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.”

Read more

‘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.

Billed as a coronation, the change in prime minister is “unfolding more like a royal wedding”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “You feel an ambient duty to spectate and even celebrate, but you’d be mad not to stay sceptical”.

Andy Burnham is set to be the seventh prime minister in a decade, having surpassed the “magic number” of 323 Labour MP nominations, making it “mathematically impossible” to challenge him.

The result was “never in doubt”, said The Times. However, he may be in a position of strength, but “beneath the surface there are already seething resentments and jockeying for position”.

What did the commentators say?

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Britain has “fallen prey to some national sickness”, said Tom McTague, editor of The New Statesman. We cling on to the “giants” of the distant past in “Attlee and Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher”, but our post-Brexit politicians “barely seem to register”. It is up to Burnham to change that. Above all, he needs to create something, anything, “new and memorable” from what has been a “fevered, amnestic past decade”.

Burnham may turn out to be a “lucky prime minister”, said The Times editorial board. Embracing AI in its nascent stages could be “genuinely transformative” for the country’s fortunes. Immigration under “tough” Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is “beginning to come under control”, and despite being unpopular, Rachel Reeves’ tax rises could “ensure a falling budget deficit” in future. If he can make a bold “pro-business gesture”, such as opening up the North Sea, he could definitely “repair the damage of the last two years”. “There is hope.”

It is precisely Burnham’s ability to inspire such hope, regardless of his lack of policies, that is his “key asset”, said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. Politics requires a “feel for the country, the ability to tell a story and carry people with you”, and Burnham undoubtedly has a “genial public persona”. Personality stirs voters most deeply, and Burnham represents someone, like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who would “at last listen to those who feel neglected and failed by politics”. Often overlooked, inspiring hope is neither common nor a “nice-to-have, it’s an essential aspect of leading”, and few before have had it.

It is clear that the “charming and combative” Burnham has cause for optimism, said The Economist. A lot is in his favour, such as “decent ideas” to devolve power and reform property taxes, and his win in Makerfield showed a rare “appealing audacity” on a local and national level. But backbench MPs have “gained a taste for rebellion”, and Burnham has “yet to set out a convincing programme to fix Britain”. If the former mayor believes an “easy manner or an ability to skirt elephant traps is enough” he is mistaken.

What next?

The MP for Makerfield will “have his work cut out for him”, said Bloomberg’s editorial board. His headline mission thus far to devolve power to other English regions could succeed if done “prudently”, but “will take years to bear fruit”. He faces much more “immediate” priorities of stimulating growth and “curbing Britain’s swollen welfare bill”.

He must also initiate “transparent” reforms to VAT, council tax and business rates, while reducing regulatory burdens, expanding apprenticeships, and improving transportation and housing. He will take office with “advantages Starmer never possessed. For the country’s sake, he can’t afford to squander them.”

Because of his “lack of a personal mandate”, Burnham’s appointments will prove pivotal, said associate editor, politics Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Of those, the most “ferocious jockeying for position” lies in the appointment of chancellor, perceived to be a “case of Ed Miliband versus Anybody But Ed”.

More widely, surrounding himself with economists Jim O’Neill and Andy Haldane, as well as arch-Blairite James Purnell, shows a “pragmatic preference for smart people with an interest in getting stuff done”. Team Burnham have likened their task to “rebuilding an aircraft while it is in mid-flight”. There will be “much turbulence to master” to avoid “plunging” from the sky like his six post-Brexit predecessors.

Retired Americans who worked all their life while paying into Social Security may assume that both men and women are entitled to the same amount. But that belief doesn’t appear to align with reality, as according to recent studies, women may receive significantly less in Social Security benefits than their male counterparts. Looming benefit cuts could widen the gap even more.

How big is the Social Security gender gap?

Women receive $4,800 a year less than men in Social Security benefits on average, said AARP. The disparity is largely because women “still tend to earn less than men,” said CNBC. Over half of caregivers, 61%, are also women, said AARP, and as a result they are “more likely to take time out of the workforce or reduce their working hours to make time for those caregiving responsibilities,” said CNBC. Both of these factors “tend to leave women with less retirement savings.”

Other data from the personal finance website FinanceBuzz claims that there is an even larger gap in Social Security pay. According to FinanceBuzz’s research, women “receive an average of $1,760 per month in Social Security, 19.9% less than the $2,198 men receive, a gap of $438 every month or $5,254 per year.” Women make up about 55% of all Social Security recipients, but the “total monthly payout to men is higher ($54.4 million vs. $53.5 million), meaning women collect far less per person.”

How does this impact retirees?

While the pay gap has been improving in recent years, the “median earnings for American women working full-time are only 83% of those of their male counterparts,” and the financial consequences may be “felt long after women have retired from the workforce,” said FinanceBuzz. The “result is a retirement income system that faithfully mirrors the inequalities of working life.”

The ongoing disparity also means that Social Security cuts, which are slated to occur in 2032, would “more deeply impact women,” said USA Today. Elderly women are “far more likely than men to rely on Social Security to meet their basic needs,” Courtney Anderson, a social insurance legal fellow at the National Women’s Law Center, said to the outlet. Her organization is pushing for policymakers to “strengthen and expand — not weaken and cut — Social Security.”

These cuts would come at a time when women, especially elderly women, are already more likely to live in poverty than men. Between 2023 and 2024, the national poverty rate “significantly increased from 15.0% to 16.2% for older women while remaining unchanged for older men,” according to a National Women’s Law Center report. But these rates “would be far higher without Social Security, which has protected millions of older women from falling into poverty.”

Some “potential solutions are in the mix,” though they would require congressional intervention, said Fast Company. One recent proposal from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget “would cap Social Security payments to $100,000 per couple, reducing the amount paid out to wealthy retirees who rely on the monthly benefits the least.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) have also “floated the idea of lifting the payroll tax cap to make the Social Security program’s math work once again,” said Fast Company. This plan would “replenish the Social Security trust by collecting more for Social Security withholding” above the current income cap — a “limit that only benefits the highest earners.”

American women in the workforce have long been outearned by their male counterparts. And though the difference narrowed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the gap is now increasing as overall wage growth slows and the economy shifts to jobs dominated by men.

What did the commentators say?

U.S. wage growth is “steadily slowing,” but for women it’s “slowing even more,” said Marketplace. The gap got narrower during the last three decades of the 20th century due to “more women entering the workforce, broader minimum wage protections and better access to contraception.” That progress has “stalled” during this century, pausing briefly when “demand for low-wage labor spiked” during the Covid-19 lockdown. Now the gap is widening again, largely because women are “more likely to be in lower-paid, stretched-thin jobs, covering the households’ basic needs,” said Elissa Braunstein, a professor of economics at Colorado State University, to the outlet. Overall, women “earn 16% less than men on average,” said Forbes.

“When women dominate a field, pay goes down,” said Mary Noble-Tolla at Lean In. When parks and recreation jobs shifted from a male-dominated field to one largely staffed by women, for example, “wages dropped by 57%.” Mothers are “hit the hardest” by the disparity, but closing the wage gap would be broadly beneficial. Paying women “fairly” would “cut the U.S. poverty rate in half and inject over $1.6 trillion” into the American economy.

