes the latest report “notable.”

What next?

Trump has “scrambled the politics of U.S. trade policy,” said Marc L. Busch at The Hill. A “durable realignment in U.S. trade politics” might come after he leaves the scene. Democrats are arguing the president’s tariffs “raise costs and undermine ‘affordability,’” and it’s unclear if Republicans will be “willing to defend” the regime going forward.

The employee in the cubicle next to yours is probably a woman. Recent job gains under President Donald Trump have gone mostly to women, who now outnumber men in the workforce. But gainful employment and truly gainful employment — that is, with more pay and status — are two different things.

What did the commentators say?

U.S. jobs reports of late “may feel especially lousy for men,” said CNBC. Women have outnumbered them in the workforce for eight straight months, the longest such stretch since 2010. That gap during the Great Recession happened “because men were losing jobs,” said economist Cory Stahle to the outlet. Now “women are gaining” jobs faster than men.

“The pink-collar economy is here,” said Justin Wolfers at Platypus Economics. Men once vastly outnumbered women in the workplace. Women’s employment “rose quickly” since 1970 while men’s work “grew more slowly and occasionally plateaued.” The gender gap “flipped” because of the growth of industries, especially healthcare, in which the job force was “already dominated by women.”

The trends defy Trump’s vision of an economy in which men can earn a “good living but also a sense of accomplishment and status,” said Paul Waldman at MS NOW. The president could urge men to seek out jobs in women-dominated fields like healthcare instead of an ever-diminishing manufacturing sector. “But it’s not the kind of profession Trump will encourage men to go into.”

The flip is “not an entirely good thing,” said Noam Scheiber at The New York Times. Women have become the majority of workers amid the “diminishing status of many American jobs,” a trend driven by factors such as reduced union membership, outsourced work and the rise of artificial intelligence. Women spent decades “reaching for the brass ring” only to find out that “it’s hopelessly tarnished once they finally grasp it.”

What next?

The next milestone is narrowing the wage gap. Women on the job “still earn far less starting the day they graduate,” said Fortune. They also make up “two-thirds of workers in low-wage jobs” such as teaching and nursing but remain “underrepresented in more lucrative fields such as finance, construction and STEM.”

The government spent £329.1 billion on benefits in the financial year 2025-26 – equivalent to 10.7% of GDP, and about £4,700 per person in Britain. It amounts to roughly a quarter of all government spending, and dwarfs the totals spent on the NHS (about £257 billion), education (about £126 billion) and defence (about £62 billion).

The welfare bill increased by about £18.8 billion in the last financial year; by 2030-31, it is expected to rise to £408.6 billion. This projected increase is fuelling calls from across the political spectrum to rein in welfare spending, particularly on disability and incapacity benefits; many also argue that increases in pension spending are unsustainable.

Who actually receives this money?

More than 24 million people claimed some form of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefit in August last year. Of these, 13.4 million were pensioners: of the entire welfare budget, about 55% goes to pensioners.

The state pension cost an estimated £146 billion in 2025-26; and another £31 billion or so went on pension credit, housing benefit for pensioners, the winter fuel allowance, and so on. In total, the UK spent £145 billion on benefits for working-age people and children – including incapacity and disability benefits (£77 billion); housing benefit (£37 billion); and child benefit (£13 billion).

Last August, about ten million recipients were of working age; and 860,000 were children receiving disability living allowance. Around a third of working-age benefit claimants are in employment of some kind (for example, low-paid workers get in-work top-up via universal credit). The latest figures show 1.6 million people who are fit for work are claiming an unemployment benefit; the cost, spread across different benefits, is some £1.4 billion.

Why is the bill rising?

In no small part, because of pensions. Since the “triple lock” was introduced by the coalition government in 2011, pensions have been guaranteed to increase by whichever is highest: inflation, average wage growth or 2.5%. This has led to sharp rises in the state pension in recent years, when inflation and wage growth have run high (pensions rose by 10.1% in 2023, 8.5% in 2024, 4.1% in 2025, and 4.8% in 2026).

But pensions are by no means the only factor. Benefits are also rising because more people are claiming disability and incapacity benefits. In 2010, Britain spent about £45 billion on such benefits; by 2025, this had risen to £77 billion.

Which benefits are these?

By the middle of this year, more than 4.5 million people in England and Wales were claiming at least one of an overlapping patchwork of incapacity and disability benefits, up from fewer than three million in 2020.

The fastest growing is the Personal Independence Payment (Pip): cash payments to cover the extra costs of being disabled – a payment that has gradually replaced the older Disability Living Allowance and Incapacity Benefit. By July, 4.1 million people were claiming a Pip in England and Wales, up 7% from last year’s 3.83 million; in 2019 there were two million. More than two million now receive health-related benefits under a separate universal credit regime.

So are people getting sicker?

Some experts point to worsening public health since the 2008 financial crisis, citing factors such as growing obesity, long hospital waiting times, the cost-of-living crisis and other social causes. But critics of the system argue that the rise in disability and incapacity claimants owes more to broadening definitions of disability – and especially to an increase in people claiming benefits for mental health conditions. In 2002, 25% of disability benefit recipients claimed primarily for a mental health condition (or a learning or neurodevelopmental condition); by 2025, this had risen to 45%. About one in seven working-age Britons now report having a long-term mental or behavioural disorder (up 50% in a decade).

How can this be explained?

Again, by most measures there has in fact been a recent increase in mental ill-health in Britain, particularly since the pandemic. Most European countries have seen similar trends; but most have not seen this translate into higher health benefit claims. Another possible explanation is the collapse in face-to-face assessments for Pip claims (down from 80% pre-pandemic to less than 15% in July 2026), which may make it harder to weed out bogus claimants – some of whom are coached by AI bots or so-called “sickfluencers” on social media. A further explanation may lie in the design of the welfare system itself, which encourages people to seek generous long-term sickness benefits.

How so?

If you’re unemployed, you don’t get much from the state. Unemployment benefit under universal credit is £339 per month if you’re under 25, £425 if you’re over 25. Add in housing benefit, and it reaches around £12,000 per year. However, if you have a long-term disability or a health condition, you get extra payments (at least £217 a month more). If you are categorised in the higher form of sickness benefits, the overall figure rises to over £17,000, according to Centre for Social Justice figures. Add in Pip, and it reaches an average of £24,000, just below the full-time minimum wage. Add in child benefit for one child, and you are paid over £27,000 – closer to the national average wage.

Obviously, the system gives powerful incentives for people to claim sickness, physical or mental; and, unlike with unemployment benefit, it brings with it little or no pressure to seek a job. There are currently around 1,000 new Pip claims submitted every day in the UK; about 34% are successful.

Is the welfare bill sustainable?

It is often said to be “spiralling”, but the overall bill has remained pretty stable as a proportion of the UK’s national income. Welfare spending amounted to just under 11% of GDP in the last financial year – up from 10.4% in 1996-97, but lower than the peak of 12.4% in 2009-10. In fact, total non-pensioner benefits have hovered between 4% and 5% for more than 40 years.

International comparisons are difficult, but the UK’s welfare bill is by most measures right in the middle of the OECD developed nations – it spends far less as a share of GDP than, say, France or Italy, and far more than the US or South Korea. Despite recent increases, the state pension is relatively ungenerous, though Britons do have good private pensions.

Spending on disability and incapacity benefits is growing fast: it is set to hit 2.1% of GDP in 2028 (almost double the share two decades earlier). The Timms Review into the Pip system is due soon; but an interim report has already deemed it “unfit for purpose”. Welfare Minister Pat McFadden said this week that Labour would make benefits reform a “moral crusade”.

However, reform is difficult: it is perceived as an attack on society’s most vulnerable. When Keir Starmer tried to tighten the assessment criteria for Pip, with a bill in June 2025 designed to save £5 billion per year, a threatened rebellion by 126 Labour MPs forced him to back down.

What was the key factor that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House for a second term? If you’d asked him that a couple of years ago, said Virginia Heffernan in The New Republic, his answer would almost certainly have been the cost of living.

“The beautiful but simple word ‘groceries’,” he once rhapsodised. “I won on that word.” Well, we now know the word on which he’ll likely lose: diesel.

Supply disruptions caused by the Iran and Ukraine wars have had a particularly severe impact on diesel prices: they hit a record high of $6.52 a gallon in the US last week, up from an average of $3.63 at the start of 2025. The price hikes “aim a missile squarely at the voters Trump can least afford to alienate”, such as pickup truck owners, lorry drivers, and farmers in states such as Iowa. By upsetting the “diesel class, Trump may have bitten the final hand that feeds him”.

‘Cheap appeal’

To fix this problem, Trump is toying with the idea of banning US diesel exports, said National Review. The policy has “cheap appeal” ahead of the midterm elections on 3 November, but it would only bring down prices for a short while, and only in some areas. While America makes more diesel than it consumes, pipeline constraints mean that most of it remains relatively close to refining hubs on the Gulf Coast.

Other areas of the US, such the Northeast and the West Coast, largely rely on diesel imports, so would end up paying even higher prices if the US further reduced global supplies of the fuel. What’s more, if Gulf Coast refineries were unable to export diesel, they’d soon run out of storage space for it and have to slash their output. Result? Not just less diesel, but also a reduced volume of other refined products such as petrol and jet fuel.

‘Fake fix’

A diesel export ban wouldn’t help America, agreed Catherine Rampell on The Bulwark. And it would cause major problems for countries that rely on these exports, such as Mexico, the UK and the Netherlands, which trade with the US in other oil-based products, and could well decide to retaliate in some form.

Still, this is the Trump White House we’re talking about – a team of people with “zero policy expertise” and “zero patience”, who care “only about what talking points will get them through the next news cycle, tomorrow’s consequences be damned”. The worse the opinion polls get ahead of the midterms, the more tempted Trump will be to reach for this “fake fix”.

“A disaster.” That was German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s own verdict on his party’s showing in the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania last week, said Klára Odstrcilová on EU Perspectives (Brussels).

The state is one of the five that made up the former East Germany (there are 16 German states in total). And though Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) won 38% in the first state election held after reunification in 1990, it has been shedding support there ever since. In the previous state election (2021) it won just 13%.

Even so, no one expected that this time the CDU wouldn’t even make 5% – the threshold a party has to cross to gain parliamentary representation. By contrast, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party – which had vowed to bring down energy prices by restoring the supply of Russian gas (the state is home to the terminal of the suspended Nord Stream pipelines) – more than doubled its vote share to 38.2%. So yes, Merz is right: a disaster, indeed.

‘Existential crisis’

Nor was the CDU’s failure confined to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said The Economist. On the very same day as that debacle, the party got thumped in Berlin’s local elections, in this case being humbled by the far-left Die Linke party. And these twin losses themselves came just two weeks after the CDU had suffered a crushing defeat in another east German state, Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD triumphed with 43.8%.

Indeed, Merz has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most unpopular German leader in polling history: his approval rating is just 13%. Yet despite all this, he has vowed to stay on for the sake of Germany’s “democratic future”, and to pursue his economic and welfare reforms with “backbone, steadfastness, and patience”. Brave words, but some of Merz’s own colleagues believe their “zombie chancellor” can’t go on.

That the CDU, which has produced more chancellors than any other party, should now be “plunged into an existential crisis” is all down to Merz, said Hugo Müller-Vogg in Cicero (Berlin). He’s only been in power for 16 months, but over that time the national vote share of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has fallen from 28.5% to around 20%. Merz’s fractious coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats has completely failed on its promises to contain the far-right and reverse economic stagnation.

Twilight phase

Immigration is usually the issue people cite when accounting for the rise of the AfD, said Dalia Marin on Project Syndicate (Prague). But more attention should be paid to a factor every bit as crucial: China. Economic competition from China has upended Germany’s export model of selling cars and high-end machinery, and devastated the advanced manufacturing industry Germans have long relied on for “good jobs and broad-based prosperity”. Average annual growth since 2020 has slumped to just 0.12%.

Nor does this only affect the poorer, former communist eastern states that are the AfD’s heartlands: “western” states such as Baden-Württemberg, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, also feel the pain. In March, the AfD almost doubled its vote share there to 18.8%: it should no longer be seen as just a creature of the east.

Merz himself now seems to have entered “Kanzlerdämmerung” – the twilight of the chancellor, said Zafer Mese in Daily Sabah (Istanbul): his coalition looks marooned. However, no CDU or CSU politician has stepped forward to replace him, so he may cling on for a while yet.

And he has one thing in his favour, said Roland Nelles in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). Next year’s five state elections are all in western states, ones where the AfD, despite its recent gains, will struggle to land a knockout blow. The “stabilising effect” this will have could lend the coalition a small window of opportunity in which to kick-start growth through its welfare and pension reforms. They’d better hope it does: if not, more election nights like the ones last week will follow.

The price of diesel has hit £2 per litre – the most expensive it has ever been – at a third of UK petrol stations, said The Sun.

This is “uncharted territory”, financial analyst Kathleen Brooks told City A.M. Donald Trump has already sent markets into a “frenzy” by threatening to ban diesel exports from the US, said the same paper. Weakened infrastructure for refining diesel and lower reserves than European counterparts mean the UK could be uniquely “exposed” to any further “ripple effects”, including more price rises.

What did the commentators say?

President Trump is trying to bring diesel prices down for US consumers ahead of the midterm elections in November. If he does decide to ban exports of US diesel, it would “hurt the countries which heavily depend” on it, said the BBC, including the UK. But it might also have “unintended effects that could hurt US production” in the longer term.

Trump’s threats have “highlighted Britain’s over-reliance on the goodwill of other countries” for its diesel needs, said an editorial in The Times. Last year, the UK imported more than 50% of its diesel supply, around a sixth of that from the US.

