What’s happening in Washington has always had a big impact on global markets. That’s been especially true since Donald Trump won the US presidential election with his America First agenda, ushering an era of trade wars, tax cuts, and increased government spending.
The US economy is doing well. GDP growth is robust and the job market is strong. Yet Donald Trump’s approval rating is low, and his party is expected to lose a lot of seats in midterm elections on Tuesday. So does that mean the economy no longer matters for elections?
It’s been more than a decade since the twin calamities of a housing crash and financial crisis savaged the US economy. At long last, its workforce is returning to pre-crisis shape.
The American economy grew a solid 3.5% in the third quarter. Today’s GDP print is the last big piece of economic news before voters go to the polls on Nov. 6, and coming after the second quarter’s 4.2% growth, it is the second consecutive quarter of strong growth. If voter sentiment does indeed turn on “it’s the economy, stupid,” as strategist James Carville famously put it, Donald Trump and the Republicans should be breathing a little easier.
Donald Trump just signed a bill to combat America’s staggering opioid crisis. The law beefs up addiction treatment, education, and policing of illicit drug flows.
Donald Trump once embraced Harley Davidson as an icon of his America First vision of US manufacturing potential. Now the global blowback from his trade policies are punishing the company and its customers—and sending Harley to set up factories on foreign shores.
Let’s face it. When it comes to creating a creepy Halloween atmosphere, the modern pop canon doesn’t have much to work with. Fortunately, ye olde Europeans liked their music a lot more chilling than “Thriller.” In fact, during the 19th century, it was composers like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner who truly cracked the code of creepiness. The sonic dread they pioneered involved two key ingredients that horror movies and metal bands still use today: a forbidden sequence of notes known as “Satan in music,” and a spooky little ditty that Gregorian monks sang about the apocalypse.
No producer in his right mind would try to make a reality TV show about central banking. Yet somehow Donald Trump is managing to generate drama out of monetary policy, of all things.
The US already has a trade war with China on its hands. Recent signals from the Trump administration suggest it may be gearing up to accuse China of currency manipulation, too.
Donald Trump’s tariffs on China are going great, the US president assured the world yesterday. “Their economy has gone down very substantially,” Trump said on Fox & Friends.
Nearly everything Americans consume came to them by way of a truck. And, of course, trucks are—at least for now—driven by people. Low pay for truck drivers, therefore, helps keep prices of US consumer goods in check. Consequently, a possible shortage of truckers could drive up their pay, causing flare-ups in inflation that could hurt the whole economy by triggering a recession (paywall).
Finally, it’s here. The bad news the financial media has been searching for, doggedly, for the last six months. As stocks plunge across the planet, fears of a recession are resurfacing.
Tensions between the US and China just keep rising. Last week, for example, US vice president Mike Pence made a speech laying out the Trump administration’s case for an all-out economic confrontation with China, beyond its current tariffs on Chinese goods.
The US jobs market is tighter than a pair of skinny jeans. Only 3.7% of people in the labor force were out of work in September. That’s the lowest unemployment rate since 1969. Meanwhile, the American economy added only 134,000 jobs—below expectations, but not exactly surprising, given the hit of Hurricane Florence last month.
In August, US president Donald Trump issued a grave warning for the World Trade Organization: If the trade dispute resolution body doesn’t “shape up,” the US will split.
Donald Trump has long vowed to tear up NAFTA and replace it with a deal that benefited American workers and companies. But where it concerns medicines, his new deal—dubbed the un-mellifluous US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—only works for US corporations, at the expense of American workers. It also will deal a big blow to Canadian healthcare consumers.
It was a close call, but North America’s 24-year-old trade alliance has been salvaged. Late last night, the US and Canada struck a final deal on an updated North American Free Trade Agreement, which will be rechristened the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
After losing more than half its value against the dollar since the beginning of 2018, the Turkish lira is finally enjoying a patch of relative calm. But even in the unlikely event that the lira has hit bottom, it’s still a huge problem for the country’s economy.
A lot of things went really badly for the US when the financial crisis hit in 2008. But in at least one respect—for reasons that have baffled analysts—the US got off relatively easy.
Attention, Kmart shoppers. Thanks to Donald Trump’s trade war with China, your prices might be about to go up.
Turkey’s central bank just did something doubly bold. It hiked interest rates to a whopping 24%, up from the 17.75% level instituted in June. And in so doing, it defied president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s strongman and self-proclaimed “enemy of interest rates.” Behold:
America’s war on poverty “is largely over and a success,” declared Donald Trump’s administration last July (paywall). And indeed, the US Census Bureau just reported that 12.3% of US households lived in poverty in 2017, down from 12.7% in 2016.
Donald Trump has made his ignorance of Economics 101 abundantly clear—from his late-night phone calls to ask how the dollar works to his constant confusion over the cause of the US trade imbalance. Bob Woodward just added another striking episode to the list.
As black markets go, Canada has a pretty weird one. Every so often, authorities bust “cheese barons” and “mozzarella mafias”—smugglers bent on turning a profit on bricks of cheap foreign cheese.