“Women aren’t born wanting to earn less money,” said Maia Mindel at The Argument. Some commentators have made the case that women earn less than men “simply because they choose to” by taking less paid overtime and more unpaid time off. But the preference for “predictable, flexible schedules” comes “almost entirely” from women with children at home. Policymakers can bridge the gap by “broadening access to public services” like childcare and early childhood education.

The wage gap means most American households have “far fewer resources” to pay for “housing, food and healthcare,” Stefanie O’Connell said at MarketWatch. And that struggle “follows women throughout their lives,” as women over the age of 65 are more likely than men their age to live in poverty. The gap is also a “major drag on the economy” because women “make most household purchases.” When they do not have as much money to spend, “both businesses and investors pay the price.”

What next?

“There is no single policy that will close the wage gap,” said Emma Cohn and Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics Blog. Possible solutions would include “pay transparency” laws that require employers to “include wage information in job postings.” Expanded medical and family leave requirements, universal childcare and an improved minimum wage would also help. Such efforts could “build an equitable economy that works for all.”

The United States mostly abandoned the construction of new nuclear power plants after 1990, but that is about to change. The Trump administration is attempting to jump-start a new atomic age with a program to build 10 new power plants by the mid-2030s. And federal officials say that dozens more facilities could come online after that.

What did the commentators say?

“This is the start,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said to reporters, per The Associated Press. The administration is providing $17.5 billion to “speed the development” of the new reactors in a bid to meet growing electricity demand from “massive data centers,” said the AP. President Donald Trump has made a goal of “quadrupling domestic production of nuclear power within the next 25 years.” But critics say the plants are “too expensive and riskier” than solar, wind and “other low-carbon energy sources.”

“Trump’s big nuclear play is here,” said Robinson Meyer at Heatmap. That is no surprise. Support for nuclear power has become “surprisingly bipartisan, at least at the elite level,” with figures as disparate as Trump and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) seeking to speed the development of new reactors. They are taking cues from countries like France and Sweden that have expanded their low-carbon power supplies by “undertaking large, state-led nuclear energy buildouts.” This should have benefits for the warming climate, but highlighting that benefit carries the “risk of discouraging the Trump administration.”

Nuclear power “should generate the cheapest electricity available,” said Alex Trembath at The Dispatch. Instead, the process of building new plants became “increasingly expensive over the decades” thanks to “overregulation, environmentalist opposition, and industrial mismanagement.” But the 57 plants that are online produce 20% of the nation’s power supply. Now it should be “time to build.”

The United States “used to be the world’s leader in nuclear power,” said The Washington Examiner editorial board. That ended because of “regulatory paralysis,” where “endless process had become an enemy of progress.” The Trump administration has now ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “speed up licensing” and created a Reactor Pilot Program that makes it easier for companies to “build, operate, and test reactors” under supervision from the Department of Energy. That has not yet resulted in a completed nuclear plant, but the “restoration of ambition” under Trump could “bring the nuclear renaissance America has needed for half a century.”

What next?

Hopes for a nuclear revival have been “longer on aspiration than action,” but the new loan program “could move the needle,” said Axios. Developing so many plants at once should “create more efficient, scaled, standardized and cheaper supply chains” that will enable the subsequent production of additional plants.

Even as the number of plants expands, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that oversees the industry is preparing to make “huge cuts” to hours devoted to safety and emergency inspections, said CNN. The changes “must be approved by five NRC commissioners to be finalized.”

The dollar has long been the world’s primary currency, giving the U.S. unusual sway over international affairs. But China’s yuan is emerging as a small-but-growing competitor, with consequences for American power and influence.

What did the commentators say?

China is building an “alternative financial system” designed to weaken the United States’ “power to dictate world affairs,” said The Wall Street Journal. The dollar is still used in 80% of international trade, and that dominance has given U.S. governments a “big advantage in policing global business.” But transactions conducted using Chinese currency allow some businesses and rival countries to evade the U.S. banking system. That is how Iran earned up to $43 billion in oil revenue in 2024 despite restrictive American sanctions. And such examples are growing in number: The yuan’s share of global finance has “tripled over the past five years,” still well behind the dollar but ahead of the euro.

The yuan is emerging as a “more important part of the global financial system,” Robin Harding said at the Financial Times. But it does not yet threaten the dollar’s dominance, in part because “China’s economic model depends on its own relentless accumulation of dollar assets.” Beijing “wants to buy oil in its own currency,” but it also wants to maintain its “massive trade surpluses” with the rest of the world, and those transactions are conducted in dollars. There is “little sign of the dollar losing control of the global financial system.”

Beijing “cannot decree demand” for the yuan, Agathe Demarais said at Foreign Policy. While China has “made genuine progress in building alternative financial channels” to U.S.-dominated systems, it “cannot translate its rising global trade footprint into greater use of its currency.” That is because China puts strict controls on the use of the yuan outside the country, making it “costly and impractical” for foreign firms to use. Absent a “massive shock,” it is unlikely the world will “embrace Chinese financial channels.”

Beijing “doesn’t need to displace the dollar” to weaken U.S. dominance over global finance, said The New York Times. But having an alternative “could expand China’s influence in a financial crisis.” And some countries will welcome that alternative. “There is a desperate desire in the world to escape the clutches” of the America-dominated system, Cornell University’s Eswar Prasad said to the outlet.

What next?

The dollar is still the “dominant currency” for loans to “developing economies,” said Reuters, but there are signs of change. Kenya last year agreed to convert its debt to China (for loans to construct a railway) from dollars into yuan to “cut borrowing costs.” Now countries like Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Zambia that have taken loans from China Eximbank are considering similar restructuring, and the bank is “encouraging — and in some cases requiring” national borrowers to “borrow in yuan rather than dollars.”

Alan Greenspan was perhaps the most influential economic policymaker of his or any era. The former Federal Reserve chairman died this week at 100, leaving behind a debate about whether he supercharged the American economy or inadvertently caused its near-destruction.

Greenspan “helped define modern American capitalism” during his two-decade Fed tenure, said NBC News. His policy judgments “created an enormous amount of wealth and prosperity for our country” during the decade-long economic expansion of the 1990s, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said to CNBC.

On the flip side, critics say the Ayn Rand acolyte’s embrace of laissez-faire capitalism set the stage for the financial collapse that caused the late aughts’ Great Recession. Greenspan’s push to deregulate financial institutions “stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe,” the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission said in a 2011 report.

Good? Or lucky?

Greenspan was a “maestro of monetary policy,” said The Economist. His Federal Reserve “kept the American economy humming” through one of the longest economic booms on record. But it was not long after he left the Fed that the global financial crisis arrived. Greenspan defended the institution’s “light regulatory touch” that critics blamed for the crash, and he argued that the Obama administration’s interventions were “preventing the massive correction” that markets needed to recover. Such excuse-making raised a question about Greenspan’s formerly shiny reputation: “Had he been good, or merely lucky, and then unlucky?”