Our infrastructure depends on it: around 10 million cars, a quarter of the country’s trains, 70% of buses, virtually all tractors and “almost 99% of HGVs” run on diesel. Yet the UK has enough reserves to last for only around six weeks, according to International Energy Forum data, compared to around six months for France, Italy, Spain and Germany.

Breaking the £2 threshold for a litre of diesel should “set alarm bells ringing in Downing Street”, said The Telegraph in an editorial. The government’s response so far has been to remove VAT from energy bills in an attempt to cushion the blow to consumers, but this “hardly addresses the fundamental issues”. As a nation, we have “failed to prepare”, allowing our refining capacity to “wither away” to leave us “dangerously exposed” to market fluctuations beyond our control.

The diesel crisis could “deepen” after the UK’s largest refinery shut down production for up to 10 weeks, said energy editor Jonathan Leake in The Telegraph. The Fawley refinery in Hampshire – which produces “one fifth of the fuel used on UK roads” – has closed for planned maintenance, a move that “will add to fears about another diesel price spike hurting drivers at the pumps”.

In the 1980s, the UK had 18 refineries, but that has dropped to just four. Two closures last year – in Grangemouth, Scotland and Lindsey in Lincolnshire – “slashed UK refinery output by about a third”. Now, any closures, planned or unplanned, temporary or permanent, have a “rapid impact on supplies”.

What next?

“Rising diesel costs aren’t just a problem for drivers generally but a wider inflation threat,” said Sky News. Diesel is the “engine of the UK economy” and shortages would heavily disrupt supply chains and lead to costs being passed on to consumers, particularly in the run-up to Christmas. This is the type of inflation that “worries” the Bank of England, which is “widely tipped” to raise interest rates in November.

Taxes on fuel – which account for “just over half of the cost of a litre” – are also set to rise. Hikes planned by former chancellor Rachel Reeves are set to come into effect in January, but her successor, John Healey, should “question the wisdom of raising prices at the pump at a time when they are clearly inflationary in nature”. As such, they are likely to be “scrapped or further delayed” at the upcoming Budget.

For most of this century, homebuyers could depend on relatively low mortgage rates at no more than 5%. But that’s no longer true. The average 30-year mortgage rate hit 7% this week, and high rates may be here to stay, which could profoundly impact an already dysfunctional U.S. housing market.

What did the commentators say?

The 7% rate has no significance “beyond the psychological effect of the round number,” said NPR. But it reflects a “sharp rise” in rates in recent months that is “squeezing the budgets of homebuyers” and seems likely to “deepen the freeze” on a housing market that has been stymied by high prices in recent years. Rising rates “contributed to a 2% decline” in existing home sales in August.

High mortgage costs are “forcing home sellers to slash prices,” said Bloomberg. Nearly a fifth of homes for sale “had a price cut in August,” the highest rate since the pandemic. It is true that current rates are “far from the double-digit levels of the 1980s,” but they discourage homebuying when combined with other factors like “stubborn inflation, rising energy prices” and “record-high home prices.” Plus, would-be buyers who can afford the higher rates are “coming to the table expecting to negotiate the price down.” The result: Home sellers are “feeling the strain.”

More buyers are moving to adjustable-rate mortgages “where the rate changes typically after five, seven or 10 years,” said Marketplace. That can “make a big difference in affordability” for buyers but is also risky. An adjustable-rate mortgage that starts out at 6% today “could, depending on the term, in five years be 8.10%,” Susan Wachter, of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said to the outlet. Many buyers take the adjustable mortgages betting that rates will drop, and “they’ll be able to refinance,” said Marketplace. Trying to predict future rates “can be a dangerous game,” Longbridge Financial’s Chris Mayer told Marketplace.

What next?

The high rates may play a role in November’s midterm election, said Politico. President Donald Trump in 2024 “vowed that interest rates on mortgages would drop to 2%.” His promise is “looking less likely than ever” to come to fruition.

Rates briefly dipped under 6% in February before the Iran war began, said CNN. But somebody buying a house at today’s rates would likely “pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more in interest” over the life of a 30-year mortgage. There may be no going back to the good old days of six months ago. “Expect 7% as the new normal,” economist Lawrence Yun said in a blog post for the National Association of Realtors. Unsurprisingly, this is putting off potential homebuyers: Mortgage applications “fell 11% last week from the same week a year ago,” said CNN.

Near-term relief is unlikely. Rates are “far more likely to go up than down by the end of the year or in the next month or two,” Realtor.com’s Jake Krimmel said to CBS News.

The cost of diesel fuel is breaking records, with spillover effects for the cost of groceries and other goods. President Donald Trump is reportedly contemplating a possible solution: a 90-day ban on exports of diesel from U.S. refineries. Experts warn the move could backfire.

‘Most important fuel on the planet’

The idea of an export ban is “quickly gaining traction with more Republicans” ahead of the midterms, said The Wall Street Journal. The United States “produces more fuel than it consumes,” and diesel exports have risen by 31% since the war began. Some officials see a halt to overseas sales as an easy way to ease price pressures. “High diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on X.

But oil companies are likely to “lose money” if exports are banned, said the Journal. The White House should not create “new restrictions that risk making a difficult situation worse,” American Petroleum Institute’s Mike Sommers said to the outlet. A decision will happen “fast, one way or the other,” Trump said Tuesday to reporters, per the outlet.

Diesel is the “most important fuel on the planet” given that it powers “trucks, trains, tractors and ships at the heart of the modern economy,” said CNN. The Iran war is not the only reason for the price spike: Ukraine has “knocked out a series of refineries in Russia,” and Russia and China have both imposed their own export restrictions.

Experts warn that while an export ban might be “quite effective at lowering prices” in the short term, it would also “jack up gasoline prices, crush U.S. refiners and damage America’s reputation as a reliable energy superpower” over the long run, said CNN. Domestic refiners deprived of overseas markets would “logically pull back on how much crude they process into fuel.” That would ultimately cause domestic fuel costs to “soar,” oil consultant Andy Lipow said to the outlet.

Food supply ‘could be disrupted’

China is being quietly credited with keeping energy prices down in the wake of Donald Trump’s war with Iran, in turn helping prop up the global economy while cementing its own power on the world stage.

By tapping into its huge reserves of oil, “China kind of saved the day,” and helped the world avoid the “doomsday scenario” when the Strait of Hormuz closure choked off 20% of global energy supply, said Paul Gruenwald, global chief economist at S&P Global Ratings.

What did the commentators say?

For decades, China heavily depended on imported crude to meet its ever-growing energy needs. But over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to address what has long been viewed in Beijing as a major security weakness by spending billions of dollars amassing the world’s biggest stockpile of oil.

Last year China’s reserves were estimated at nearly 600 million barrels bigger than the US. This enabled it to dramatically cut its oil imports when the war in the Middle East broke out, keeping a lid on global oil prices and safeguarding its own economy.

Not only has this enabled China to weather the global commodities storm resulting from the closure of the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, it has seen China emerge as a “clear winner” from Donald Trump’s foray into the Middle East, said The Guardian, citing the findings of a report from geopolitical consulting firm Asia Group.

Long thought to be vulnerable to oil supply shocks, the conflict has made clear how China has “managed to transform that weakness into a surprising source of geopolitical power”, said The New York Times.

This has “big implications for the global energy industry, where oil producers like Saudi Arabia and the United States — not importers like China — have traditionally held most of the cards”.

“If they come to feel that in this domain, they are less vulnerable than they and many others may have assessed previously, that is a profound and important shift in one of the key inputs to how China makes decisions about its global strategy,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former White House and State Department official who worked on China issues in the Biden administration.

What next?

While the Iran crisis has vindicated Xi’s investment strategy, the “buffer” of China’s stockpile of oil, which has helped the world avoid a far deeper energy crisis up to now, “may face a test as Beijing shows signs of resuming purchases”, said CNBC.

Should this happen, the drag on global growth from elevated oil prices would deepen well beyond current estimates, said Krishna Srinivasan, director for the Asia and Pacific Department at the International Monetary Fund.

But the Iran crisis has also shown how “China’s muscular energy policy has afforded Beijing a major tool it could use, for instance, in a war over Taiwan”, said The Wall Street Journal.

“In the future, such power could be wielded in a clash with the US In the event of a war over Taiwan”. For example, “Beijing’s ability to slash oil imports for months on end could help China resist efforts by the US and its allies to block energy shipments”.

For China, “oil is not the Achilles’ heel we thought it was,” said Michal Meidan, head of China energy research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “I think a lot of people thought China was very, very vulnerable to oil supply disruptions. It’s not.”

A K-shaped economy, in which the rich get richer while everybody else falls behind, is showing up at the airport. Airlines in desperate search of profits are expanding roomy first- and business-class seating on flights while economy class continues to get more cramped.

‘Literal experience of class division’

American Airlines is “ripping up existing airplane configurations” to add more business-class seating, said CNBC. Half the airline’s revenues come from the 30% of seats in the high-end category, which is why the more expensive (and more luxurious) seating options are “only going to grow in our fleet,” said American Airlines CEO Robert Isom this week at an industry conference, per the outlet.

American’s newest Boeing 777 aircraft will feature a “monster 70-suite business-class cabin,” said CNBC. “Higher-spending customers” are a “resilient and bright spot” for airlines struggling with rising fuel costs. So the K-shaped economy is “taking flight.”

Budget airlines are joining the rush. JetBlue is revamping its first-class cabins with “redesigned seats, premium amenities and upgraded seatback technology,” said Fox Business. Flyers are “increasingly looking for more premium experiences,” said JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty in a statement, per the outlet. Southwest Airlines does not offer a first-class cabin on its flights, but it is building deluxe lounges at four airports — Austin, Baltimore, Honolulu and Nashville — as it transitions from a no-frills carrier “known for free bags and open seating” to an outfit “fighting competitors for bigger spenders,” said The Washington Post.

You should “go fly on an airplane” if you want to understand the K-shaped economy, said Allison Morrow at CNN. Delta Airlines started 2026 with projections of a 20% profit increase “largely on the backs of its ‘premium’ customers.” The industry’s shift to a greater reliance on high-dollar offerings suggests the shift to “more expensive travel isn’t just a fad.”

Economy-class passengers, meanwhile, are getting squeezed. Legroom for standard economy seats has shrunk “from roughly 35 inches in the 1970s to about 31 inches today,” said Simple Flying. Some airlines leave passengers a mere 28 inches of space. The disparity between experiences in the front and back of airliners is the “literal experience of class division" in the U.S., said Morrow.

Economy: ‘Essential for filling aircraft’

Airlines not so long ago “routinely gave first- and business-class seats away in free upgrades” to loyal customers, said ABC News. But those days are done for, given the money that can now be made from selling those tickets.

Revenue from pricier seating has “more than doubled” in the last decade, said Delta CEO Ed Bastian at a March conference, per ABC News. That can help airlines be “resilient through these tougher times.”

Economy passengers are still needed, even if they do not get the same legroom as business-class peers. The back-of-the-plane crowd is “essential for filling aircraft and covering fixed costs” for airlines, said Quartz. These days, though, it is the top-end passengers who “increasingly determine whether a route, and a carrier, makes money.”

Homeowners dues are reshaping the neighborhood, said Giulia Carbonaro in Newsweek. About 21.6 million people—nearly one-fourth of all homeowners in the country—paid a condo or homeowners association (HOA) fee in 2024, according to the Census Bureau. These community governance groups rely on owner dues and assessments to cover shared amenities, like pools, trash collection, and lawn maintenance. But in many places, the fees are rising quickly as HOAs contend with higher upkeep, labor, and insurance costs. Homeowners understandably put “mortgages and utilities first when their disposable income is squeezed,” but too many missed HOA payments can result in a tax lien on their property. Between 2022 and 2025, HOA liens rose 41.7% to more than 250,000 nationwide, according to property data platform Cotality, while HOA-led foreclosure filings rocketed more than 46%.

Americans living in older condos are facing the brunt of this, said Claire Boston in Yahoo Finance. They often “pay more than double the annual fees that newer condo owners do.” The collapse of a 40-year-old condo building in Surfside, Fla., in 2021 forced many HOAs to “spend heavily to catch up on deferred maintenance” and recoup rising insurance costs. The impact has reverberated well beyond Florida. HOA fees are even increasing for affordable houses, said Cormac McCrimmon in PBS.org. In Boulder, for instance, Henriette Gregorio bought a home in 2021 through the city’s Permanently Affordable Homes program. Although her mortgage has stayed manageable, her HOA fees have since doubled to more than $800 per month. “It’s a real challenge,” said Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, who also lives in a townhouse with escalating HOA fees.

Not all HOAs are evil, said Daniel Kramer and Madeline Carr in the Los Angeles Times. These “private, quasi-governmental organizations” can be real forces for good when it comes to sustainability, managing “how entire neighborhoods use water, generate energy, provide wildlife habitat, and respond to climate change.” Some are already starting to reject “aesthetic uniformity” for healthier environmental rules like “requiring native plants, limiting turfgrass, and encouraging renewable energy.” There are some HOA red flags to look out for before buying, said Veronica Dagher in The Wall Street Journal. Ask the board about any upcoming improvements. They are costly and lead to inconveniences, but “a strong track record of upgrades is often a sign of good governance.” Prospective buyers can request a “reserve study” that summarizes the HOA’s financial health to see how prepared the organization is for major repairs such as a roof replacement. Finally, talk to residents to get a vibe. While some HOAs function like “easygoing golden retrievers,” others are “tightly wound like pit bulls.”

Compared with the likes of BMW (which sold more than 2.5 million cars last year), JLR is a “minnow”, said Steve Fowler in The Independent. It sold just over 352,000 vehicles last year, employing 43,000 people globally, and 34,000 in the UK. But the company, owned by India’s Tata Motors, is a “big fish in a small pond”, creating work for businesses in supply chains up and down Britain. And the “decline of a single species can cause a whole ecosystem to collapse”.

