Finance and the Economy

America’s 25-Year Tax Cutting And Fiscal Train Wreck

July 14, 2025 Jack Rasmus, Canadian Dimension. Educate! Donald Trump, Federal Debt, Finance and the Economy, One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Tax cuts for the rich

On July 4, the US Congress passed Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—or BBB for short. The mainstream media and economists have mostly been reporting the details of the tax cuts contained in the bill—that is, which taxes got cut, how much accrued to businesses and the wealthy as opposed to the rest of us, what the impact is on GDP, and maybe even on government deficits and debt. All interesting facts. But not the most important. They purposely ignore the cuts in historical perspective and the bigger picture they represent.

America For Sale! Everything Must Go!

July 2, 2025 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Educate! Big Beautiful Bill, Class Struggle, Congress, Donald Trump, Failed State, Finance and the Economy, Privatization, Republican Party

The U.S. government has fallen into the hands of people who lack proper metaphors; all they know is business. The nation should be “run like a business” according to these unimaginative suits among the GOP, who haven’t read or studied enough to consider how the government might be run like anything else. The problem with this thinking is it will, by inevitably following the profit motive, lead to a terminal phase. With the House passage of President Donald Trump’s budget legislation “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the United States has reached the private equity looting stage of the metaphor. The logic of this scheme will collapse, but it might bring us all down with it.

What Many Environmentalists Get Wrong About The Money System

July 2, 2025 Matthew Slater, Resilience. Educate! Commons, Environmental Activists, Finance and the Economy, Money

Amongst my environmentalist friends, one of their favourite novels of recent times is ‘Ministry for the Future’. In the book, the author Kim Stanley Robinson shocks us with how abruptly climate change might unfold. He also describes a policy response which seems unusually bold – the creation of a new currency that is linked to reducing carbon emissions. As an expert in alternative currencies, I was delighted that popular fiction turned some of my ecologically-minded friends on to the subject of money. I’d viewed environmentalism as failing to stem pollution and habitat destruction because the dominant ideology of growth, competition, and profit was seemingly out of their scope.

Trump Is Setting The US Economy Up For Another Great Financial Crisis

June 27, 2025 C. J. Polychroniou, Truthout. Educate! Donald Trump, Economic crisis, Finance and the Economy, Trump Administration, wealth inequality

The financial system of the United States has always been prone to instability and crises. Now, however, under the new Trump administration, which is pushing for major cuts in regulation, including in the cryptocurrency sector in which the Trump family has a major financial stake, the financial system has become more vulnerable than ever, posing serious risks to the wider economy. Of course, this matters very little to Donald Trump, his family, and his billionaire friends. For Trump, the actual meaning of “America First” is “self-enrichment.” In the interview that follows, progressive economist Gerald Epstein, a leading expert in finance and banking, talks about the changing nature of the U.S. finance system under Trump 2.0.

Pizza Goeth Before A Fall?

June 6, 2025 Jon Jeter, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Economic insecurity, Finance and the Economy, Recession, Worker Rights

While economists, politicians and pundits sift daily through a mountain of data—from unemployment rates to gross domestic product, inflation to bank lending rates—one overlooked economic indicator points unambiguously to a deep and imminent economic downturn: Pizza. In its February 24th earnings call with the financial press, Domino’s Pizza CEO Russell Weiner reported a 3.2 percent spike in carryout orders during the previous quarter, combined with a 1.4 percent decrease in deliveries. Weiner attributed this change in consumer behavior to “macro and competitive pressures,” or, in layman’s terms, households in the U.S. increasingly can’t afford delivery fees and driver gratuities that can easily add $10 to the price of a pizza.

What GNDI Leaves Out Of Pacific Economies

June 5, 2025 Arnie Saiki, Onibaba. Educate! Australia, Finance and the Economy, Gross Domestic Product, Pacific Islands

The recent presentation of the 2025 Pacific Update at the University of South Pacific hosted by Australia National University on Gross National Disposable Income (GNDI), introduced a revised approach to economic measurement for the Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Delivered by Professor Stephen Howes, in collaboration with Dr. Rubiat Chowdhury, the presentation argued that GNDI is a more accurate measure of income for the region than the widely used Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The failure of GDP as a national accounting metric is evident, and we should all agree that GDP has been a failure for Developing Countries and regions, particularly Pasifika.

The Economic ‘Protracted War’ Between The US And China

June 5, 2025 John Ross, Geopolitical Economy. Educate! China, Donald Trump, Finance and the Economy, Tariffs, Xi Jinping

China and the U.S. have come to a 90-day trade agreement. This was a clear victory in the first battle of the “trade war” for China — as was admitted even in the U.S. media. As Bloomberg, a fiercely anti-China source, summarised the analysis of the overwhelming majority of Western media: “Xi Jinping’s decision to stand his ground against Donald Trump could hardly have gone any better for the Chinese leader.” But it would be an error to mistake this decisive victory for China in the first battle with a belief that the U.S. will abandon the economic struggle against China – it will not. This is in economic terms a “protracted war”, not a single battle.