No one promoted the free-market system “with more ardor” than Alan Greenspan, Roger Lowenstein said at The New York Times. Those principles “work well most of the time,” but the 2008 financial collapse “was not one of those times.” Greenspan’s Federal Reserve “failed to crack down on hyperpermissive lending terms” that let Americans too easily borrow too much money for houses they could not afford. The damage to Greenspan’s reputation “should be imprinted” in the memory of every economic policymaker.

Greenspan’s “worst moment” came when he pronounced himself “shocked” that banks had failed to protect themselves or their shareholders in the rush to make bigger profits, said The Wall Street Journal. In truth, Greenspan had a “keen” understanding that “government can’t fine-tune the economy or create wealth.”

Lessons for Kevin Warsh

Greenspan’s supporters remember his Fed delivering “mostly stable prices, booming asset markets and steady economic growth,” Jonathan Levin said at Bloomberg. Those fans include Kevin Warsh, the new Fed chairman appointed by President Donald Trump. Warsh should understand that Greenspan’s hot economy was partly produced “from a good deal of economic and demographic luck” — the kind of positive development “Warsh can’t bet on today.”

The newly appointed Fed chairman should learn from Greenspan’s legacy as a “bipartisan operator,” Harry Kraemer said at Forbes. Greenspan served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, after all. The Fed’s commitment to “balancing low unemployment and rising inflation does not have to be politicized.”

With the U.S. and Iran arriving at a “memorandum of understanding” to end hostilities, President Donald Trump seems to think petroleum prices will come down immediately. “Let the oil flow!” he wrote on social media. But while average gas prices did fall just below $4 per gallon after the deal was signed, economists say extended relief from high prices could take much longer to arrive.

When will gas prices come down?

Drivers might expect that oil prices will start to lower as soon as the deal with Iran is inked, but they will “probably have to wait weeks or longer to see meaningful improvement,” said The New York Times. Gas prices often fluctuate in an “up-like-a-rocket, down-like-a-feather” manner, meaning gasoline costs “quickly rise alongside the price of crude oil but are slow to follow its descent.” Gas stations tend to lose money when the price of gas goes up, so when oil starts to “go down, station owners are slow to bring retail prices down to make up for their poor financial performance on the way up.”

Trump is also hopeful that the reopening of the long-contested Strait of Hormuz, and the reactivation of its oil-shipping lanes will help ease the price burden. But there is a “big difference between reopening the Strait of Hormuz on paper and actually resuming the flow of oil through it,” said The Atlantic. While a small number of ships have started traversing the strait, the U.S. and Iran are “far apart on crucial issues, including Iran’s nuclear program,” which could “dissuade oil producers from resuming operations, insurance companies from reducing currently sky-high rates and ‘Ships of the World’ from starting their engines.”

Once ships do start moving again, there will be a “gradual process of resuming east-west traffic, with international actors providing additional support,” Gregory Brew, a senior analyst on Iran and oil at the Eurasia Group, told Intelligencer. But it will “take longer — probably between three and four months — for the region to return to normalcy.” Many countries in the Middle East aside from Iran have had their oil production affected. In Saudi Arabia, virtually “all oil production has been shut in” or capped, said Brew. So a “full return to prewar production and refining levels is likely to take weeks, months or even years,“ said Reuters.

What is the bigger picture?

Fas prices presumably staying high for a while could affect more than just the gas itself. Republicans are “hopeful prices will soon ease near pre-war levels” because the midterms are on the horizon, said Politico. Even if prices go down, voters may carry negative thoughts about Trump’s economy with them into the voting booth.

Other economic elements that rely on petroleum will still be affected as well, most notably airline travel. Aviation experts “have spent months warning that even if the war ended, travelers should not expect airfares to go down immediately,” said The Associated Press. Airlines often buy fuel in advance and adjust their schedules according to demand, meaning “lower oil and jet fuel prices can take weeks or months to get factored into the cost of commercial flights.”

Fuel prices remaining elevated will also affect the grocery aisle. Fuel accounts for 15% to 30% of the total price of food, according to the Independent Grocers Alliance. It “can take months for an energy shock like the one caused by the Iran war to wind through the food supply chain and raise grocery prices,” said the AP. Food, much like gas and travel, may be expensive for a long time to come.

While Republicans have generally been associated with deregulation since the 1970s and 1980s, President Donald Trump has overseen a stratospheric rise in deregulatory policies during his second term. The White House argues these deregulations are about eliminating the red tape of Washington, but critics are worried about Trump’s rolling back of protections.

‘Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation’ executive order

Just days after Trump took office again, the White House enacted perhaps its most consequential policy regarding deregulation. Trump’s Executive Order 14192, titled “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” established a 10-to-1 rule for federal agencies; it ordered that anytime an agency enacted a “new regulation, it shall identify at least 10 existing regulations to be repealed,” according to the order. The goal of the rule is to “alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people.”

The EO, beyond establishing deregulatory guidelines, “also requires more upfront disclosure of forthcoming rules,” said Forbes. The order led to a slew of actions being taken by federal agencies and also stated that all new regulations should have no cost. This is “effectively impossible to accomplish when issuing any regulation at all, as nearly every regulatory change represents some level of cost to come into compliance,” said the Economic Policy Institute.

Global warming deregulation

Trump has worked to repeal several factors of the country’s standing on climate policy, most notably a 2009 finding, which “focused on emissions from motor vehicles but later regulations of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and methane emissions from oil and natural gas operations are based on it as well,” said the Brookings Institution. The repeal removed a “key federal tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the United States toward a greener economy.”

White House officials say that “overturning the regulation will save more than $1 trillion and will help cut the price of energy and transport,” said BBC News. Environmentalists don’t seem to buy this argument. The deregulation is “going to force Americans to spend more money, around $1.4 trillion in additional fuel costs to power these less efficient and higher polluting vehicles,” Peter Zalzal from the Environmental Defense Fund told BBC News. At least 24 states are suing the Trump administration over the 2009 repeal.

Workplace safety

Throughout its first year back in office, the Trump administration aimed to “rewrite or repeal more than 60 ‘obsolete’ workplace regulations, ranging from minimum wage requirements for home healthcare workers and people with disabilities to standards governing exposure to harmful substances,” said The Associated Press. The changes also applied to workers in other high-risk industries, including those in mines, and would “limit the government’s ability to penalize employers if workers are injured or killed while engaging in inherently risky activities.”

Many labor rights organizations lambasted the move. The deregulation “indicates a readiness to compromise the health and lives of workers, especially Black and brown workers who are overrepresented in the blue-collar industries that would be impacted, in pursuit of corporate profits,” said the Center for Law and Social Policy. Despite the pushback, the government maintains the slashes will “cut regulatory burdens, spur job creation and fuel economic opportunity for American workers and businesses,” said the Department of Labor in a press release.

Commercial fishing

Trump, in another bit of climate-related deregulation, signed a proclamation to restore commercial fishing “within three of America’s marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean, rolling back protections for areas that are considered pristine ocean ecosystems,” said USA Today. The proclamation expanded the legal commercial fishing area to “about half a million square miles in the Pacific,” with the White House saying the move is “aimed at boosting the U.S. fishing industry and lowering seafood prices for consumers.”