‘Rotten 12 months’

So the news that JLR is cutting 4,000 jobs is worrying, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The firm has had a “rotten 12 months” thanks to Trump’s tariffs, luxury taxes in China, inflation in materials costs and a disastrous cyberattack. But it’s a decent business, making sensible redundancies in the name of competitiveness, and is not facing a “VW-like existential crisis”.

Or not yet, said Ben Marlow in The Telegraph. JLR has not yet recovered from its “preposterous” pink rebrand in 2024. Combined with the cyberattack, a four-year new product drought, and the success of Chery’s Jaecoo 7 (the “Temu Ranger Rover”), the company looks wobbly.

What happened

Iran on Wednesday said it attacked two U.S. ships and eight tankers near the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S. sinking five Iranian oil tankers. The Pentagon said the tanker strikes were retaliation for Iran’s first confirmed attacks on U.S. Navy ships during the six-month war. Those attacks “failed,” The Wall Street Journal said, but “officials described some of them as close calls.”

This was the “biggest wave of attacks on shipping by both sides” yet, Reuters said, and it “sent the price of oil surging” above $100 a barrel for the first time since July. U.S. gas prices hit $4.22 per gallon, and diesel rose to a record $5.94 per gallon. On Thursday, five gas stations in California maxed out diesel at $9.99 per gallon, the highest possible price on the pump, according to GasBuddy.

Who said what

The U.S. and Iran “appear to be stuck in a cycle that is draining U.S. air defenses and deepening Iran’s economic crisis,” The New York Times said. Iranian ballistic missiles did “minimal” damage to a U.S. military base in Jordan, officials told the Times, and it may have left some U.S. troops with “traumatic brain injuries.” They also damaged “several fighter jets” at the base, CBS News said.

What next?

“I think war ​is going to end immediately after the election,” sending oil prices “tumbling downward,” because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday. Top White House advisers have “privately” discussed with Trump “that the Iran war could drag on through the remainder of his term,” the Journal said, citing U.S. officials.

President Donald Trump had a clear goal when he appointed Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve: lower interest rates to spur economic growth. Now Warsh has signaled that the Fed could raise rates to rein in rising prices, putting him on course to clash with the president.

What did the commentators say?

Raising rates before the midterm elections “would create an immediate showdown with the Trump administration,” said The New York Times. The president “has gone to great lengths” to get the Fed to lower rates and Warsh was “handpicked” for the job after an “elaborate audition process” shaped by Trump’s rate preferences.

The financial markets have demanded signs that Warsh is “serious about bringing inflation under control,” said the Financial Times. Warsh last month bent to those demands. Rising prices are “concerning,” and the central bank has “work to do,” he said at a Wyoming Fed meeting, per FT. Observers saw that as a signal that rate increases could come as soon as this month.

The Fed chairman is in a tough spot. The war with Iran has “sent global energy prices soaring,” which has “kept inflation from slowing,” Jonathan Levin said at Bloomberg. The AI spending boom has also “kept prices elevated.” A rate hike before the midterm elections “would surely raise the ire of the White House,” but it would be the “right thing” for Warsh to do in order to bring rising prices under control. It would also “bolster his credibility in the financial markets” if he was seen “putting American households above politics.”

What next?

There is “still significant uncertainty” as to whether Warsh will move to oppose Trump’s pressure campaign and raise rates this month, Jamie McGeever said at Reuters. In addition, the president might benefit if Warsh decides to ignore the White House and set his own course. Trump “doesn’t want higher interest rates,” but rising prices and higher borrowing costs “aren’t particularly palatable” to voters heading into the midterm elections.

“Not everyone is convinced” that Warsh will move to raise rates, said CNBC. The chairman’s comments at Jackson Hole were “only marginally” more hawkish on inflation than his previous remarks, Citigroup economist Andrew Hollenhorst said in a client note, per the outlet. And Trump administration officials maintain that a rate hike is not justified by the current evidence. Core inflation “has remained very, very restrained,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview with CNBC.

Trump’s preferences remain clear. The Fed should lower interest rates “OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT,” the president said in a Truth Social post. The next Federal Reserve policy meeting is Sept. 15.

John Healey has said Britain’s economy is finally “turning a corner” as he set out his mission to “make Great Britain growth Britain” again.

In his first major speech as chancellor, Healey sought to reassure the markets by pledging to stick to Labour’s tax and spend fiscal rules, while trying to present a more optimistic view of Britain’s economic prospects. But only days ago a global bond sell-off saw UK yields hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crash, further increasing the cost of borrowing for the UK government.

But Healey “begins with a credibility problem that is not entirely of his own making”, said Simon French in The Sunday Times. He is the eighth chancellor in 10 years, so many businesses, households and investors are “fatigued and sceptical” about yet another new vision for growth.

What did the commentators say?

“A glance at the news could easily reinforce the gloomy impression” that the UK economy is in dire straits, but some key indicators are “telling a more cheerful story – one of growth”, said James Moore in The i Paper.

There is a “surprising level of optimism” among businesses in the services and manufacturing sectors, with overall GDP growth expected to beat Bank of England forecasts for the third quarter, boosted by warm weather and the men’s football World Cup. The data shows “that UK plc is more resilient than anyone really expected in the face of the strong headwinds that it is battling against”.

There are tentative signs that “consumer confidence has also improved”, said Delphine Strauss in the Financial Times. Private new car registrations are up by almost a fifth compared to last summer, while earlier figures from the Bank of England show growth in consumer credit.

UK recruiters also saw hiring pick up in August for the first time in four years. It adds to “evidence that the UK’s weak jobs market was stabilising and business and consumer confidence were improving – albeit from a low base – before a renewed rise in gas prices and sovereign bond yields that again threatens to hold back the economy”.

Most members of the public who describe the economy as broken “put its condition down to poor political priorities rather than to other reasons, such as global shocks, immigration or failings on the part of individual citizens (such as not working hard enough)”, said Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman.

Andy Burnham and his chancellor are constrained by costly rising debt – interest on debt costs more than the defence, Home Office and justice departments combined – rigid fiscal rules, and Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise the three main taxes. But they need to find a way to pay for their ambitious policy platform “that commands the confidence of markets – and a public more and more convinced that the economy is broken by design”.

What next?

While the underlying numbers look positive, were the Bank of England to raise interest rates later this month, or Healey to announce tax rises in the Budget at the end of October, things could turn sour very quickly.

For now, the chancellor is trying to strike a more upbeat tone than his predecessor. After the equivalent speech in the last two years since Labour returned to power, the public has been “left with a clear message of tough times, and significant tax rises ahead”, said the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam. Today was different.

The chancellor is “trying to nurture some fragile early signs that confidence is returning” but “the burning question is how to fill multi-billion gaps in public finance plans before the Budget, in a way that minimises the economic impact.

“While vibes are important, policy matters more.”

Artificial intelligence could cause a global economic downturn, the Bank of England’s governor has warned.

Andrew Bailey is the latest in a “throng of figures” to highlight the risks posed by the most advanced versions of AI technology, said The Guardian.

What did he say?

Bailey said “frontier” AI models were “showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities”.

In a two-page letter sent to international finance ministers and central bank governors, Bailey said the advanced models risk destabilising the “highly interconnected” global financial system through cyber-disruption that “can spread across jurisdictions”.

The central bank officially raised concerns about AI in July, listing the threats of a potential stock market bubble, worsened cybersecurity vulnerabilities and AI companies’ increasingly complex and opaque debt.

How would AI cause a bubble?

The inflated valuations of companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Nvidia have led to warnings that the companies are in a stock market “bubble”. This is a “significant run-up in stock prices without a corresponding increase in the value of the businesses they represent”, said The Motley Fool.

Usually, this is driven by “highly optimistic market behaviour”, said Investopedia. Then, when investors’ confidence starts to wane as they realise their hopes are not panning out, they all begin to sell off, sending stock prices tumbling and causing an abrupt contraction in the market.

The “core problem” in the markets is always debt, said Andrew Neill in the Daily Mail. But suddenly there’s “a big new kid on the block in the credit markets” in the form of America’s AI “hyperscalers”, which are “investing several trillion dollars to roll out their transformative technology” on “borrowed money”.

They’re borrowing from private credit markets, an “expensive, unregulated, opaque source of debt”. This means “voracious governments” are competing with the AI giants for credit, “pushing up the cost of borrowing”. But if AI share prices “came tumbling down” they’d bring the “whole stock-market caboodle with them” because the “continuing surge” in share prices is “overwhelmingly AI-driven”.

So what can be done?

Bailey said the sector should prioritise “appropriate steps to support safe and responsible model release and deployment on a global basis”.

But he warned that “recent developments” have “highlighted” that “many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond”.

It’s a have or have-not housing market out there, said Samantha Delouya in CNN.com. Look no further than San Francisco. Just a few years ago, the City by the Bay was a symbol of “urban decline.” Now it has the hottest housing market in the country. “Fueled by the artificial intelligence boom” that has left tech workers “flush with cash,” home prices are routinely getting bid up more than $1 million above their listing price. The median home in San Francisco now sells for $1.7 million. And the frenzy has “spilled over into the rental market as well.” Rents for one-bedrooms are up nearly 23% this year to $4,180 a month, and two-bedrooms are up nearly 26% to $6,020. And the upcoming initial public offerings from AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to only increase “the potential buying power.”

The housing market should settle the lingering debate about “whether the K-shaped economy is over,” said Anna-Louise Jackson in Fast Company. It’s “alive and well.” Entry-level homebuyers “have been priced out” and seem to have “stopped searching.” Traffic on listings of homes priced below $370,000 has fallen sharply since 2021, according to Realtor.com. But “the other end of the housing spectrum tells a very different story.” Those shopping for big, expensive houses “remain very much engaged.” Wealthy buyers are “propping up national sales figures,” said Halina Bennet in Slow Boring. Current housing data “looks decent,” but that’s because upper-end strength is masking some serious lower-end weakness. For anyone who has not “become a newly minted tech millionaire,” economic analysts say, this could be “the worst year for the housing market since 2011.”

The newly passed federal housing law could offer a potential solution, said Lily Belle Poling in The Wall Street Journal. The law makes it “easier and cheaper” to manufacture modular and prefabricated homes for assembly “on site.” Such homes “have long been stuck at the fringe of the housing market,” constituting only 3% of new construction in the U.S. But that number could soon soar. Cuts to red tape in the new law should reduce costs by $5,000 to $10,000 a home. For some homebuyers, those savings “could equal more than 10% of the original cost.” Modular homes are also moving out of the trailer parks and increasingly into the suburbs, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. Several developers are pitching them “as the way of the future,” betting that more homebuyers will be “willing to give manufactured homes” another look. Newer homes “are of a much higher quality than those of past decades,” and some of the nicest ones list for more than $600,000. But on average, a factory-built home can still be had for only $90,700.

GOP lawmakers and cattle ranchers were ringing “alarm bells” last week over President Trump’s decision to temporarily lower tariffs on ground beef, said Mallory Wilson in The Hill. To curb soaring beef prices—which have been pushed up by drought, rising input costs, and shrinking herds—Trump declared that he would let up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the U.S. with “no out-of-quota tariff.” He claimed the meat would be sold at 25% below the current market rate of $6.89 a pound, but offered no details on how the plan would work or which countries would participate. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) warned that the import of cheap foreign meat will only hurt American ranchers, “most of whom are MAGA Republicans.” Meriwether Farms, a farm-to-table operation in Wyoming, called the president’s actions a “betrayal.”

This is a purely political play by Trump, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “He knows he and Republicans are being blamed” for higher prices, and it’s no coincidence that his 90-day tariff reprieve “covers the three months through the November midterm elections.” But these welcome concessions to consumers are also an admission that his tariff strategy has “failed economically and politically.” Trump may love the political leverage tariffs provide, but “he and his party may pay a price this November for raising prices” for millions of consumers.

There are very few American industries that private equity has not leached into, and investors are now setting their sights on the multibillion-dollar youth sports industry, with numerous sports receiving an influx of funds. But not everyone is on board. Parents and politicians across the spectrum have raised concerns about the future of athletics under this business model.

How is private equity getting involved in youth sports?

It began when the Covid-19 pandemic threw a curveball to youth sports across the United States. Local leagues “stopped building rinks and fields and stopped maintaining the ones they had, and no federal agency exists to coordinate what replaced them,” said Fast Company. A pathway for private equity appeared.

Private ventures find youth sports appealing because they offer “pricing power that almost nothing else in consumer spending can match,” said Fast Company. American families “spend more than $40 billion a year on youth sports — nearly twice the NFL’s annual revenue.” There was also a 46% increase in the amount families spent on youth sports from 2019 to 2025, according to an Aspen Institute survey. The rise in spending grew at “twice the rate of price inflation in the U.S. economy during the same period.” Private equity has used this surge of youth sports dollars to invest in almost every sport played by American children.

One of the most notable ventures in private equity sports is Black Bear Sports Group, a firm that in “less than a decade grew into the single largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the U.S., with 47 facilities across 11 states,” said USA Today. Black Bear, the sports arm of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, has used this leverage to “steer families into its own costly ecosystem of leagues, tournaments and fees.” Families “must spend hundreds more each year or risk being shut out.”

Black Bear’s model has changed large swaths of youth hockey from a “network of community-based nonprofits into a vertically integrated, for-profit system with fewer checks on how money flows,” said USA Today. And other sports have been similarly impacted. Brand Velocity Group, a private equity firm led by Eli Manning, has purchased the “company that manages and controls the official youth sports licenses for most major U.S. professional leagues,” said Forbes, while investment firm KKR now owns Varsity Brands, one of the largest producers of youth uniforms.

How are the players and families being impacted?

