For years, ProPublica has built its reputation on a simple premise: Follow the money.Whenever ProPublica investigates a corporation, a politician, industry or public policy initiative, its first questions are usually the same: Who benefits, who pays and what interests…
The first rule in reading an inflation report is to ask what kind of inflation it is. Demand inflation, wage-price inflation, tariff inflation, housing inflation, and energy-shock inflation are not the same animal. They do…
The financial press needed only minutes to take a hot CPI headline number and turn it into a Fed-panic story. CNN promptly won the ugly-poster-child award, telling viewers that consumer prices “spiked” and that the…
The latest trade report delivers a simple but powerful message: America is selling more to the world, importing more of what it needs to rebuild at home, and steadily shrinking the trade deficit. This is the…
A secure border means a safe and prosperous America. That is a central tenet of the Trump presidency. In the first days of President Trump’s second term, he moved with speed and force to halt the…
When I was getting my Ph.D. in economics at Harvard back in the 1980s, no institution was more revered and respected than the National Bureau of Economic Research.These days, the NBER seems to spend far too…
The April jobs report delivered another reminder that the American economy is stronger than the professional pessimists, Wall Street forecasters, and Washington spreadsheet jockeys keep insisting. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 115,000 in April, nearly double the…
For decades, Washington measured economic success by how much America could consume, borrow, import, and outsource. Wall Street got cheap goods. Multinationals got cheap labor. China got our factories. American workers got pink slips, hollowed-out…
Today’s advance estimate of Q1 GDP tells us the Trump economy is growing. Business investment is surging. The private sector is rebuilding. And the federal government is finally being put on a diet. Real GDP rose…
I recently spoke at a conference in Washington hosted by the National Council of Textile Organizations. It was a bittersweet experience.Sweet because during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Americans desperately needed masks, gowns, and…