The deregulation has many worried about fish health, especially because Trump is also a big promoter of ocean mining. The move also came as the Trump administration shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which involved the “decommissioning of a vast network of ocean floor sensors that collect data on marine ecosystems, ocean currents and global climate data,” said Truthout. The White House is ultimately “ developing the ocean for offshore oil drilling and mining — basically, as a gas station and a garbage dump,” ocean policy expert David Helvarg told the outlet.

Nuclear power

The White House also turned its crosshairs toward some of the alleged red tape around nuclear energy. The Trump administration “overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public,” said NPR. These changes were implemented to “accelerate development of a new generation of nuclear reactor designs.”

Energy experts cautioned that nuclear deregulation comes with safety risks. The White House is “taking a wrecking ball to the system of nuclear safety and security regulation oversight that has kept the U.S. from having another Three Mile Island accident,” Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told NPR. The nuclear free rein is “yet another example of the Trump administration's push to accelerate nuclear energy, albeit through unconventional methods,” said Reason magazine.

Financial services

Trump has taken aim at the banking industry as a major arm of his deregulatory platform. With Trump’s authority, financial services regulators are “undertaking the biggest overhaul of bank supervision since the 2008 financial crisis,“ said Reuters. These regulators argue that less stringent policies are needed because banks have “become too preoccupied with processes and pursuing minor issues, and should focus on core financial risks.”

The president himself has also “personally complained that banks have hidden behind reputational risk management to deny services to conservatives, claims they deny,” said Reuters. Financial experts say rolling back these regulations has weakened the banking industry’s power to “police problems that do not inherently amount to material financial risks, but which may eventually ⁠lead to problems — such as control lapses, governance or other process issues.”

Governmental powers

All of the deregulations point to a general withering of the federal government. The White House’s “structural deregulation” approach “aims to compromise the capacity of the federal government to fulfill its core functions,” said Lawfare. Within weeks of retaking office, Trump went on a federal deregulation push “more sweeping in scale and scope than what we anticipated and far beyond what the president tried to do in his first term.”

Trump’s “structural deregulation” is “distinct from standard, ‘run-of-the-mill’ deregulation that aims to weaken or rescind certain agency rules or policies but falls short of a wholesale attack on agency capacity,” said Lawfare. Rather, Trump’s agenda includes “regulatory rollbacks that weaken health, safety, financial or labor standards.” Trump’s executive orders have also played a role, most notably Executive Order 14215, which applies the “White House regulatory review process to independent agencies,” said The Regulatory Review, a change that has not historically been implemented.

The war against Iran upended the global economy and sent prices soaring. What happens now that a fragile peace has arrived?

Higher prices will “likely outlast the Iran war,” said The Associated Press. Fuel and food costs will come down slowly, airline tickets will stay pricey, and shipping costs will remain elevated as supply chain kinks are repaired after the Strait of Hormuz is reopened. There is a “good deal of uncertainty about how the reopening will unfold,” said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, to the AP.

Rebuilding ‘could take years’

The war “permanently altered” the global economy, said Patricia Cohen at The New York Times. Many countries discovered their “profound vulnerability” to shocks from relying on imported oil for energy supply, sparking a long-term “transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.” And China is “poised to benefit most” from that shift.

More broadly, the world economy has been “kicked onto a path of slower growth and higher prices,” said Cohen. Countries and businesses will not “simply pick up where they left off before the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran.”

President Donald Trump long promised that oil prices would “drop like a rock” after the war ended. But that will be a “difficult promise for Trump to keep,” as the oil industry is experiencing “extraordinary practical challenges” to restoring supply chains disrupted by the war, said David Goldman at CNN. Tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz face a “bottleneck” after Iran mined the passageway, leaving only “two narrow passageways” for safe travel. Gulf States will also need time to restart wells shut off during the war because there was no way to export the oil. Plus, rebuilding oil facilities damaged by attacks “could take years.”

The end of the war may mark a “new era of U.S. inequality,” said Matt Peterson at CNBC. The conflict heightened an “already historic disconnect” between Americans who “share in the affluence” generated by AI-driven stock market gains and “those who can’t.” The second group was forced to dip into its savings to pay for the “energy crunch” caused by the war, exacerbating already simmering economic tensions. The war “didn’t create American inequality, but it hasn’t helped.”

Volatility ‘already baked in’

It “may be too late” for Republicans to benefit from lower gas prices they hope will result from the new peace, said Politico. GOP officials fear that “voter perceptions of a sour economy are already baked in” to the midterm elections outlook.

The problem is that actual relief will take time to arrive. Price volatility is “expected to last beyond the summer months” and into campaign season. Voters are unlikely to “forget about the months and months of high gas prices that added to their pain” when they go to the polls in November, said Democratic pollster John Anzalone to Politico.

What happeed

Consumer prices rose 4.2% last month from a year earlier, the highest inflation reading since April 2023, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Most of the increase was due to rising fuel prices. But the “higher energy costs are rippling through the food supply chain,” affecting beef, coffee and produce, The Washington Post said. Asked about the rising cost of living, President Donald Trump “took a surprisingly optimistic tack,” The Associated Press said. “I love the inflation,” he told reporters.

Who said what

Trump’s take was “unexpected” given that voters rank the economy “as a top concern — and have given Trump low marks on that issue” after he’d pledged in 2024 to “quickly vanquish inflation,” the AP said. “His argument now is that higher prices are solely a function of the Iran war” and that “relief is already on its way” because of a “secret mission” that he said had already moved 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. “As soon as this war is over,” he told reporters, prices will drop “like a rock.”

What next?

Despite Trump’s claims, efforts to reopen the strait “have so far stalled” and oil disruptions are already baked in through 2026, Reuters said.

Another element of aviation is causing trouble for the air travel industry, and this time it’s the airplanes themselves. The companies that manufacture aircraft engines are increasingly coming under fire for alleged price gouging, which airlines say is making it harder to afford new planes. Combined with increased demand from travelers, airlines have found themselves between a rock and a hard place.

Why are aircraft engines becoming more expensive?

Aircraft engines have “emerged as an acute flashpoint for the industry, both in terms of their performance and lack of availability,” said Bloomberg. Many airplane manufacturers also increasingly rely on “less than a handful of manufacturers, creating quasi-monopolies and dependencies.” These companies are then able to drive up the price of building the engines.

Manufacturers are also turning toward a trend in energy-efficient engines, but this comes with its own problems. Continuing shortages of the “industry’s most fuel-efficient aircraft engines have sent their market values soaring,” said the Financial Times. The constraints of building these types of engines have “become one of the biggest concerns for the industry as manufacturers have struggled to keep up with booming demand for Airbus and Boeing planes.”

These factors mean that engines have become one of the most expensive elements of building new airplanes. A pair of jet engines now represents up to 80% of the total market value of a new plane, according to aviation finance company Avolon. It represents a marked change from two decades ago, when the engines would have only “accounted for 20% to 30% of an aircraft’s value,” said the Financial Times.