Many say the influx of private equity is creating a pay-to-play culture that can be difficult to escape. There are also questions about whether parents are being “forced into buying bundled services they don’t want,” said USA Today. “We’re all paying so much money, and each year, they take away more and more,” Stephanie Kurzweil, a New Jersey hockey mom who paid $4,600 for her son’s spot on a Black Bear-owned team in 2023, said to USA Today. “They are in it for the money. There is no thought for the kids.”

An obsession with centering youth sports around traveling is another common element of private equity that is creating angst among parents. One soccer mom “was shocked when the coach made a surprise announcement that the team was going to compete in scrimmages in Europe that cost $3,500 per player,” said Intelligencer. “I was thinking, ‘There are plenty of teams we are losing to right here in our state,’” the mom, Elizabeth, told Intelligencer. “Why do we need to go lose to teams abroad?”

As a result of this increase in private money, skills and talent level “no longer act as a barrier to entry,” said Intelligencer. “When I competed, travel was more like you had to be really good. It was intimidating, and most people did not make it,” Amanda Pennel, a Georgia mother who played travel basketball as a teenager and whose son plays basketball now, told Intelligencer. Now it “doesn’t matter if you’re the worst basketball player anyone’s ever met; there’s a travel team for you.”

It’s not just regular parents who are complaining. Some high-profile individuals are also sounding the alarm about this private equity surge. “Investor money has warped youth sports in another way: It has individualized and professionalized the experience,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), whose son plays in a Black Bear-owned hockey league, said at The Atlantic.

It is a marked change given that for “most of the past century, youth sports were managed primarily by local park departments, parent-led leagues and nonprofit groups,” said Murphy. But the “high-pressure environment, driven by parents and profit-hungry owners alike, has produced a youth-sports culture in which profit and individual achievement matter more than teamwork or character building.”

What has the larger response been?

As private equity’s stranglehold on youth sports expands, many are looking to the government to intervene — and it appears that Washington, D.C., is taking notice. Several lawmakers have been “looking at the skyrocketing costs of youth sports and trying to figure out ways to regulate private equity’s role in the industry, where rising costs have priced out many young athletes,” said Cronkite News. Democrats in both chambers of Congress recently introduced the Let Kids Play Act, a bill that “would protect youth sports from so-called ‘vulture investors’ that Democrats accuse of exploiting youth sports.”

The bill, if passed, would “ban junk fees, loosely defined as fees that are hidden, offer little or nothing in return or are added only after an initial price is disclosed or paid” and “hold private equity firms liable for certain violations,” said Cronkite News. Beyond this bill, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce also held a bipartisan hearing that “scrutinized the role of private equity in youth sports,” said CNBC, another “potential sign that Congress could be inching closer to intervening.”

“Consolidation is driving up costs for families while limiting access to more affordable, community-based options,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), the chair of the House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education subcommittee, said during the hearing. The “simple reality is that too many children are being priced out. It’s not that they lack talent or determination; it’s that their families simply cannot afford the rising costs.”

Not everyone is happy that Congress is thinking of regulating the private equity extravaganza. “Some of the largest youth sports groups acknowledge a need for regulation but defend the role of private capital in expanding access and meeting demand,” said Cronkite News. “I agree that there is a problem with youth sports,” Matt Kanne, the CEO of youth basketball operator Open Gym Premier, said to the outlet. “The infrastructure of youth sports is underfunded and ill-equipped nationally. But why block investments?”

‘Save the children. Ban everyone age 18 and older from social media.’

Joe Mathews at the San Francisco Chronicle

“Ban everyone age 18 and older from social media,” says Joe Mathews. Adults are “having the wrong conversation about digital safety.” Every “week, more grave-faced politicians declare that we must protect kids by banning them from social media, even though most unhinged people online are old enough to vote.” If any “demographic has proved it cannot handle an unmoderated feed, it is fully grown adults.” If “adults ban ourselves from social media tomorrow, what do we really lose?”

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‘The unique horrors of AI food slop’

Brady Brickner-Wood at The New Yorker

The “next frontier of food imagery has proven far less appealing than whatever food porn was,” says Brady Brickner-Wood. Restaurants are “plastering menus and promotional materials with AI-generated” food. A “nauseating, nightmarish quality defines AI’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon.” These “renderings of food — genuinely, slop — offend the materiality of the living in a way that AI’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not.”

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‘The price of Russian paranoia’

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan at Foreign Affairs

As “Russia’s war in Ukraine becomes increasingly costly with no end in sight, the Kremlin has kept tightening its grip over Russian society,” say Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Less “apparent, though, is the dramatic shift in domestic security doctrine that undergirds these efforts.” Rule by “spy hunting and paranoia has also come with significant costs,” as “proliferating social controls and prosecutions for treason have created a pervasive climate of mistrust and fueled a sense of paralysis.”

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‘Trump’s ‘Golden Age’? Well, yes — for dollar stores.’

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect

Americans are “not experiencing the Trump Boom in quite the same way that Trump is,” says Harold Meyerson. The economy has “positive metrics to be found, so long as they don’t concern the experience of the American people as such.” Most “revealingly, because this is a metric that does reflect the experience of the American people, business at dollar stores is up and rising.” These stores are the “canary in the coal mine when the economy is going to hell.”

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Even “the liberal intelligentsia” expressed alarm when America’s national debt recently surpassed the $40 trillion threshold, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Blame the entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which “keep growing on autopilot,” along with a pandemic-era “spending binge” by both political parties that has doubled annual deficits to nearly $2 trillion. The initial Covid relief bill in 2020 was necessary, but continued sending out checks for far too long. The Biden administration spent trillions on additional stimulus for a “mostly recovered” economy, as well as a “bipartisan infrastructure bonanza,” and “a climate extravaganza.” Because of these spending sprees, the gross national debt has ballooned by $17 trillion since 2019—about as much as the country accumulated “during the entire first 225 years of its history.”

The true culprits are 21st-century GOP tax cuts, said Bobby Kogan in MS.now. Data show that those massive reductions in revenue, passed under George W. Bush and President Trump, are “driving this fiscal imbalance.” It was not a secret that raw federal spending would increase as Baby Boomers aged and health-care and retirement costs rose, but our old tax system “was set to keep pace with it,” and “debt was projected to shrink continuously as a percentage of the economy.” Bush even inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton (who raised taxes), but he squandered that gift by reducing taxes on wealthy Americans. Trump doubled down on that irresponsible strategy, and slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Now Republicans insist we must cut “crucial aid that Americans rely on,” rather than undo the tax cuts “that are responsible for creating the fiscal gap.”

President Trump promised to cut the deficit, said Alan Rappeport in The New York Times, but he’s “only exacerbated America’s financial woes.” Elon Musk’s now-disbanded DOGE failed to achieve its goal of slashing federal spending by $1 trillion, and it’s unclear it saved any money at all. Trump’s tariffs backfired when the Supreme Court ruled most of them illegal, which led to refunds to companies of $160 billion. Trump’s expensive war against Iran has only added to the sea of red ink. Getting out of this mess means “putting everything on the table,” said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. That includes tax increases and cuts to popular benefits. Sadly, neither Democrats nor Republicans have the “gumption” to tell voters that hard choices must be made.

Dating can take a toll on your emotions. Now it is wrecking people’s finances too, as “dateflation” makes standard dating-related expenses inaccessible for many singles. Faced with the economic pressure of inflation, many are turning to “infladating” and going on budget-friendly dates.

Rising costs

Finances impact “nearly every aspect of life, to varying degrees,” said USA Today. Your dating life is “no exception.”

Not only does the “state of the economy impact the kinds of dates people go on,” said USA Today, but it may also “influence who people decide to go out with.” As dating expenses continue to rise, “people become more selective about who they choose to take out.” People use calculations to determine “which dates to go on” and not just “what they’re doing on the date” but “who is worthy of that date,” Damona Hoffman, a dating coach, said to USA Today. You’ll likely “wait to see that there’s some possibility of this relationship going somewhere” before you’re willing to “make a monetary investment in someone.”

On average, Gen Z spends $205 on a date and millennials spend $252, said CNBC, according to BMO Financial Group’s survey of 2,501 U.S. adults. Nearly 47% of singles feel dating isn’t worth the money, while 48% of Gen Z and 40% of millennials say the high costs of dating are an obstacle to reaching their financial goals.

Those who have embraced “infladating” are “being more mindful about spending on dates due to rising costs,” Susan Trombetti, the matchmaker and CEO of Exclusive Matchmaking, said to Vice. Infladating does not mean “investing less energy into your dating life,” said Vice. Rather, it’s “investing less money into it.” Effort goes a “long way with the right person.”

Better than giving up

If infladating worries people, experts note the alternative could be worse. In reality, many people are “struggling in today’s economy” and are “opting out of dating completely because it’s too expensive,” dating coach Amy Chan said to USA Today. She sees it more in her “male clients who feel embarrassed that they cannot take a date out to a nice restaurant.” If the “antidote for that is infladating,” then she is “all for it!”

In any case, singles should be “wary of the person who pulls out all the stops on a first date,” said Chan. People are taught to “read that as romantic,” but this level of intensity “hasn’t been earned by anything real between you.” It’s a “performance,” and often it says “more about how they want to be perceived than how they feel about you.”

This isn’t “just a dating story” but a story about “how our finances and the things that impact them affect every area of our lives,” including “how we pursue relationships,” Michael McAuliffe, the president and founder of Family Credit Management, said to Vice. Basic everyday costs have been “increasing much faster than most people’s paychecks.”

The trade war between the United States and Canada has turned white-hot, and it is not clear when or if the conflict will abate. America’s northern neighbor is hunkering down for extended economic pain, while President Donald Trump argues that Canada has been “ripping off” the U.S. for years. Tariffs are flying in both directions. Will anybody blink?

‘Undiplomatic’ bargaining

Last weekend’s breakdown of U.S.-Canada trade talks is a sign that Trump’s “bulldozer approach” to trade “may be reaching its limits,” said The Washington Post. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from negotiations “rather than accept a lengthening list of U.S. demands,” choosing to face new American tariffs on an “array of Canadian products” that includes “hockey sticks and Crown Royal whisky.” (U.S. consumers could also face a surge in toilet paper costs.)

Carney is digging in. Trump’s “undiplomatic style” of bargaining — including frequent references to Canada as a “51st state” — has made once-friendly Canadian public opinion “fiercely anti-American,” said the Post.

Canada is “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social. “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” That proclamation “depends on the meaning of the word ‘need,’” Paul Krugman said on Substack. Canada “dominates” the type of lumber that U.S. contractors prefer for framing houses, and America “imports millions of barrels a day” of Canadian oil. The United States economy is much larger, but an “all-out trade war would create a lot of pain” at home when American voters are “already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.”

Trump’s latest trade conflict “makes no economic or political sense,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. GOP candidates are “already getting pounded” on affordability issues on the campaign trail. The president’s abysmal approval rating is the result of voter perceptions as he wages “blunderbuss wars without a strategy.” Now Trump is providing fresh fuel for those concerns a “mere 10 weeks before midterm elections.”

‘United against Donald Trump’

Carney was “right to call Donald Trump’s bluff,” Tony Keller said at The Globe and Mail in Canada. There was widespread fear among Canadians that “Ottawa was about to sign a bad deal” with the United States that would make major concessions to Trump “in return for nothing much.” The good news for Ottawa: U.S. voters “won’t understand why Mr. Trump is so intent on severing our partnership.” Canadian leaders must now “appeal to Americans and American business” for support.

Canada is now “more united against Donald Trump than ever,” Stephen Maher said at the Toronto Star. The Canadian government is preparing aid to assist the country’s hardest-hit businesses. Trump seems equally determined. It is “time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore,” he said Wednesday to interviewer Glenn Beck, per Reuters. This may be a long fight: Carney “sees little chance” of resuming trade talks until after the U.S. midterm elections in November, said Bloomberg.

Since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants last month, terminating employment authorization for beneficiaries, South Florida has been bracing for impact. The sudden loss of TPS for so many Haitian employees who reside in the region has hit its economy hard.

What is happening in Florida?

As a result of the end of TPS for Haitian immigrants, “some home-care agencies have shut down,” said The Wall Street Journal. Nursing homes in South Florida are “scrambling to fill vacant positions,” and restaurants are “scaling back operating hours.”

Few industries have been left untouched. Hotels, retailers, airport contractors and small businesses are also struggling with staffing shortages. No other U.S. state has “more Haitian TPS holders than Florida,” said the Journal. Of the “roughly 350,000 Haitian TPS holders” in the US, almost half live in the state. Around 93,000 of them are part of the state’s workforce, according to an analysis by three immigrant-rights groups — FWD.us, Haitian Bridge Alliance and UndocuBlack Network.

The changes have affected both Haitian workers and “South Florida’s tourism industry,” said the Miami Herald. About 52,000 Haitian TPS holders were part of the workforce in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to Phillip Connor, a research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Migration and Development, per the Herald. Of those, a “significant number worked in tourism-related jobs.”

The Department of Homeland Security has for decades “granted TPS designations for foreign-born people who can’t return to their home countries because of “unsafe conditions such as armed conflict or natural disasters,” said the Journal. When Trump returned to office, his administration moved to “terminate TPS status for 13 countries, including Haiti,” arguing that prior administrations had “misused the program by repeatedly extending its protections.” In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could end TPS status for both Haitian and Syrian nationals. There are “significantly fewer Syrian TPS holders in the U.S. than Haitian ones.”

Critics of TPS argue that people with the status “make up a fraction of the overall labor force — a loss the economy can absorb,” and that any difficulties in replacing them could “have the benefit of raising wages.” Their departure creates “real opportunities for less-educated, American-born workers,” Steven Camarota, the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, said to the Journal.

