Ronald Reagan and his fellow Republicans once invoked what they referred to as “welfare queens” as they made the case for reining in social spending in the 1970s and 1980s, painting a picture of unscrupulous women bilking the system to finance a sumptuous lifestyle. Now as they try to justify …
On a wet Wednesday morning in April, Ashley Holroyd had a steady but slow stream of customers into his coffee shop in Barrow-in-Furness, an industrial town in northwest England. The cafe, Coffee D’Ash, had been open for only about six months, and it barely filled the cavernous space. Despite the …
Less than a year ago, the Federal Reserve took decisive action to bolster the U.S. economy. With inflation easing and the labor market starting to soften, the central bank opted to go big, lowering interest rates by half a percentage point and signaling further cuts to come. Rather than a …
The latest message from the data on the U.S. economy is simple: So far, so good, until further notice. The labor market remained in a healthy state of balance as America entered a global trade war in April. U.S. employers added 177,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on …
The latest message from the data on the U.S. economy is simple: so far, so good, until further notice. The labor market remained in a healthy state of balance as America entered a global trade war in April. U.S. employers added 177,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on …
When Congress voted to normalize trade relations with China at the beginning of this century, U.S. manufacturers braced for a stream of cheap goods to begin flowing into U.S. ports. Instead, they got a flood. Imports from China nearly tripled from 1999 to 2005, and American factories, with their higher …
Ben Whelan is not the kind of carpenter to wax poetic about the joys of framing a wall or redoing a roof. Like a lot of men he knows, he started working in residential construction as a teenager because it was a reliable way to earn money. But he has …
There was little rest on Wall Street this weekend. There was plenty of anger, anxiety, frustration, and fear. Anger at President Trump for a brash and chaotic rollout of tariffs that erased trillions of dollars in value from the stock market in two days. Anxiety about the state of the …
President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on a scale unseen in nearly a century is more than a shot across the bow at U.S. trading partners. If kept in place, the import taxes will also launch an economic project of defiant nostalgia: an attempt to reclaim America’s place as a dominant …
For three years, the U.S. economy has been buffeted by rapid inflation, high interest rates and political instability at home and abroad. Yet it has proved surprisingly resilient, supported by the sturdy pillars of robust consumer spending, a rising stock market, and healthy balance sheets for households and businesses alike. …