The continuing spike in value means the price to lease new engines has increased significantly over the past few years. In January 2025, it cost $400,000 to lease two engines from manufacturer Pratt & Whitney; in comparison, leasing an A320neo plane itself cost just $306,000, according to data from aviation consultancy Cirium cited by the Financial Times. The supply chain failures “across the industry from manufacturers cost airlines at least $11 billion in 2025,” said Bloomberg, a trend that could continue through the remainder of 2026.

How are airlines reacting?

Many airline executives are angry at the inflated cost of plane engines. Most say they are “being forced to remove engines and take them for maintenance into crowded shops earlier than expected, which is driving up costs and sucking up the fuel savings they were supposed to get from the engines,” said CNBC. The increased costs represent a “paradox: Engine makers dazzled carriers with more fuel-efficient options for new planes from Boeing and Airbus,” but now “production shortfalls and disappointing reliability with those engines are becoming costly problems.”

So far, most engines “have not reached the reliability that airlines need, though there have been improvements,” said CNBC. As airplanes “push the limits, it sometimes comes at the cost of reliability, and what we all are seeing is that those engines have to go into unscheduled maintenance far more frequently than prior engine generations,” Alexis von Hoensbroech, the CEO of Canadian carrier WestJet, told CNBC. A “lot of the fuel savings are in fact eaten up by unplanned maintenance costs.”

People looking to grill hamburgers this summer may not get a respite from rising beef prices anytime soon, as an ongoing cattle shortage across the United States could compound high costs at the grocery store. Farmers are now worried the beef industry could be on the fritz for a while.

How is the cattle shortage affecting the beef market?

At the beginning of 2026, American cattle producers had 86.2 million heads of cattle nationwide according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), marking the lowest number to start the year since 1951. The number of cattle that had calved (given birth to a baby) was also down 100,000 from the prior year. Several economic and geopolitical factors have “been pushing livestock numbers down, including rising costs, international competition and increased consolidation in the cattle industry,” said NPR.

“Years of severe drought in the western United States” have also “strained feed supplies and forced many ranchers to reduce their herds,” said WTHR-TV Indianapolis. With less grain comes less grass for cattle to feed on, so “farmers have cut herd sizes — a decision that can shrink the nation’s beef supply for years.” The reduced supply is becoming unsustainable for ranchers.

As cattle become more scarce, their price goes up, and these higher prices have led many ranchers to “sell their livestock and have dissuaded them from buying new animals to rebuild their herds,” said NPR. Cattle farmers say they are being forced to gamble with the industry. “We could put another 100 head out on grass, with what our grass will hopefully be this spring, but then you’re also wondering too, ‘Is that too much of a risk?’” Amanda Hall, a cattle farmer in Lexington, Kentucky, told NPR.

What does the future hold?

Even as ranchers are looking for solutions to high prices, there is “no quick fix for tight supplies, as the sticker shock in the grocery aisles didn’t happen overnight,” said Bloomberg. But Americans don’t want beef any less just because it’s more expensive, and demand has “allowed big retailers to stay on the winning side of these sales, while meatpackers lose out, as larger accounts have leverage to negotiate their pricing,” David Anderson, an agricultural economics professor at Texas A&M University, told Bloomberg.

President Donald Trump’s effort to “lower beef prices has divided top administration officials and some of his closest allies,” said Politico, potentially throwing another wrench into the problem. Trump faces a dilemma in “trying to balance consumers’ concerns about rising grocery prices with those of his supporters in the cattle industry.” The administration’s decision to import large quantities of Argentinian beef has also rubbed many ranchers the wrong way.

The government still remains optimistic that the livestock lull is temporary. While short-term lows remain, cattle inventories “are expected to rise to 91.6 million head in 2034,” said the USDA. Prices in 2026 could reach record highs “before falling back through 2031 and then starting a new climb through 2034.” Other parts of the farm are also expected to grow, as “broiler chicken production is projected to reach successive annual record highs over the next 10 years.”

China’s manufacturing might is overwhelming Europe, and Europe is gearing up to push back. A trade war could be in the offing as Brussels seeks to protect the continent’s workers and factories from a flood of inexpensive imports from state-backed Chinese manufacturers.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is aiming for a “major crackdown on subsidized Chinese imports,” said Politico. Europe cannot “be the victim of a predatory strategy that is destroying our industry,” EU industrial strategy chief Stéphane Séjourné said to the outlet.

China is warning it will retaliate against any EU action. Europe is “going further and further down a radical path,” said state-run social media account Yuyuantantian, per The Wall Street Journal. The tit for tat could further unsettle a global economy already rattled by President Donald Trump’s trade policies and fallout from the Iran war.

What did the commentators say?

The Chinese economy is “taking everyone down,” Michael Schuman said at The Atlantic. The country has become a “government-subsidized, export-driven manufacturing juggernaut” that is “alienating trading partners.” That includes Europe, where Chinese imports are “costing Germany 10,000 manufacturing jobs a month.” The success of China’s export strategy may make its businesses seem “unstoppable,” but its continuation relies on the “assumption that other countries will continue to absorb China’s exports.” Beijing may instead be pushing its rivals to embrace a “protectionism that depresses prosperity for everyone.”

“What, precisely, is the problem with Chinese surpluses?” Martin Sandbu said at the Financial Times. Chinese car imports have indeed increased in recent years, but that merely “displaced imports from elsewhere.” The overall number of vehicles shipped into the EU has “remained steady” during that time. Europe could benefit from manufacturing competition “as a spur to faster productivity improvements at home.” That would be good both for European businesses and “for consumers.”

The EU may be “finally waking up to China,” Peggy Corlin and Luca Bertuzzi said at Euronews. The reassessment “has been long in the making” after “decades of deepening economic dependence.” But Europe is not entirely united on the issue. Germany, for example, is still focused on “securing market access for German companies in China,” while Spain is welcoming a “growing share” of Chinese investments. “Political will” is the “key determining factor” in what happens next.

What next?

Europe’s search for solutions is “increasingly urgent,” said The New York Times. EU officials are worried about the “imminent collapse of industry,” Jeromin Zettelmeyer, the director of the Bruegel think tank, said to the outlet. “The tone is basically panic.”

Curbing imports could ultimately be “profoundly tricky” in a European marketplace where consumers have become “hooked on what China is selling,” said the Times. The issue may soon come to a head. “Global economic imbalances” will be on the agenda for the G7 Summit of European and North American leaders later this month.

The war in Ukraine is unwinnable and could bring down the Russian economy. That’s the emerging assessment among Russia’s power brokers, as Vladimir Putin faces mounting challenges on the battlefield and at home.

Kremlin propagandists may still be “projecting confidence about the outcome of the war”, said Igor Gretskiy, of the Estonian-based International Centre for Defence and Security, but there’s been “a marked shift in mood” among Russia’s political and business elites. It’s no longer their “default assumption” that Russia will achieve its objectives.

What did the commentators say?