Who is feeling the impact?

Employers and deportees aren’t the only ones feeling the impact. Businesses are “terminating employees with lots of experience,” Wendi Walsh, the secretary-treasurer of the South Florida hospitality workers’ union Unite Here Local 355, said to the Herald. That will “put pressure on the workers left behind.”

The local economy will “miss the workers’ income too,” said the Herald. Haitians on TPS in South Florida provided “$1.5 billion in annual economic contributions, $174 million in annual federal and payroll taxes, and $176 million in annual state and local taxes,” according to estimates by the Princeton research fellow.

In South Florida and elsewhere across the nation, many “de-documented” immigrants are “taking refuge in a growing underground economy,” where transactions are “in cash and remain off the books,” said the Sun Sentinel. Some are “going mobile to quietly deliver services that once yielded paychecks.” Others rely on friends and family to go grocery shopping, “fearing they’ll be arrested by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Many of them are “scared the government will deport them to Haiti” when they know they “cannot survive” there, Margarette Nerette, a vice president at the Florida branch of the Service Employees International Union, which represents healthcare workers, said to the Sun Sentinel. They have “kids who go to school” but don’t seek medical care or go shopping. They don’t know “what to do to survive the crisis the government has put them in.”

A significant drought in Panama caused by the El Niño weather pattern has forced the Central American country to slash the number of vessels it lets through its major canal. And the reduced flow of goods through one of the world’s most consequential shipping lanes could create a ripple effect that shakes the world’s economy.

What did the commentators say?

Starting on Sept. 15, the Panama Canal Authority will let 32 ships pass through the canal’s locks daily, a drop from the 36 it currently allows. While a decrease of just four ships per day may not sound significant, it represents a major change for a “critical chokepoint that moves about 5% of the world’s shipping,” said CNN. The United States is the “canal’s biggest user — about 70% of all the goods moving through it are coming to or going from the U.S.”

These reductions are necessary because the Panama Canal “relies on fresh water to operate its locks and has had less rain than normal” in recent years, said the Financial Times. The coming El Niño, when “surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean rise, potentially causing severe drought and warmer winters, could be one of the most intense ever.” And for Panama, the “result is a wet season that’s already been drier than usual and is likely to get worse,” said CNN, possibly causing a massive shortage of freshwater in the canal.”

This shift in the number of vessels could result in higher prices for consumers in the U.S. and globally, experts say. While some ships “may wait to transit to avoid the higher fees, those carrying more time-sensitive cargo are likely to take the plunge and pay the steep transit prices, driving up the price of those goods,” said CNN. One notable example: the pharmaceutical ingredients in Tylenol and certain prescription drugs, which “come, in large part, from China and are believed to transit through the Panama Canal to the U.S. East Coast,” said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to CNN.

Others are not convinced the change will have much impact on prices, especially in the United States. There is only a “small chance that cargo owners, pressed by paying more for shipping and other costs, will pass on this increase to customers,” Simon Heaney, a senior manager at the Drewry shipping research and consultancy firm, told Newsweek — especially since global shipping has already “been upended for months by the U.S.’ war with Iran,” said the outlet.

What next?

The shipping reductions are just the Panama Canal’s latest in a line of “other water conservation measures, such as lowering the maximum draft — the vessel’s depth in the water — for the largest ships,” said The Guardian. But the canal itself could also turn into a hindrance for vessels, as officials said that with the “upcoming reduction, waiting times for ships trying to get through without making a reservation beforehand will increase.”

In the meantime, shipping companies have already been “preparing for possible disruptions in the 110-year-old canal,” said the Financial Times, with many taking drastic measures to get ahead of the cuts. For ships that don’t make reservations to pass through the canal, officials typically issue several extra slots through an auction; at least one large ship “paid a staggering $4 million to fast-track its trip,” said CNN, leaving “others, either unwilling or unable to shell out that kind of sum, in maritime limbo.”

What happened

Canada on Tuesday released a list of more than 700 U.S. products it plans to tax at up to 50% in response to 50% tariffs President Donald Trump imposed on $20 million of Canadian goods over the weekend. The “dollar-for-dollar, rate-for-rate counter-tariffs” will be paired with $5.4 billion in support to protect Canadian workers and businesses, said Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne in a press conference. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said Canada was “targeting products” that will “put political pressure” on the Trump administration in certain states.

Who said what

Trump’s “trade war with Canada is escalating as the midterm elections approach,” voters are angry over rising costs and “control of the U.S. Senate hinges on states along the border,” like Michigan, Ohio, Maine and Alaska, The Associated Press said. Senior Canadian officials maintained that Ottawa “did not design the new measures around the U.S. electoral map.”

But Canada’s retaliatory tariffs “targeted products made in states with hotly contested congressional elections,” The Wall Street Journal said. Ottawa is “trying to show the Republican Party that there’s a systemic cost to doing this sort of thing,” former U.S. trade official Ed Gresser told the Journal.

What next?

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs don’t take effect until Sept. 8, so “there’s still time to pull back from the brink of an even bigger trade war,” the AP said. “Voters hate tariffs,” and Trump must be “hearing from political folks that if he wants any chance of salvaging the midterms he can’t start a trade war with Canada,” Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute told the AP. “My guess” is “cooler heads do prevail somewhere in the next few weeks.”

North Korea has been hailed as “the world’s most surprising economic success story” by the leading US financial daily, The Wall Street Journal.

Despite being tightly controlled, technologically backward, and subject to crippling Western trade embargoes, the country has recorded year-on-year GDP growth of more than 3%, of which many advanced economies could only dream. Their unlikely success story has been “aided by arms sales and troop deployments to Russia” to fuel the Ukraine war, support from China, and “the ability to flout international sanctions to import more energy, components and materials”.

What has changed?

Five years after making a rare admission that the nation’s economic policies were falling short, in February Kim Jong Un addressed the Workers’ Party Congress to celebrate a turnaround, declaring “everything has fundamentally changed”. But while the supreme leader may have triumphantly taken credit for the boom, in reality “he has Russia and China to thank”, said Forbes.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, North Korea has earned an estimated $14 billion providing military support to the Kremlin, and hundreds of millions in trade and foreign aid from China. North Korea’s “emergence as a modern-day pirate state on the back of its lucrative cryptocurrency theft operations” has also helped, Shreyas Reddy of Korea Risk Group, told the Financial Times.

The effect of this influx on the so-called hermit kingdom has been sudden and startling. The regime has used some of the windfall to modernise Pyongyang with new brightly lit shopping districts filled with luxury and high-tech goods, and high-rise apartments blocks. Cars, once a rarity, are increasingly common and frequently electric, and can even be hailed with ride-sharing apps.

Outside the capital, the regime’s ambitious “20x10” regional development initiative aims to build new factories, housing and public infrastructure in 20 counties each year over a 10-year period.

All of this is an “incredible accomplishment for a country that is this poor”, regional expert Stephan Haggard told the WSJ.

Can it last?

Due to a lack of reliable data and the regime’s complete control of the media, accurately assessing what is happening on the ground in North Korea is notoriously difficult, said WioNews. But “a closer look beneath the headlines reveals a more complicated picture than either Western critics” or the Pyongyang regime acknowledge.

While the growth over the last three years appears genuine, said the Financial Times, North Korea’s “economic resurgence fell short of a genuine transformation” in that it “was mostly being driven by participation in Russia’s war in Ukraine”.

Peter Ward of the Sejong Institute in Seoul said North Korea was in the throes of a “Russian sugar high” fuelling a slew of “shovel-ready, exciting-looking projects that will catch the eye of the leader, but aren’t necessarily sustainable”.

Ultimately, said Asia Business Daily, the racks of luxury goods and the Pyongyang construction boom are “merely an optical illusion”, in that they are enjoyed “almost exclusively by the leadership and a privileged class in Pyongyang”.

North Korea remains incredibly poor. Out of its 27 million citizens, 17 million are still believed to live in extreme poverty, and the UN estimates that more than 40% of the population are undernourished. Analysts are sceptical that Kim can turn the short-term gains brought about by the war in Ukraine into sustainable long-term growth. “Knowing the North Koreans, they probably haven’t fixed the roof while the sun is shining,” said Ward.

The nest isn’t as empty as it used to be, said Noam Scheiber in The New York Times. Sending a kid off to college usually meant an end to cohabiting with them under the same roof. Not anymore. Today, nearly half of adults under 30 are still living at home, according to the Federal Reserve, a level not seen since the pandemic. The prevalence of “boomerang kids” reflects a number of trouble spots in the economy, including the soaring cost of living, out-of-control home prices, and “persistent weakness in the job market for recent graduates.” Many young people are moving back with their parents to look for jobs “from the relative comfort” of home, where meals are guaranteed and rent is paid for. It’s becoming so common that the stigma is disappearing: People who live at home after graduating are perceived less as “rudderless” and more as “driven-but-thwarted.”

For parents, it can be a financial hit to let a grown son or daughter move in, said Jeff Green in Bloomberg. Most parents want to do all they can to help their child. But such caregiving isn’t free. Financial planners estimate it can add up to “roughly $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year,” when you add up all the extra groceries, utilities, and other expenditures, which cuts into retirement savings. They recommend establishing “clear expectations along with a timeline and exit plan.” That could include charging increasing rent until it reaches market rate—at which point young adults may prefer to move out and share an apartment with roommates. There’s a difference between “providing a safety net and enabling financial immaturity,” said Michelle Singletary in The Washington Post. There needs to be accountability. If adult children are home because “they’re carrying massive student loans,” make sure you “monitor their progress reducing the debt.” If they’re unemployed or can’t contribute financially, there are other ways to ensure they can help, “such as cooking, cleaning, or maintaining the property.”

Having a boomerang kid is “probably less dire” than it seems, said Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker. There has actually been a “steady increase in young people living at home over the past 25 years.” Some of this is cultural—black, Asian, and Latino families usually have higher rates of intergenerational living—and some of it is social: “People are getting married later in life,” and thus not leaving the nest for love. “In reality, most young people are likely doing OK.” But it’s also “likely they’re not doing as well as they had hoped.” That’s why “the narrative of the downwardly mobile young person” has become so persuasive—as a rallying cry for the Left, and a cry for help from Mom and Dad.

Government borrowing is getting more expensive. Bond yields — the amount the government pays investors to borrow their money — this week hit their highest rate since the financial crisis of 2007, as investors demonstrated their nervousness about the U.S. economy with a massive bond sell-off. The market turmoil could spread, raising borrowing costs for consumers and businesses.

What did the commentators say?

Bond investors are “mainly concerned about two things,” said NPR. The first is that persistent inflation, driven in part by the war with Iran, is eroding the value of the bonds they hold. The second is the federal government’s longstanding and bipartisan “habit of spending more money than it collects in taxes.” The U.S. federal debt hit a “record-shattering” $40 trillion this week. Most observers do not believe the government will “find itself unable to pay back investors,” but investors are increasingly “worried.” This week’s bond jitters are their way of “sounding alarm bells” about the American economy.

Government bonds are also “under pressure from a wave of new corporate debt,” said CNN. Companies like Alphabet and Meta are borrowing massive amounts of money to fund their build-out of artificial intelligence networks, and those corporate bonds are “competing with government bonds for investors’ attention.” That creates less demand and forces higher yields for the government bonds. Big Tech and big government are “competing for the same pool of buyers at the same moment governments need those buyers most,” deVere Group’s Nigel Green said in a note, per CNN.

The return to pre-2008 rates for bond yields “isn’t cause for panic,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. It might sound frightening to hear that “rates are higher than they’ve been in nearly 20 years,” but in truth the low rates of that era were “abnormal.” The rising rates will create “new budgetary stresses” for the federal government: Servicing the debt now costs $1 trillion a year, making it the “second- or third-largest line item in the federal budget.” The government can no longer borrow “as if near-zero interest rates would last forever.”

“America is about to get more expensive,” Wharton School’s Mohamed A. El-Erian said at The New York Times. The pain is likely to spread to “sectors that are traditionally sensitive to interest rates” such as the home and auto markets, which will “sideline even more prospective first-time home buyers” and raise the cost of transportation. That in turn will feed an “affordability crisis that already sits atop voter anxieties” ahead of the midterm elections.

What next?

Bond markets calmed briefly on Wednesday after the Treasury Department announced it would “more than double the size of its government debt repurchases,” said CNBC. But that relief will probably be “short-lived,” said the Journal, because the buyback program does not address the fundamental concerns about “high levels of debt and government spending.” As of Thursday morning, yield rates were once again on the rise.

What happened

The U.S. gross national debt on Wednesday hit $40 trillion for the first time, just five months after reaching $39 trillion. The new debt figure is an “ominous milestone for an economy that sits on a shaky fiscal foundation after decades of borrowing to pay for the rising costs of the military, social safety net programs” and, especially since last year, President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, The New York Times said.

Who said what

The “federal government’s IOU has now more than doubled in less than a decade,” from $19.95 trillion when Trump was first sworn in, Reuters said. Much of that debt funded the Covid-19 response, including $8.4 trillion added under former President Joe Biden. But Trump has also “largely ignored the dwindling number of fiscal hawks in his Republican Party,” and his “landmark second-term” tax-and-spending bill “will ​add another $4.7 trillion in debt.”

The bipartisan “inability of lawmakers to confront the debt comes with long-term risks,” the Times said. The “best-case scenario” in an “unsustainable” fiscal trajectory, said Margaret Spellings of the Bipartisan Policy Center in a statement. “AI disruption, a recession, global war or any number of other events could quickly push us over the edge from a challenge into a full-blown crisis.”

What next?