Wage Stagnation Has Made ‘Minimal Quality Of Life’ Out Of Reach For Most

May 20, 2025 Sharon Zhang, Truthout. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Low wages, Wages, Worker Rights and Jobs

The ability to afford basic needs and wants in line with living a “dignified life” in the U.S. is increasingly out of reach, new research finds, naming wage stagnation and soaring prices as factors driving unaffordability. According to an analysis released by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) last week, a “minimal quality of life” is out of reach for the bottom 60 percent of American households, or those with incomes of about $100,000 a year or less. Researchers pinpoint stagnating wages and decreases in workers’ spending power as well as increases in costs as reasons for growing unaffordability. According to the researchers, the minimal quality of life has doubled since 2001, with 2023 seeing the largest single-year increase.

President Trump’s Proposal To Eliminate Income Taxes: Can It Be Done?

May 9, 2025 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Debt, Donald Trump, Finance and the Economy, Tariffs, Tax Cuts

In February, President Trump said that tariffs would generate so much income that Americans would no longer need to pay income taxes. The latest plan, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is to abolish income taxes for people who earn less than $150,000 yearly. That move would affect roughly 75% of workers, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. On its face, this could narrow the wealth gap by boosting disposable income for low- and middle-income households without raising taxes on the wealthy — a politically clever alternative to progressive tax hikes.

Bonds Away!

April 24, 2025 Les Leopold, Scheer Post. Educate! Donald Trump, Finance and the Economy, Tariffs, US Bonds

I recently wrote about a somewhat mysterious group of financial traders known as the bond vigilantes. Their actions caused Donald Trump to abort many of his Liberation Day tariffs, but that does not make them the good-guy defenders of democracy. In fact, they are quite the opposite. Many understood that point, thankfully, but others wondered about the government bond market, how it worked, and why the value of something fully backed by the faith of the U.S. government might be mutable in value. Readers had questions and the answers will help us understand why Trump flinched when the bond vigilantes drove up the interest rates on government bonds.

Trump’s Tariffs Hurt The United States Much More Than China

April 22, 2025 Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. Resistance Report BRICS, China, dollar, Donald Trump, Finance, Finance and the Economy, Neoliberalism, Russia, Tariffs, Trade

Why has US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on countries all around the world? And in particular, why is Trump waging a trade war on China? What are his real goals? Well, to try to answer these questions, I spoke with the economist Michael Hudson, who is the author of many books, and who just published the new report “Return of the robber barons: Trump’s distorted view of US tariff history“. Michael Hudson outlined the history of the use of tariffs in the United States and in other countries, and he explained how Trump is using tariffs as a weapon of class war, to benefit the rich at the expense of the vast majority of the population, and also how Trump is trying to reshape the global financial system, in order to benefit the United States at the expense of everyone else.

Why Trump And Musk Ignore The Largest Money Laundering Scheme In Human History

April 14, 2025 Lee Camp, Scheer Post. Educate! DOGE, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Finance and the Economy

President Trump and Elon Musk will tell you they’re saving money for the US government and thereby the US taxpayer. The DOGE team have claimed that they have already cut out $65 billion of waste and fraud – equaling savings for the American people. Incredible! (I’m going to invest my cut of that money in an up-and-coming fad called “fidget spinners”.) Oh, I forgot to mention – Everything Musk has said is utterly false. “…some of the biggest errors in savings [announced by DOGE] are, as CBS first reported, a USAID contract for $650 million that was listed three times, as The Intercept first reported, a Social Security contract listed as $232 million, instead of $560,000, and an ICE contract that DOGE listed as $8 billion, when, in reality, it was $8 million.”

Will Trump’s Tariffs Trigger A Second Great Depression?

April 12, 2025 Jon Jeter, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Donald Trump, Finance and the Economy, Great Depression, Tariffs, Trade War, Trump Administration

That the Trump administration’s trade war will trigger a steep economic downturn in the U.S. is almost a foregone conclusion a week after the president announced sweeping new tariffs on imports. Last week, JP Morgan, the nation’s largest bank, estimated that there is a 60 percent chance of an imminent recession. That was followed by an announcement from Goldman Sachs, America’s second-largest investment bank, that its economists had raised the odds of a recession to 45 percent, representing the second time in a week that it has increased its forecast.

Chris Hedges Report: The Economics Of A Dying Empire

April 10, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Resistance Report Finance and the Economy, Trump Administration, US Empire

“These are levels of craziness that are part of the decline I suspect of all empires when they consume themselves,” Professor Richard Wolff says of America’s current situation in the outset of Donald Trump’s second term. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the history and rationale behind the decisions made by Trump and how it relates to the decline of the US empire. From tariffs to deregulation, Wolff says it is all erratic, uncoordinated and unpredictable, which are tangible signs of America’s decay. “You cannot tell people what a tariff will do.

China Retaliates With 84% Tariff As Trump’s Trade War Escalates

April 10, 2025 Abdul Rahman, People's Dispatch. Educate! China, Donald Trump, Finance and the Economy, Tariffs, Trade War

On Wednesday, April 9, Trump announced that he is raising the tariffs on China to 125%. Earlier that day, China raised its tariff on all American imports to 84% in response to the US raising the total tariffs on Chinese exports to 104% on Monday. The new rates will be effective from Thursday, the Chinese state council said in a brief statement. China also issued a white paper on Wednesday about its trade relations with the US. Published on the same day that Donald Trump’s so-called “reciprocal tariffs” regime went into effect, the white paper refutes his claims of a massive trade deficit with China.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

Daily movement news and resources