Setbacks have been mounting on several fronts, said Gretskiy. “First, the cracks in the Russian economy became impossible to ignore”, with the federal budget “deeply out of balance” and the deficit at the end of April nearly double what was planned for the whole of 2026.

“In the most serious sign of internal division” since Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago, senior Russian government officials have warned Putin that spending on the war “is on an unaffordable path”, said Bloomberg.

Then there is the military situation itself. Ukrainian drone attacks are causing severe disruption to Russia’s logistical networks and supply lines to the front, and long-range strikes have hit Russian oil-production infrastructure and even threatened Moscow. The Russian army is no longer able to grind out incremental capture of Ukrainian territory, and one million of its soldiers are thought to have been killed or wounded since hostilities began.

We’re in a situation where “the capabilities of both sides are comparable”, said Russian political scientist Vasily Kashin on Russia in Global Affairs. “Historically, such wars have only extremely rarely resulted in the complete destruction of one side.” Russia can have no hope “of annexing new large Ukrainian territories” when “it lacks the capacity to sustainably control and manage” them, and its goal of eliminating the Kyiv regime is “fundamentally unattainable at this stage”. The publication of such a damning analysis is “a further sign of growing dissent at the top of Russia’s political establishment”, said Catherine Belton, Russia reporter for The Washington Post.

“Sustaining the war machine” is also “eroding” the president’s “social base”, said anti-Putin activist Alexey Sakhnin in Jacobin. A recent poll by Moscow’s independent Levada Center suggests that 62% of Russians favour peace talks with Ukraine, with only 27% expressing support for continuing the war.

What next?

There are parliamentary elections in September, so the Kremlin will want to ensure that “increasingly evident war fatigue” doesn’t “affect the cohesion” of Putin’s system”, said exiled Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza in The Washington Post last week.

But if events continue to turn against him, Putin may feel he has not choice but to roll the dice and go for broke, Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Foundation told The Post’s Belton: “To a great degree, escalation is the only way to respond to a situation which you can’t control.”

Target is back on target. The big-box retailer known for affordable style has returned to its roots, sparking a turnaround after a multiyear slump.

The company’s first quarter sales were its “best results in four years,” said CNN. That’s the product of CEO Michael Fiddelke’s move to “win back shoppers with new, buzzy brands” such as Pokémon and Parke. Fiddelke took over earlier this year after a “series of strategy mistakes,” including cutting DEI programs and Pride displays, which sparked boycotts by the company’s largely liberal customer base. But now, Target’s “comeback strategy is working.”

‘Style and design’

Target is attempting to get back to what “historically made the chain distinctive,” said Axios. The company does best when it’s “truly leading with style and design at an incredible value,” said Fiddelke to reporters. Those elements help distinguish the retailer from rivals like Walmart and Amazon and are being applied not just to the products on Target’s shelves but also to “store design, remodels and even shopping carts,” said Axios. Style must be at the “center of how we think about the business,” said Fiddelke.

The company is also “executing its largest grocery transition” in more than 10 years, said Retail Touch Points. Target added 3,000 new food items to its grocery aisles during the first quarter of 2026, as well as 1,500 new health and wellness items. Customers are “actively seeking newness,” Chief Merchandising Officer Cara Sylvester said to reporters. Such changes helped, but so did consumers who seemed ready to spend during the early part of the year. Bigger-than-normal tax returns “were a source of upside to consumer spending,” said Chief Financial Officer Jim Lee.

Target’s quarterly report comes as analysts are watching to see if “surging gasoline prices due to the Iran war” are leading to consumer cutbacks, said The Associated Press. The cutbacks are also a sign of how well the company can weather becoming a “flashpoint” in culture wars. But boycotts and politics have “never been the main issue” behind the company’s slump, GlobalData Retail’s Neil Saunders said to the AP. Instead, customers felt Target was “failing on execution,” said the outlet.

‘We want to be careful’

The turnaround “may not be as smooth as the latest results imply,” said MarketWatch. Target must pivot from halting the slump to sustaining “full-scale growth,” said Brian Mulberry, of Zacks Investment Management, to the outlet. Though the company has upgraded its sales expectations for 2026, Fiddelke acknowledges the headwinds as consumers pull back from spending. “We want to be careful not to get out over our skis,” he said to reporters.

Next up are store revamps. Target and other big retailers are “pouring billions of dollars back into their stores” to lure customers even as online sales continue to occupy a bigger share of consumer spending, said The New York Times. Remodeling brick-and-mortar stores, Fiddelke told the outlet, is part of the strategy for “elevating the Target experience.”

‘The world cannot afford to fail women, children and adolescents’

Cyril Ramaphosa and Pedro Sánchez at Al Jazeera

In “too many parts of the world, giving birth still comes with more fear than hope,” say South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The “true measure of global progress is not found in financial markets or summit declarations” but in “whether a woman survives pregnancy and childbirth, whether a child is vaccinated and nourished and whether an adolescent can grow up healthy.” No “woman or girl should be denied access to life-saving care.”

Read more

‘Why everything feels more expensive’

Roland Fryer at The Wall Street Journal

A recent poll “found that 83% of Americans say it’s harder to buy a home than it was for previous generations,” and “they aren’t wrong,” says Roland Fryer. But the “explanation is more complicated than either side’s populists admit.” The “culprit is structural, not political.” Productivity gains “tend to concentrate in goods — cars, clothing, televisions, food — as technology steadily drives prices down.” Before “indicting the economy, consider what 50 years of growth actually delivered.”

Read more

‘Why Trump’s stock trades are so exceptionally corrupt’

Michael A. Cohen at MS NOW

Donald Trump is the “most corrupt president in American history,” says Michael A. Cohen. In the “first quarter of the year,” he “made more than 3,700 financial trades,” and the “conflicts of interest and personal corruption are simply astonishing.” Even “if it’s true that Trump is not involved in these stock purchases, the mere appearance of a conflict of interest is why, in the past, presidents have avoided day trading.” With “Trump, there’s always a worse tale to tell.”

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‘During National Police Week and beyond, law enforcement officers merit respect’

Randy Robertson and Josh McKoon at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

During National Police Week, Americans “pause to honor the brave men and women who put on the badge and willingly place themselves in harm’s way to protect our communities,” say Randy Robertson and Josh McKoon. We “remember the officers who made the ultimate sacrifice,” but “today, law enforcement officers are being asked to do more with less.” We “also must recognize the burden carried by the families of law enforcement officers,” as “they make sacrifices, too.”

Read more

What happened

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair in a 54-45 vote, with only one Democrat joining Republicans. President Donald Trump has aggressively pressured the central bank to slash interest rates and made that a condition for his chair pick. But “hot inflation readings are clouding the path for the rate cuts Warsh advocated as he essentially campaigned for the job,” The Wall Street Journal said.

Who said what

Warsh will start his four-year chairmanship amid “resurgent inflation, public discontent with the economy and unprecedented attacks on the Fed’s independence,” Axios said. No Fed chair has “been confirmed by such a narrow margin,” said the Journal, reflecting Democratic concerns that Warsh will be Trump’s “sock puppet.”