The “exploding debt” is “already affecting Americans’ pocketbooks by raising borrowing costs” and squeezing wages, said The Associated Press. The U.S. is expected to hit the current $41.1 trillion statutory debt limit “sometime between late winter and mid-summer” of 2027, forcing Congress to “again vote on whether to raise or suspend it.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night announced a three-day pause on 50% tariffs he had threatened to impose on $20 billion of Canadian imports. “Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!” he said on social media, about 90 minutes before the midnight deadline. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the two sides had made “substantial progress,” but there’s “important work still to be done.”

Who said what

Trump’s tariffs “would have risked escalation into a trade war between the North American neighbors,” The Wall Street Journal said. But the “political impact would likely have been bigger than the economic one,” The Associated Press said. Canada had “threatened to retaliate” with “levies of its own,” and Trump would be “taking a risk by imposing a hefty new tariff” on consumer goods ahead of midterm elections, with U.S. voters “already frustrated with the high cost of living.”

What next?

Trump has “previously announced deals with other countries, only to have them fall through,” The New York Times said. But the U.S. and Canada both have “reason to step back from the brink,” the AP said. Long-term government borrowing costs “hit their highest in decades” on Tuesday, Reuters said, as “Trump’s policies — from tariffs to war — upend the global order.”

‘LinkedIn users are rewriting the past to land their next jobs’

Beth Kowitt at Bloomberg

LinkedIn “has inadvertently become a treasure trove for economists studying the modern labor market,” says Beth Kowitt. New research “has uncovered a problem with treating LinkedIn as a historical record: users keep mucking up the data.” People “have been polishing their resumes for as long as resumes have existed,” but “today when workers rewrite their own career histories, they’re also altering the public record and our understanding of the labor market.” The “result is a kind of arms race.”

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‘Debbie Wasserman Schultz running in a Black district is brought to you by the Supreme Court — and the GOP’

Andra Gillespie at MS NOW

After the Supreme Court “gave Florida Republicans permission to redraw district lines to benefit their party, the biggest news is the decision by Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a white woman, to run in the state’s only plurality-Black district,” says Andra Gillespie. Her “candidacy there highlights the tensions between descriptive and substantive representation and the strategic risks that emerge when a large field of candidates run for the same seat.” But “she could still win with a plurality.”

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‘The age of big-spending Republicans is here’

Merrill Matthews at The Hill

It “may be hard for the Gen Z crowd to accept, but there was a time when Republicans in Congress believed in fiscal responsibility — restraining government spending,” says Merrill Matthews. Now “all most Gen Zers have ever known is big-spending Republicans.” The GOP “used to be serious about controlling federal spending, but that was before Trump.” These party members “may soon find voters and the economy demanding they return to their conservative roots.”

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‘What my dad’s generation of engineers can teach the AI industry’

Len Khodorkovsky at Newsweek

“Half of companies rolled out an AI agent that passed internal testing but still failed once real customers began using it,” and the “gap isn’t a failure of engineering. It’s a permanent feature of it,” says Len Khodorkovsky. It’s the “everyday cost of manufacturing at scale.” A “model that aces its benchmarks but fails in the real world is like a tolerance that only looks good on paper,” and “every factory learned a long time ago that reality humbles perfect designs.”

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Reform UK’s plans to cut £50 billion per year from the welfare bill – unveiled yesterday by Robert Jenrick – are “extremely ambitious”, but also a “political risk”, said Ben Chu on BBC Verify.

Nigel Farage has said the party will not cut pensions, meaning roughly £207 billion of the overall £353 billion welfare budget is up for grabs, and Jenrick aims to cut around 25% of that.

Under the plans, long-term welfare claimants who are fit to work would be forced to do 20 hours of community work a week, and foreign nationals would be banned from claiming benefits altogether. Personal Independence Payments (Pip) to disabled claimants would be scrapped and replaced with a “health security allowance” with more stringent eligibility criteria that could exclude up to two-thirds of current recipients.

These proposals may fit Reform’s “current ideological appeal”, pollster Sir John Curtice told The Independent. But this has limitations to their wider appeal, and has the potential to significantly backfire with their base.

What did the commentators say?

The “centrepiece” of the policy is to exclude foreign nationals from claiming most UK benefits, said an editorial in The Times, including European Union citizens with ­settled status in the UK.

This is just another “calculated bang on the populist drum”: the majority of foreign nationals “don’t qualify in the first place”. UK visas stipulate a clause of “no recourse to public funds”. Not only would stripping entitlement from the 4.3 million EU citizens who have been in the UK for many years antagonise relationships with the bloc, it would be “pointless”; many of those with indefinite leave to remain would have a “near-certain chance of being granted British ­citizenship should they apply”.

But for the Reform base, a more pressing issue is the “proposed abolition of Pip”, said journalist Fraser Nelson on his Substack newsletter. “Every Reform MP sits on more Pip claimants than the majority that elected them.”

In Jenrick’s seat of Newark, where he was elected as a Conservative with a majority of 3,572, there are 6,011 residents who claim Pip. And almost all of Reform’s target seats are “heavily welfare dependent”. Jenrick risks going into the next election as “the Pip-snatcher, the grim reaper of welfare”. “The Labour attack lines write themselves.”

There’s no doubt that the welfare state “needs reform – but not Reform”, said The Independent’s editorial board. Not only would the proposed cuts impose “much misery on the most vulnerable in society”, but they would also “substantially weaken” the British economy.

Employers with more than five staff would “take on the role of the state in social insurance and health care”, carrying a “significant increase” in cost, risk and pastoral responsibilities. Afforded only “tiny tax breaks” in return, employers would be “even less willing to take on people with long-term conditions, or who they perceive as liable to develop them”.

There may be “flaws” in the Reform approach, but the ambitious scale of the reforms is “laudable”, said an editorial in The Telegraph. Jenrick is seeking to “revive” the “something-for-something contributory principle” of William Beveridge, “founder of the welfare state”, but is up against a system that is growing at an “unsustainable” pace.

What next?

Reform has been overtaken in the polls by Labour “for the first time in more than a year”, because of the “bounce” under Andy Burnham’s leadership, said the Financial Times. The government has said that it was “already reforming welfare by narrowing the gap between standard and health universal credit rates”, by reintroducing face-to-face assessments and “investing £3.5 billion in employment support”.

Burnham’s willingness to get to grips with the expanding welfare state is “likely to emerge as the key dividing line over the coming months”, said Rupert Yorke, former deputy chief of staff to Rishi Sunak, in The i Paper. “It remains to be seen whether he prioritises this issue with his backbenchers over his ambitious plans for regional devolution or social care”.

Economists have argued the U.S. is experiencing a K-shaped economy in which the rich get richer while working Americans increasingly fall behind. Now the Trump administration is pushing back. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is “sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy,” he said on CNBC this month, insisting that lower-wage workers are seeing improvements under GOP policies.

Is the gap narrowing?

The U.S. wealth gap “appears to be narrowing,” David Goldman and Rachel Siegel said at CNN. Wages and spending for the rich outpace “growth in paychecks and expenses for the poor” in a K-shaped economy, but recent reporting suggests “those lines seem to be getting closer together.” One June report found the gap in spending growth between high- and low-wage earners is the “narrowest it has been in three years.” The remaining disparity is “not getting wider in absolute terms,” PNC economist Brian LeBlanc said to the outlet.

The K-shaped economy was “increasingly reliant” on the spending of wealthy Americans on goods and services, said Axios. That made the U.S. economy vulnerable to a “wealth shock” if the rich were forced to curtail their spending due to a falling stock market or another crisis. But “lower- and middle-income Americans are catching up” and putting U.S. consumer spending “on a more resilient footing.” One indicator: After-tax wages among lower-income workers “rose 5.2% in July from the same period a year ago.”

Analysts believe the “shrinking gap largely reflects an improving labor market” in which “more lower-income households are working and collecting paychecks,” said Axios. That signifies there is not “much there in terms of support for the K-shape narrative,” JPMorgan Chase’s Jeremy Barnum said to investors last month.

There are skeptics. The K-shaped economy “remains firmly intact,” Moody Analytics’ Mark Zandi said in a July post at LinkedIn. Households with incomes above $200,000 “are powering overall spending,” with the top 20% of earners accounting for an “astonishing nearly 60% of personal outlays.” Spending by the bottom 80% of the country, meanwhile, remains “unchanged after inflation.” It is a gap that has “persisted since the pandemic,” and the numbers show “no sign that the trend line will reverse soon.”

‘Slightly softer prongs’

It is “tempting to conclude that the K-shaped recovery is behind us,” former JPMorgan Chase economist Anthony Chan said at The People’s Economist. The U.S. does “seem to be making progress,” but more evidence is necessary to determine that the trends have changed. “We may need more than one calendar quarter of good news to fully eliminate the K-shaped economy designation.”

For now, the U.S. economy might best be described as K-shaped but with “slightly softer prongs,” Juliana Kaplan said at Business Insider. Lower earners are “seeing slightly more stability” even if higher earners are still propelling consumer spending. “Trying to describe the economy with a letter shape might just be alphabet soup.”

Growth may be slowing, but Russia’s economy is essentially sound. That’s the message Vladimir Putin is keen to purvey; and by way of proof he cites Russia’s incredibly low unemployment rate: just 2.1%. He’s got it back to front, said Alexander Kolyandr in The Spectator.

Far from being a comfort, this figure should cause Putin huge alarm. It underscores the fact that his nation is undergoing its worst labour crisis in decades: it “has run out of workers”. The crisis has its roots in the low birth rates of the 1990s, but the war in Ukraine has “poured fuel on it”.

Woefully inefficient remedies

It certainly has, said the Luxembourg Times. Men are being sent to the front in vast numbers: the target number of contract soldiers to be signed up this year is 409,000. And the high pay they’re being offered as a lure is crippling the economy. In 2022, a contract soldier’s monthly salary was about four times the average Russian wage. It’s now closer to twice the average wage because the defence industry (employment in military production has risen by half a million since 2021), the railways and other big state sectors have all had to hike up wages in an effort to compete. As a result, companies in the civilian sector are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

Yet the remedies the Kremlin has pursued to tackle the crisis have been woefully insufficient, said Samuel Bendett and Maria Snegovaya in Foreign Policy. Expanding forced prison labour, a familiar Soviet strategy, is no longer an option as so many convicts have already been sent to the front lines. (The jail population has shrunk from 465,000 in 2021 to 282,000.) So too with the plan to open jobs hitherto deemed too physically taxing or dangerous to women, as their number in Russia’s labour market is remarkably high already.

Economic ‘death zone’

Such measures fail to get to grips with the sheer scale of the problem, said Mathias Brüggmann in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 1.4 million Russian soldiers have been killed or badly wounded. The only solution to Russia’s chronic labour shortage is increased migration.

Yet since March 2024, when Tajik terrorists killed 149 people in an attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, the Kremlin has gone in the opposite direction, imposing harsh new rules on migrants, especially those from the former Soviet states in Central Asia – Russia’s largest immigrant group. Their number has fallen dramatically. Issuing 70,000 Chinese and 34,000 Indians work permits this year hasn’t been nearly enough to plug the gap.

In fact, Russia’s economy has now entered “the death zone”, said Alexandra Prokopenko in The Economist. The budget deficit is spiralling out of control; export revenues are falling. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk of fiscal crisis, of institutional collapse, “of damage so severe no post-war policy can repair it”.

Millions of older Americans who are already struggling with rising gas and food prices will soon have to pay more for prescription drugs, said Anna Wilde Mathews in The Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration announced last week that it is scrapping a Biden-era subsidy program for Medicare drug plans, known as Part D, starting next year. The program, which this year will give insurers an estimated $3.6 billion to “blunt increases in premiums,” lowered average premiums by about 40% in 2025 for Part D’s 25 million enrollees. About 75% of enrollees, who today pay an average monthly premium of $36, will be hit with higher bills in 2027 because of the cancellation. The Trump administration said the subsidies encouraged insurers to hike rates, knowing the government would pick up the tab. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, said the insurance industry “bailout” was “no longer needed,” and that the administration was working with pharma companies to lower drug costs.

“Letting these Medicare subsidies expire is the right thing to do,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. The program began in 2024 with an administrative action by President Joe Biden, with no authorization from Congress. It was always a “Band-Aid for bad policy, not a long-term solution for health-care costs.” Rather than addressing why Part D premiums were going up, the subsidies shifted more of the bill to taxpayers. “If a health policy can’t work without taxpayers bailing out insurance companies when costs rise more than expected, the underlying policy is the problem, not the planned expiration of the bailout.” The subsidy was always intended to be temporary, said Aliss Higham in Newsweek. It was designed to “limit volatility and variation in Part D premiums” as insurers adapted to changes in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which reduced Medicare enrollees’ out-of-pocket expenses and capped insulin and vaccine costs. Ultimately, more than half the subsidy money flowed to just one company, UnitedHealth Group, which Oz called “unacceptable.”

The cancellation “comes at a curious time,” said Miranda Yaver in MS.now. Midterm elections are just around the corner and Democrats are pressuring Republicans on affordability issues. And now “America’s most reliable voting bloc will receive notice of higher health-care costs”—in most cases, up to $20 more per month. That might not sound like a lot, but it matters greatly to seniors who live on fixed incomes. “This policy shift undercuts Trump’s expressed commitment to prescription drug affordability,” especially because his other efforts, like the direct-to-consumer drug portal, TrumpRx, and most favored nation drug pricing, “have shown little progress” in actually lowering costs. As a political issue, Medicare “should remain untouchable.” The Trump administration is testing the “third rail.”

‘Shopping is impossible’

Rachel Sugar at The Atlantic

With online shopping, the “problem is the overabundance of options” and “too much information, or too little information,” says Rachel Sugar. At “this point, the boundary between ‘shopping’ and ‘not shopping’ has all but collapsed.” There is “now a third state: ‘a little bit shopping,’” the “constant thrum of consumer opportunities that lead mostly to more consumer opportunities.” It is “both a genuine attempt at making a purchase, and a hobby that is infinitely expandable to fill any length of time.”

