Finance
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Jamie Dimon gets candid about national debt: ‘There will be a bond crisis, and then we’ll have to deal with it’
When it comes to national debt, the main lesson hawks want to impress on policymakers is the cost of inaction: How much the public will ultimately have to pay if officials don’t address deficits. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, has echoed this warning in the past. It’s better to get ahead of a
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More than two-thirds of U.S. schools say they’re unable to afford the cost of student free lunch—and MAHA’s dietary guidelines may make it worse
As more than two-thirds of U.S. public schools say they already can’t sustain free meals for their students, one economist is sounding the alarms and says the Trump administration’s updated dietary guidelines may make these financial troubles even worse. For the 2023-2024 school year, the government provided 4.8 billion lunches to the nearly 29.4 million
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‘Take the money and run’: Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke on why the UAE quit OPEC
The decision was shocking. But the announcement April 28 that the UAE was leaving OPEC caps years of tension where the desert state chafed under the cartel’s quotas, and recently, encountered severe strain in its relationship with Saudi Arabia, the group’s most potent force by far. Though it had felt strains before, it was the
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The $39 trillion national debt just got its own version of the viral Doomsday essay
America has its viral AI doomsday essay. Now it has a debt version. No Labels, the centrist political organization that has spent 16 years pushing bipartisan solutions in Washington, has quietly released Nightmare on Main Street—a fictional “oral history” narrated from the vantage point of 2029, in which a cascade of weak Treasury bond auctions triggers
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GM expects $500 million in Trump’s tariff refunds—just a fraction of the $3.1 billion in tariffs it paid last year
There’s a $500 million windfall General Motors is expecting to help boost its first quarter earnings. The catch? It’s a refund for tariff payments it made to the Trump administration—and it doesn’t come anywhere close to the billions it still has to pay. When the Supreme Court in February struck down tariffs the Trump administration
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Ray Dalio says the U.S. is ‘certainly in a stagflationary period,’ and what the Fed does next could make or break the economy
American households are already feeling the squeeze of a slower, pricier economy, a situation some observers warn could quickly cascade into a full-blown stagflationary episode—one in which growth stalls and inflation stays sticky. The Federal Reserve’s next move could determine whether those voices are right. For many consumers, the economy already looks like stagflation. Inflation
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U.S. consumer confidence inches up even as the Iran war sends energy prices soaring
U.S. consumer confidence rose modestly in April despite growing anxiety over soaring energy prices brought on by the war in Iran. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index inched up to 92.8 in April from 92.2 in March. Though the gauge measuring American consumers’ confidence has ticked up the past two months,
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BP’s profits more than doubled at the war in Iran pushed gas prices to new multiyear highs
BP’s profit more than doubled in the first quarter as the war in Iran drove energy prices sharply higher. On the same day that the British energy giant reported a banner financial performance, gasoline prices in the U.S. hit new multiyear highs, a point of increasing agitation for travelers, households and also businesses that are
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Activists call surging oil and gas profits ‘horrifying’ as energy giants post profits twice as high as 2025
If drivers saddled with pricey fees at the pump have been one of the biggest economic losers of the war in the Middle East, the companies selling that gasoline have emerged as the conflict’s clear winner. In mid-March, when the war was only two weeks old, market capitalization at the world’s six largest energy firms
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Janet Yellen on her legacy as the first woman to lead the Fed, Trump’s central bank clash, and Kevin Warsh’s tightrope
Throughout her career, Janet Yellen has broken barriers with several “firsts.” First woman to lead the Federal Reserve. First female treasury secretary. First and only person to hold the “big three” U.S. economic leadership positions—those two, plus chair of the White House council of economic advisors. Her latest honor is as a 2026 inductee into