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that producer prices jumped 1.4% last month and were up 6% from a year earlier, the highest wholesale inflation numbers in at least three years. With the jump in consumer prices, it’s clear “America’s inflation problem is getting worse, not better,” Axios said. The producer price numbers were “so far above expectations,” said Carl Weinberg at High Frequency Economics, they “will set off alarm bells at the Fed” and “in the financial markets, too.”

What next?

Warsh takes the reins from Jerome Powell on Friday. Powell’s decision to stay on as a Fed governor amid lingering criminal threats from Trump’s prosecutors “could prove awkward” for Walsh, who “has vowed to embark on ‘regime change,’” The New York Times said.

From Meghan Trainor and Zayn to the Pussycat Dolls, artists are canceling their concert tours because of unsold tickets. This so-called blue dot fever — taking its name from the blue dots that represent available seats in a performance venue’s seating chart — reflects a lack of affordability and the reduced power of nostalgia.

Why are seats not selling?

There are “signs that consumer tolerance for high prices is breaking and a correction is taking place,” said The Times. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the average ticket price “increased from $96.17 in 2019 to $106.07 in 2022, marking the first time it had crossed the $100 threshold,” said Pollstar. The price of concert tickets peaked in 2024 at $135.92. In 2025, the price “dropped 2.4% to $132.62, but it’s still more than either 2022 or 2023.”

Directly after the pandemic, there was “such pent-up demand that it was really easy to tour and everybody was making a lot of money,” said J.R. Lind, a senior writer at Pollstar, to The Times. Now, there’s a “little bit of coming back to earth.” With “inflation and rising fuel costs,” affordability is “going to start affecting concerts.”

“Sky-high ticket prices” are happening because of “three key factors,” said Rolling Stone. “Supply and demand, as reflected in the controversial practice of dynamic pricing, rampant scalping, and one dominant company, Live Nation, controlling every source of revenue, including beer, food, parking and Ticketmaster service fees.”

In addition, touring costs have become high. The national average for regular gas is at $4.56 a gallon, with California at $6.17. Diesel fuel averages $7.49 a gallon in California, which is “critical for the trucks that move staging, lighting and equipment between cities,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “Those costs can quickly change the math for tours that depend on long-haul logistics.”

Are there cultural implications?

Along with the ticket prices, the cultural capital for many artists is dwindling. Artists are “getting booked into rooms too big for where they sit today,” Nathan Green, the CEO and co-founder of New Level Radio, said to Newsweek. Older artists banking on nostalgia are struggling most: Zayn, formerly a member of boy band One Direction, and the Pussycat Dolls, a girl group that was big in the early aughts, both recently canceled their U.S. tours.

In 2024, the “British band Oasis sold out its first North American tour since 2008 within an hour,” and “Coldplay, Hilary Duff and My Chemical Romance are among artists who have seen huge demand for live concerts despite the height of their popularity being two decades ago,” said Newsweek. Still, banking on old glory no longer works for everyone.

“Blue dot fever” disproportionately affects smaller or older artists. “Mega-stars and must-see tours continue to sell, while some arena and stadium runs find that streaming popularity, nostalgia or social media buzz does not always translate into thousands of $100-plus seats,” said the San Francisco Chronicle.

The problem could be helped by downsizing. “If the business goes back to booking artists into rooms they can fill, even if it means smaller venues and more nights, the show looks like a show again,” said Green. “The empty seats are a sign to every fan that the hype was bigger than the act.”

What happened

Consumer prices last month shot up 3.8% from a year earlier, the biggest year-over-year uptick since May 2023, the U.S. Labor Department reported Tuesday. The heated inflation was driven largely by a 28% year-over-year jump in gasoline prices tied to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran.

Who said what

The latest consumer price index underscored how “daily life in America is getting more expensive,” The New York Times said. Airfares were up 21% from a year ago and food prices rose 3.2%, with coffee prices jumping 19% and tomatoes up 40%. Trump’s tariffs are “still slowly filtering through to some goods,” The Wall Street Journal said, but the war “has presented a much quicker and more obvious shock that could be hard to reverse.”

Asked Tuesday if cost-of-living concerns were motivating his dealmaking with Iran, Trump said “not even a little bit.” His only concern is Iran’s nuclear program, he said. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

What next?

In a separate report Tuesday, the Labor Department said real average hourly wages fell 0.5% from March to April, meaning “most workers are effectively taking a pay cut even as the White House touts its economic record,” The Washington Post said.

Andy Burnham might be the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader, despite his lack of a Westminster seat, but he certainly isn’t the bond market’s favourite.

In fact, gilt traders see the Greater Manchester mayor as the “biggest threat” of all the potential candidates, said the Financial Times. He troubled investors last year when he suggested the country should not be “in hock” to the bond market. Six out of 10 fund managers picked Burnham as the candidate that would “trigger the most negative market reaction”.

Burnham has said his comments on the bond market were misinterpreted, but the political project he espouses and the vision he offers for the country’s future – Manchesterism – remains highly divisive. Critics see it as “mostly vibes and boosterism” that “relies on a bottom-up localism” difficult to scale at a national level, said PoliticsHome. Others see it as our potential economic and political saviour.

What did the commentators say?

Manchesterism is a “horrifically overused phrase” about how my city “does things differently”, said Stephen Topping in the Manchester Evening News. But it’s true. Manchesterism is “‘place-based’ rather than party political”. It involves “public services working closer together, and in partnership with both the private sector and community groups, to ensure the benefits of a stronger economy can be felt by more people”.

The Greater Manchester region has become the UK’s fastest growing economy over the past decade, “at more than double the rate of the national average”. Devolution has been critical: the “trailblazer” deal struck in 2023 has allowed Greater Manchester to “take public control of key services” such as the bus network, which has improved living standards and boosted the local economy. Those who have worked closely with Burnham believe Manchesterism “could work in other parts of the UK”, though it would pose “a radical departure from the UK’s largely centralised economy”.

Burnham’s programme has begun “delivering affordability and economic dynamism” by “regaining public control” of essential services, said Mathew Lawrence, director of progressive think tank Common Wealth, in The New Statesman.

Energy, water, housing, transport and care are “domains of inelastic demand” and “existential need”. So market governance of the supply side “produces rent extraction” and underinvestment. The public “pays twice: through higher bills” and taxes to fund support. But public control of essentials eliminates the privatisation premium. “Rebuilding public provision is not the alternative to fiscal prudence. It is fiscal prudence.”

Manchesterism might be the “buzzword of the day”, but it’s simply people projecting their “pipe dreams” on to Burnham’s “blank canvas of soft-left localism”, said Daniel Johnson in The Telegraph.

“The irony is that 19th-century Manchesterism was more or less the opposite of what the Labour Party now thinks it means.” Manchester was “both the laboratory and the showcase of the Industrial Revolution”, the “citadel of free trade”. It had nothing to do with Burnham’s “municipal socialism”. His proposed solution to Britain’s economic woes is “a muddled melange of municipal meddling, including tax hikes and more borrowing”. What Britain needs is the 19th-century version, which Burnham doesn’t understand.