Read more

‘Why must a socialist also be woke?’

Janan Ganesh at the Financial Times

It is “natural to forget what a normie Karl Marx could be,” says Janan Ganesh. From the “beginning, it was possible to be a socialist, the socialist, and culturally middle-of-the-road.” It was “possible to believe in seizing the means of production without being avant-garde on matters of sex, race, crime or war,” but “that point has got lost over time.” The “hard left will always pair a conceivably popular economic program with a provably hated cultural one.”

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‘The death toll of a mass shooting doesn’t end at the scene’

Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham and Anupam Jena at Time

When a “mass shooting tears through an American community, we count the dead,” say Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham and Anupam Jena. But the “damage doesn’t stop at the victims.” The impact that a “shooting spreads across the whole country cannot be seen the way we can see a wound,” but “we can see its footprints in the form of antidepressant prescriptions filled, in accidental gun deaths” and in “lives lost on the road,” as “decades of research show that stress and distraction make drivers more dangerous.”

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‘Why fashion falls for fascists’

Ari Hoffman at UnHerd

A “Dorian Gray-like question comes to mind in the wake of the decision” by Anna Wintour to “devote the 2027 Met Gala to John Galliano, a designer hailed as a visionary who has also spewed baroque bigotry,” says Ari Hoffman. Beyond the “judgment of Galliano’s character — by all accounts, it’s troubled — lies a more difficult reckoning with fashion’s fascination with cruelty and fanaticism, which all too often has lain behind the glittering surfaces.”

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‘My laundromat accepts Apple Pay. Why won’t they take my cash?’

Mary Anna Mancuso at the Miami Herald

Cash “isn’t going out of circulation; it’s disappearing from everyday transactions,” says Mary Anna Mancuso. Businesses “prefer electronic payments” because it “reduces the risk of robbery, digital transactions go into the bank almost immediately and the bookkeeping is simpler.” But it is “worth asking what we lose when convenience becomes the only option.” A “modern payment system should accommodate everyone — whether they choose to tap their phone, swipe a card or hand over a dollar bill.”

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‘Ukraine has always been here — and always will be’

Lidia Pilecky at the Chicago Tribune

Ukraine’s “history tells the facts. We were here. We are here. And we will remain here,” says Lidia Pilecky. For “centuries, Russian rulers repeatedly tried to ban the Ukrainian language and suppress the very identity Putin claims never existed.” But “today, Ukrainians defend the universal principle that no nation should be destroyed because a more powerful neighbor claims it has no right to exist.” Ukraine’s “fight is also taking place in classrooms where children learn the truth.”

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‘Cyclospora outbreaks will only get worse as climate chaos grows’

Amy Moas at Newsweek

This “has been one of the most dangerous summers on record, and experts have been warning about it for decades,” says Amy Moas regarding “two deaths linked to the outbreak of cyclospora.” It is “easier to associate loss of life with extreme weather when it’s tied to a singular event.” But “you can ‘contact-trace’ this now-fatal outbreak back to the ongoing climate crisis.” If “summer gets longer and warmer, we’ll see a longer, hotter mechanism for the parasite to thrive.”

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‘Fancy sodas fall flat with me’

Brenda Cronin at The Wall Street Journal

Fancy sodas “come in winsome bottles or sleek cans and have ridiculous flavors like watermelon-dandelion or rosehip-jacaranda,” but “they taste like carbonated cough syrup with a Windex chaser,” says Brenda Cronin. People “should be reveling in the gourmet soda parade,” if “only the flavors didn’t sound like products from Bath & Body Works” or “taste like a mashup of SweeTARTS and Jolly Ranchers.” When “drinking feels more like penance than a party, I’ll do without.”

Read more

What happened

The Trump administration has refunded about $100 billion of the roughly $166 billion collected through President Donald Trump’s 2025 “liberation day” tariffs, according to a court-ordered progress report filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of International Trade. The Supreme Court ruled in February that those import taxes had been collected illegally using an authority the president did not have, and a judge subsequently ordered their return to the importers.

Who said what

Trump has “placed heavy-handed tariffs at the center of his economic and foreign policy agendas,” CNBC said, and he has “vented his rage over the court rulings.” The “speed at which the money has been refunded has surprised trade lawyers and analysts” alike, the Financial Times said. White House officials had “warned that the refunds would depend on further litigation.”

What next?

Trump’s administration has “recently taken a series of steps to effectively re-create” his initial sweeping tariffs “using other legal authorities,” said CNBC. On Monday, 25 states sued the administration over the new tariffs, “calling them a pretext for replacing” the axed “liberation day” levies, The Associated Press said.

With back-to-school season in full swing across parts of the U.S., many American families are feeling an extra pain in their wallets from buying school supplies. The cost of these supplies ebbs and flows over the years, but economists say 2026 is an especially difficult year for buying new pencils or glue sticks — and families may not feel relief in the near future.

How much have school supply costs increased?

The “price of a typical school supply list has increased 7.7% over the past year, with some essentials seeing much larger jumps,” according to an analysis from progressive think tanks The Century Foundation and Groundwork Collaborative. The highest spikes were seen among lunch boxes, which had a 26.8% year-to-year jump; notebooks, up 23%; index cards, up 22%; and notebook paper, up 20%. In total, families will pay about $175 more on school items in 2026, the think tanks said.

The spike in school supplies isn’t entirely new. The average “school supply list costs about 34% more than it did 10 years ago,“ which “works out to roughly 3 to 4% per year over the last decade,” said WWL-TV. In addition, “today’s supply lists often go well beyond the basics, with requests for disinfectant wipes, paper towels, copy paper and, in some cases, electronics like Chromebooks or laptops.” These requirements can “leave families with fewer opportunities to save.”

Combined with the rising cost of food, the average U.S. household will spend about $4,000 this year between school supplies and school lunches, the think tanks said. At least 45% of parents “plan to take on debt to pay for back-to-school shopping this year,” according to a Credit Karma survey, while half of American parents are “cutting back on other expenses to make room for back-to-school shopping,” said Deloitte.

Why have school supplies become so expensive?

Many are pointing to the economic policies of the Trump administration as a cause. The White House’s tariffs “on a range of imports have driven up the price of binders, pencils and other school supplies,” said CBS News. Many school supplies, including pens, markers and notebooks, are “manufactured overseas, making them subject to higher tariffs.” Newell Brands, the makers of supplies including Sharpie, Paper Mate and Elmer’s glue, announced they’d be implementing price increases to offset the tariffs.

Beyond the tariffs, other “school supply companies also blame higher energy costs due to the Iran war for having to raise their prices,” said CBS. ACCO, the parent brand of Mead and Trapper Keeper, has said that “higher oil prices stemming from the conflict have driven up the company’s costs and led to price hikes for consumers.” With all of these global issues, parents at home “don’t have a lot of wiggle room on the matter,” Julie Margetta Morgan, the president of The Century Foundation, said to The 19th.

Many parents are “searching their local back-to-school fairs for supplies, or seeking out backpack giveaways and school supply distributions” to lessen the burden, and others are “working more over the summer to cover increased costs,” said The 19th. Still, not all parents are feeling the relief. Content creator Victoria Albano posted a recent reel on Instagram showing a $230 Target bill for her incoming first grader’s school supplies. “I was up all night trying to figure out what to buy and what not to buy,” Albano told The 19th. “I’m not struggling, but I’m not where I want to be.”

Kevin Warsh is new to his job as chair of the Federal Reserve, but he is already making one big change that is reverberating through the financial markets. He is no longer providing forward guidance about how the Fed might react to future U.S. economic developments. Are rate hikes likely to control inflation? Warsh will not say. That leaves financial analysts uncertain how to navigate the economy.

‘Learning to play the ball’

Warsh “just broke one of the Fed’s most powerful habits,” Phil Rosen said at Inc. Fed officials voted to keep interest rates steady last week, but that decision “was the least interesting news of the afternoon.” Instead, Warsh’s decision not to signal what might happen next was the “most important” thing he did. This is a departure from “years of clear and frequent forward guidance” under former chair Jerome Powell. Warsh seems to believe that keeping future plans close to the vest “will force markets to think for themselves rather than waiting to be told which way to swing.” The markets are “learning to play the ball not the referee,” Warsh said to reporters.

That is discomfiting to market players. “No really, what is Kevin Warsh thinking?” Kai Ryssdal and Sean McHenry said at Marketplace. The chairman has signaled “commitment to getting inflation under control,” but the absence of forward guidance means the Fed’s plans for how to do that are “still a little unclear.” Markets understandably want to know “what are the contingency plans? What would it take for the Fed to raise rates?” New Century Advisors’ Claudia Sahm said to the outlet. Warsh’s new strategy potentially “obscures the Fed’s framework for understanding and reacting to economic conditions,” Maria Eloisa Capurro said at Bloomberg.

It is a “good thing” that the “Fed is staying quiet” under Warsh, Benn Steil said at The Washington Post. The Fed’s forward guidance under Powell often relied on “faulty forecasts” that “regularly undershot actual inflation.” That “doesn’t enhance credibility” for the Federal Reserve. “The most useful forecast is no forecast at all.”

A ‘less transparent Fed’

“Silence isn’t golden for a world looking to Kevin Warsh’s Fed,” Nicholas Spiro said at South China Morning Post. Warsh and his allies are correct that the Fed’s “forward guidance often proved counterproductive” under Powell. But a “less transparent Fed” creates “uncertainty in an already messy and unpredictable world.” Warsh has a “credibility problem” in that it is not clear to investors “how willing he is to push for interest rate increases” in the face of inflation. His silence “could be a pretext for ducking hard questions” about Fed policies.

Stocks dropped and bond yields rose following last week’s Fed meeting, said The Wall Street Journal, a sign that Warsh’s silent treatment has not reassured markets he will aggressively confront inflation with higher interest rates. Investors “want to feel comfortable that the Fed knows what it is doing,” Loretta Mester, the former president of the Cleveland Fed, said to the outlet. “Not saying anything” may not be sustainable.

What happened

The Federal Reserve Bank on Wednesday held its benchmark interest rate steady, but it “left the door open” to future rate changes “if inflation remains elevated,” said NPR. By a vote of 9-3, the bank’s rate-setting committee left short-term borrowing rates “in a range between 3.5% and 3.75%.” Holding the rate steady will impact the “cost of credit throughout the economy,” including for “auto loans, business financing and credit cards.”

Who said what

The split vote shows Fed officials have “splintered over how the central bank should tackle elevated inflation,” said The New York Times. “Pressure is building” at the Fed to “act on inflation that has run above its target for five years,” said The Wall Street Journal. The no-votes have “underscored officials’ fraying patience with looking past another price shock” amid tariff and AI-related market turbulence.

What next?

That three policymakers voted to increase the rates suggests that “in the coming months,” said the Times, the debate among economists “will center not on whether the central bank will lift borrowing costs, but when.”

What happened

Undeterred by Supreme Court rulings rejecting his tariff regime, President Donald Trump on Thursday launched a new workaround to continue taxing foreign imports. Under the new scheme, which replaces an expiring near-blanket 10% duty, the United States will introduce new tariffs of 12.5% on goods from trading partners, including China and Japan, that have allegedly failed to impose or enforce bans on goods produced with forced labor. Those deemed to have taken steps against forced labor, such as the United Kingdom and the European Union, qualify for a lower 10% rate. Goods from the 60 affected trading partners make up 99.4% of U.S. imports.

Who said what

“The real message here that everyone needs to take away is the president is going to always use the tools at his disposal to achieve his trade policy objectives,” a White House official told CNN. But “Trump’s new tariffs are angering voters,” said Politico. This latest move will only serve to “aggravate Americans who were already blaming the tariffs for stubborn inflation ahead of a midterm election dominated by economic issues.”

Trump has also “once again inspired anger and confusion in U.S. allies and trading partners,” said The Guardian. Many officials argued that the “rationale was hard to swallow.”

What next?

The tariffs are expected to face fresh legal challenges and risk in-kind retaliation. “Everything is on the table,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said after meeting with his provincial and territorial counterparts on Thursday to discuss a response.

Heat waves this summer have brought droughts to large swaths of the United States, and they are spelling disaster for many farmers. Coupled with the lingering problems from last year’s dry winter, some farmers say their livelihood in the fields is literally and figuratively drying up.

Why is this particular drought so bad?

While droughts are a frequent fixture of summertime, 2026 has been worse due to a confluence of factors, including the arrival of El Niño. The ocean-warming weather pattern “can contribute to severe droughts,” which often “disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world” including parts of the United States, said Mother Jones. Some experts believe this El Niño could be the strongest so far this century, making it an especially dry season.

The extreme heat in many American areas is also a contributor, leading to drought patterns that are “intensifying across several key farming regions while corn and soybean crops enter critical reproductive stages,” according to the USDA. Some areas in the Western U.S. are routinely reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is “increasing stress on vegetation and raising concerns over fire ignition.”

Farmers are also still recovering from an unusually dry winter, which was an “extraordinarily dry one in the Western part of the country” and has been “taking a bite out of farmers' plans,” said PBS News. One notable dearth is occurring along the Colorado River system in Arizona, where the drought is “pitting farmers against residents of cities and suburbs as well as industrial users including data centers, solar projects and semiconductor plants,” said Reuters.

How are farmers being affected?

Many could be “feeling the impacts of the ongoing drought and extreme heat this summer both in the short-term and long-term future,” said WRAL-TV Raleigh. Some customers have had to cut back on buying plants because of water restrictions, which have also “led to some smaller crops” this summer. “We just have enough water to grow what we normally grow. We didn’t expand any more this year,” farmer John Harmuth said to WRAL-TV.

Across the country in California, a similar scenario is playing out. The state has been the “king of broccoli production for decades,” but “water struggles provide an opening for New York, Maine and other Eastern states to boost their own production of the green vegetable,” said Politico’s E&E News. While California isn’t “about to be unseated” as the top broccoli grower, farmers in the Golden State may see increased competition as farmers in the East “could fill some of the gap caused by drought if the region coordinates its efforts.”

With farmers continually losing access to water, many are turning to state governments for solutions. In Arizona, farmers are fighting with “housing developers and solar companies” who are “buying up agricultural land,” said Reuters. They are urging Arizona politicians to “impose a moratorium on residential growth, arguing that farmers are critical to the country's food security.” Innovations such as “cross-country water pipelines similar to those for oil” could also help, said farmer Jace Miller to the outlet. Companies “can't just keep taking water from agriculture.”

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have undoubtedly made their mark on healthcare. But they have also begun to shape the broader economy.

While there are those “salivating at the prospect of where AI can go in the years ahead,” perhaps the “bigger leap in the near term” is the “technological miracle that is stopping us salivating at all,” Jim Reid, the global head of macro and thematic strategy at Deutsche Bank, said in a commentary. Perhaps the GLP-1 is the “real short-term general-purpose technology for a wider range of consumers, especially in the U.S.” In other words, the age of the Ozempic economy has arrived. These are some of the ways you might feel the impact.

Restaurants

People on GLP-1s have shifted how they spend money on eating out. People taking the drugs go to restaurants and order out half as often as they did before, according to a survey by Deutsche Bank, though they spend slightly more each visit. Brands with “differentiated, healthier offerings or more occasion-based demand” are likely to be more competitive, said Investopedia^.

Still, restaurants in the U.S. appear to be “going through a rough period,” and some attribute the difficulty to the “growing use of weight-loss drugs,” said The Motley Fool. Sales are down while “inflation rages for salaries, food and other input costs.” If chains can “pivot to lighter, higher-protein meals,” demand may “bounce back in the years ahead.” But if Americans “start consuming vastly fewer calories” because of weight-loss drugs, this could be a “permanent reset for the entire sector.”

Groceries

Because GLP-1’s help eliminate “food noise,” which can “lead to bingeing and distracting thoughts about eating,” patients are “cutting back on snacks and spending more on healthy items,” said The Washington Post. Compared with non-GLP-1 households, GLP-1 users “reduced their spending by 10%” over a year across “100 categories including groceries, quick-service restaurants and tobacco,” according to data company Numerator.

The “fallout could hurt the snack food industry,” but some companies are “innovating and acquiring health food brands.” They’re focused on “high-protein items,” which “support muscle mass, are highly satiating and boost metabolism,” as well as buying more “quick and healthy frozen meals.”

Researchers increasingly see a “shift away from volume” with customers’ grocery shopping and instead note a move toward what economists call “premiumization,” Benzinga said. Consumers may eat less, but they seem willing to “spend more on nutrient-dense products,” especially protein.

Alcohol

Studies have shown that GLP-1 drugs can suppress alcohol cravings among heavy drinkers. According to NielsenIQ data, users spent “14.5% less in the category after starting the treatment,” while nonalcoholic wine and beer purchases among the group “ballooned by 1,158% and 935%, respectively,” said the Post. Meanwhile, “high-protein drinks and probiotic soda brands that promote gut health” are seeing significant growth, as they are popular among users of weight-loss drugs.

Retail

Sales of smaller-sized clothing for both men and women have increased, according to a study by Impact Analytics. Demand for women’s tops in sizes extra small and small rose by two percentage points between 2022 and 2024, while demand for large and extra large sizes was down by two percentage points. Analysts believe it will “probably be more difficult to find larger sizes in stores,” with retailers “shifting most of that inventory to online only,” said the Post.

Meanwhile, credit and debit card data, according to Consumer Edge, shows that “formal-wear sales surged 80%,” and sporting goods “jumped 24%” in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. The shift could indicate a “need [or] desire to buy new clothing and accessories after undergoing a positive life change,” said Michael Gunther, Consumer Edge’s head of insights.

There are also more “affordable and eco-friendly ways to spend on apparel,” the Post added. Consignment and thrift shop spending surged 80%, according to Consumer Edge, as “consumers look to save as they go down sizes.” Meanwhile, resale outlets are “seeing an uptick in larger sizes for donations and consigning.” They are also contributing to the “estimated $47 billion in apparel that customers send back to online retailers each year because it doesn’t fit,” said Investopedia.

Due to the risk of muscle mass loss, GLP-1 users are encouraged to exercise and strength train. They’re also spending more on items linked to a more active lifestyle, like wearable electronics, which saw sales rise 29% over six months among the group, according to Consumer Edge.

Airlines

Analysts are also predicting future winners in the Ozempic economy. The dropped pounds may have a “surprising perk for airlines too,” said The New York Times: “lower fuel costs, as slimmer passengers lighten their aircraft’s loads.” The four largest U.S. carriers, “American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines,” could save upwards of $580 million a year altogether in fuel costs, according to a study by financial firm Jefferies.

Lower passenger weight could “reduce fuel use by 514 million gallons annually,” according to an analysis by Michigan State University, Benzinga said. The amount saved by the airlines would be “approximately $2 billion a year,” MSU economist Bill Knudson said.

Workforce

This shift is not so much about consumer spending, but it has an economic impact linked to changes in workforce potential associated with GLP-1 use. For nonworking women, those who use GLP-1s are 27% more likely to start a job within 18 months of their weight loss than those who aren’t using GLP-1s but want to, according to a study published by Harvard economics professor Rebecca Diamond.

These weight-loss treatments may also “influence broader factors tied to workplace performance,” including “energy, focus and long-term productivity,” according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine and analyses from organizations such as the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company, said Forbes.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Monday signed proclamations imposing 50% tariffs on a wide range of Canadian imports, claiming that America’s second-largest trading partner has unfairly discriminated against U.S. cars, alcohol and dairy products. The tariffs, set to take effect in 30 days, rely on Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which has never been used to levy import duties and is untested in court. Some products, like energy, would be exempt, but the new tax will apply to goods that comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement, the White House said in a fact sheet.

Who said what

The new tariffs “could unleash a new wave of economic chaos, with risks of higher inflation and further fraying of relations” with Canada, The Associated Press said. A senior administration official “said that Canada was one of the only nations other than China that retaliated against Trump’s previous tariffs and must be held accountable.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that “Canada, as is its right,” had “merely matched” Trump’s tariffs, but his country “stands ready to engage intensively” to address a “trade dispute” that “has raised costs for families, particularly in the U.S.”

What next?

The new tariffs would apply to nearly $20 billion of Canadian goods, the White House said, or roughly 5.2% of Canadian imports last year. But Trump’s “invocation of 338 is the nuclear option,” threatening all U.S. trading partners and injecting “massive uncertainty” into the global economy, Cato Institute economist Scott Lincicome said to the AP. “We crossed the Rubicon.”

Polls matter, but the stock market might be President Donald Trump’s favorite barometer of success. “Everybody’s profiting” when the markets rise, he said to reporters recently. But that’s not quite true. Rising stock prices are nonetheless a consolation for the president, and shaky market responses to controversial policies have spurred him to shift course on tariffs and war with Iran.

‘Economic pressure’

The president “considers market reaction a key measure of success,” said The Washington Post. The metric helped launch the now scuppered attempts to end fighting with Iran. Markets have reacted badly to surges in fighting — the S&P plunged Monday after the U.S. reimposed a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz — but “every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship,” Trump said to reporters last month as he explained his attempts to reach a deal.

Most presidents “play down the idea that they are susceptible to economic pressure” when making foreign policy, the Post said. But Iranians decided that Trump’s devotion to Wall Street and its negative reaction to the Strait of Hormuz closure “gave them leverage” to take a harder line and extract concessions, Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney said to the outlet.

Trump’s close attention to stock indexes “risks conflating the fortunes of ‌financial markets with the broader experience of U.S. households,” said Reuters. Roughly 40% of Americans “do not have money in the markets.” And the markets do not measure the health of private firms or small businesses that serve as the “backbone of the U.S. labor market.”

The stock market has grown by $15 trillion since the president began his second term, though that is mostly held by the richest 1% of the country. A poor response to Trump policies seems to matter mainly “when corporate or financial interests are at stake,” Groundwork Collaborative’s Alex Jacquez said to Reuters.

‘Not the litmus test’

The president’s new “Trump accounts” for newborns are expected to draw more young Americans into “long-term wealth-building” through stock markets, said Yahoo Finance. But the markets are “not the litmus test the American public wants” from the presidency, Ali Vitali said at MS NOW. Trump’s recent financial disclosures revealed “billions in wealth growth for the president and his sons,” but the voters “standing at gas stations” and paying higher prices at the pump probably find it “unfair.”

Stock investors have figured out to “pounce” when Trump shows signs of “buckling” on unpopular decisions, Katie Martin said at the Financial Times. Still, the bond markets that buy and sell federal debt are telling a different story about Trump’s policymaking. U.S. bonds have “never recovered from the drop in price” they experienced at the start of the Iran war. And there are signs that “large, conservative investors” are “reducing their exposure to risks around U.S. institutional credibility” and moving to Canadian and European bonds instead. That means American officials “will have to work a little harder” to keep attracting the bond investors they need to “balance the books.”

Just days away from her expected departure, Rachel Reeves defended her legacy to the “great and the good of the City” in the annual Mansion House speech, said the Financial Times.

Her “valedictory” address claimed successes in reduced government borrowing and lower NHS waiting lists. “Loud applause and even whoops of support from guests” indicated support from the finance sector, too, even if possibly not reflected across the country.

But many in the audience were preoccupied by one question: “who would be in charge of the UK’s fiscal policy next week”?

What did the commentators say?

“Farewell, Rachel Reeves, the blubbing chancellor who made us all cry,” said James Moore in The Independent. According to most polling, she is by far the “most unpopular chancellor on record”. She may have resisted “juvenile attempts” to tax the billionaires advocated by many in her party, but she opted for “one of the worst possible means” to raise funds, in hitting employers with higher National Insurance.

But by far her “darkest legacy” is the “million young people not in education, employment or training”. Ultimately, despite a handful of isolated wins, Reeves has “rarely shown the kind of bravery or instinct needed for this great office”.

Reeves’ record is the worst of “any chancellor of modern times”, said financial columnist Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph. In her Mansion House speech, she primarily presented herself as the only person who could provide stability. “The trouble is, none of it was very convincing.” The economy’s “stagnant” growth only looks “tolerable” in the context of poor performances from other G7 countries, unemployment is on the rise, and debt has “soared” to close to “100% of GDP”. Given her shortcomings, her belated attempts to appeal to Andy Burnham’s regime were “cringey” at best. “It was an embarrassing end to a dismal chancellorship.”

“Barely a sector has escaped unscathed” from Reeves’ “duplicity”, said Alys Denby in CityAM. The first, and telling, blow was her “acrobatic triangulation” over the definition of a tax on “working people”, breaking her manifesto pledge by freezing thresholds. She will be remembered for “dissembling, breaking promises and making Brits poorer”.

Not everyone will be glad to see the back of Reeves, said Politico. Her tears in the Commons once sent financial markets “spiralling”: “now they’re the ones sobbing”. She is uniquely “friendly to the City”, typified by her “smoked salmon offensive” of holding regular breakfasts with City chiefs in the run-up to the 2024 election. With uncertainty over her successor, “things can only get worse” for the financial elite.

A “fair assessment” of Reeves’ tenure in No. 11 “would not be wholly negative”, said The Times’ editorial board. “She has a couple of sizeable achievements to her name.” She relaxed some of the “onerous” regulation on businesses, made reforms to the London Stock Exchange and “consolidated” the “fragmented” pensions industry. “Regrettably”, however, Reeves’ negatives “outweigh the positives”. Labour may have inherited a “sizeable fiscal problem”, but with Reeves’ “disastrous” first budget, they “exacerbated it”.

What next?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is likely to become Reeves’ successor when Burnham’s cabinet is announced on Monday, said the Financial Times. Mahmood is on the right of the Labour Party and is viewed as a “tough operator and capable minister”, overseeing “contentious” immigration reforms. Since the reports broke, the markets have “responded positively”. Speaking on Wednesday, Burnham said that he might “ask for a little bit more” in tax, and refused to rule out a wealth tax. Whatever the selection, the future chancellor’s “big task” will be to frame a convincing autumn Budget.

“Dare I suggest there are the seeds here for a comeback” for Reeves, said Moore in The Independent. The UK is in a “precarious predication fiscally”, and we “shouldn’t underestimate” Reeves’ standing with the markets. If the Burnham project goes “horribly wrong”, he may find himself calling on someone to “steady the ship”. “The record shows that Reeves can take the blows. She could do it her way.”

What happened

China on Tuesday reported “one of its lowest quarterly growth rates in decades,” the Financial Times said. From April to June, the world’s second-largest economy grew just 4.3% compared to the same period last year — below economists’ projections of 4.5% and down from 5% growth in the first quarter.

Who said what

This is a “rare admission of economic weakness for China,” CNN said. Despite “surging exports buoyed by the AI boom,” the country still faces a “weak domestic economy and sluggish consumer spending,” The Wall Street Journal said. “Tensions with trade partners, including the U.S. and the European Union,” also remain, CNBC said. Focusing heavily on exports while domestic demand falters is “really quite unsustainable, to be frank,” Alicia Garcia-Herrero, an economist with financial firm Natixis, told CNN.

What next?

Such “disappointing growth” is likely to fuel calls for government stimulus measures, “including a policy rate cut,” CNBC said. The ruling Communist Party’s policymaking body meets later this month and the “extent of the slowdown will likely dominate the agenda,” said Bloomberg.