The vision of Manchesterism Burnham outlined in January is, in practice, an industrial strategy – and there is “nothing new about those”, said Christopher Snowdon in The Critic. Economists have long criticised them for “misallocating resources, crowding out private investment, picking losers, and forcing taxpayers to bail out industries that are only kept on life support for political reasons”. How, exactly, can Manchesterism “stop us being in hock to the bond markets” when Manchester City Council is “one of the most indebted in the country”.

What next?

Burnham is planning to reassure the bond market that his possible election to Labour leader would “not trigger a financial meltdown”, said The Telegraph. Sources say he is planning to endorse a pamphlet outlining a framework for Manchesterism, setting out how it could be rolled out across the UK and “the wider economic theory behind his ideas”.

But the uncertain national landscape, in which voters are moving both further left and further right, could make the success of Manchesterism “a challenge for anybody”, Sarah Longlands, chief executive of the Manchester-based Centre for Local Economic Strategies, told Manchester Evening News.

Manchesterism is still in its early stages, yet for all the benefits devolution has brought, Greater Manchester is still “a tale of two cities”, with a great income and opportunities divide exacerbated by the cost of living crisis. “Growth in Greater Manchester has to be for everybody – otherwise, what’s the point?” Longlands said.

What happened

The federal Court of International Trade on Thursday ruled against the 10% global tariffs President Donald Trump imposed in February after the Supreme Court struck down steep import taxes he had enacted under a different legal authority. Trump’s tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 are “invalid” and “unauthorized by law,” the trade court said in its 2-1 decision.

Who said what

Thursday’s ruling dealt “yet another legal setback” to Trump’s “efforts to wage a trade war without the express permission of Congress,” The New York Times said. But the court “only explicitly blocked” collecting the tariff from two small businesses and Washington state, finding that the other 23 states in the lawsuit hadn’t paid any relevant tariffs. Another reason the ruling’s “immediate impact might be limited,” The Wall Street Journal said, is that the tariff expires July 24, at “which point the administration plans to pivot to different tariffs” that are “more routinely used and seen as legally durable.”

What next?

The ruling “weakens” Trump on his “core economic initiative” a week before he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss bilateral trade, The Washington Post said. It also “sets the stage for another protracted legal battle” over refunding the billions collected under another illegal tariff regime, Reuters said.

How big is true crime?

It’s a nationwide obsession. According to a recent study by Edison Research, some 230 million Americans, or about 67% of the population, consume true-crime content: documentaries, podcasts, YouTube videos, and books that delve into real-life murders, scams, and scandals. The genre’s popularity can be seen in last year’s top-5 most-watched documentary TV shows on Netflix. Four had a true-crime theme and the No. 1 series, American Murder: Gabby Petito, had more than 60 million views. On podcast charts, series such as Crime Junkie and the audio version of NBC’s Dateline routinely sit among the most downloaded shows. This demand for crime-related content has led media giants to heap cash on top producers: In 2022, Amazon paid more than $100 million for exclusive distribution rights to the hit podcast My Favorite Murder. For the loved ones of some of the victims covered in the shows, it’s traumatizing to see their real-life pain replayed for profit and entertainment. “I’m so tired of murder victims being used as cash cows,” said Charlie Shunick, whose 21-year-old sister Mickey was kidnapped and murdered in Lafayette, La., in 2012.

How did the genre become so popular?

True-crime stories have long been a subject of public fascination, from the penny dreadfuls of Victorian England to the murder-heavy newsmagazine shows launched in the 1980s and ’90s, such as Dateline and CBS’s 48 Hours. But it was an NPR podcast, Serial, that ushered in the modern true-crime craze. For the first season in 2014, host Sarah Koenig delved into the 1999 murder of Baltimore high schooler Hae Min Lee, finding weaknesses in the case that led to the conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. He was freed in 2022. That Serial season was downloaded more than 300 million times, and its success spawned thousands of copycats and a vast community of true-crime fans. “Everybody loves a whodunnit,” explains criminologist Scott Bonn.

Who are true crime’s biggest fans? 

They tend to be white and female. Women make up 62% of listeners to true-crime podcasts and an oversize share of true-crime TV watchers. Some social scientists say women may be drawn to the genre because, in an often violently misogynist society, they want to pick up on survival skills. “If you are more fearful, you are more interested in knowing more about how these situations can occur,” said psychologist Dean Fido. Others say it’s simple human nature to be fascinated with taboo subjects like murder and rape—just as it’s natural to rubberneck at a car crash. But critics argue that true crime gives Americans a misleading picture of real crime. Serial killers, a favorite of the genre, are exceptionally rare. And true-crime creators disproportionately focus on white female victims such as Petito, 22. Her 2021 murder in Wyoming Bridger–Teton National Forest received extensive media coverage, unlike the more than 700 Indigenous women who had disappeared in the park over the previous decade.

What happens when a crime is spotlighted?

Sometimes, coverage results in a breakthrough. The case of 19-year-old Kristin Smart, who was murdered in her California Polytechnic State University dorm room in 1996, went cold until 2019 when Christopher Lambert, then a Cal Poly student, started a podcast, Your Own Backyard. Listeners sent in tips, and in 2022 former Cal Poly student Paul Flores was convicted of Smart’s murder. True crime can also reveal miscarriages of justice: Investigative podcast In the Dark helped free Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Mississippi who faced execution after being tried six times for the same crime. But critics say those shows are outliers, and that most of the genre is pure exploitation. Family members of the 17 young men murdered by Jeffrey Dahmer were outraged by Netflix’s hit Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, saying the streamer not only failed to consult them but also glamorized the serial killer. “We’re all one traumatic event away from the worst day of your life being reduced to your neighbor’s favorite binge show,” said Eric Perry, a cousin of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey.

Are there other problems with the genre?

Independent sleuths can interfere with active investigations. After the suspected February kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie, hordes of true crime livestreamers set up camp outside Nancy’s Tucson home. Police had to deploy extra patrols to manage the vloggers, one of whom had a pizza delivered to the crime scene. Those streamers typically don’t adhere to the journalistic standards of mainstream reporters. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos had to publicly refute allegations made by some streamers that members of Guthrie’s family were involved in Nancy’s disappearance, calling the claims “wrong” and “cruel.” Meanwhile, some psychologists warn that hardcore fans can become desensitized to violence. My Favorite Murder listeners, who call themselves “Murderinos,” can buy T-shirts featuring the hosts’ catchphrases, including “Stay sexy. Don’t get murdered.”

Can such shows keep our attention? 

There are some signs the industry is stagnating. While true-crime podcasts today account for 15% of all new podcasts released, that share is down 20% from 2022, according to industry journalist Frank Racioppi. And today’s most-listened-to true-crime podcasts are largely the same ones as those four years ago. But few experts think our fascination with true crime will fade anytime soon, because it runs so deep. Dr. Michael Mantell, former chief psychologist for the San Diego Police Department, notes that prehistoric humans painted “true crime” images of people killing one another on cave walls. “This is not something that’s new,” he said. “It didn’t start with Ted Bundy. This began 30,000 years ago.”