Browsed by
Category: Economics

Mexico president touts friendly Trump call, but warns tariffs would kill 400,000 U.S. jobs

Mexico president touts friendly Trump call, but warns tariffs would kill 400,000 U.S. jobs

Reuters reports: Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Thursday she and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump had agreed to maintain a good relationship in a friendly phone call that appeared to ease tensions between the top trading partners amid tariff threats. Sheinbaum struck a more conciliatory tone a day after saying Mexico would retaliate if Trump carries out his pledge to impose a 25% tariff on Mexican and Canadian imports. “It was a good conversation and we are going to keep…

Read More Read More

The message to Democrats is clear: you must dump neoliberal economics

The message to Democrats is clear: you must dump neoliberal economics

Joseph Stiglitz writes: As the shock of Donald Trump’s victory sinks in, pundits and politicians are mulling what it means for the future of the US and global politics. Understanding why such a divisive, unqualified figure won again is crucial for the Democrats. Did they go too far left and lose the moderate Americans who make up a majority? Or did centrist neoliberalism – pursued by Democratic presidents since Bill Clinton – fail to deliver, thus creating a demand for…

Read More Read More

Musk asks voters to brace for economic ‘hardship,’ deep spending cuts in potential Trump Cabinet role

Musk asks voters to brace for economic ‘hardship,’ deep spending cuts in potential Trump Cabinet role

NBC News reports: In the home stretch of the 2024 election, voters who’ve been weighing both campaigns’ proposals to tackle living costs are now hearing a new pitch from the Republican side: accept some short-term economic pain to rein in government spending. That message has emerged from former President Donald Trump’s wealthiest backer, Elon Musk, who says that the GOP nominee’s plans to put the U.S. on firmer fiscal footing would likely entail “temporary hardship” for ordinary Americans. At a…

Read More Read More

The little-known factor driving up housing costs: dirty money

The little-known factor driving up housing costs: dirty money

James K. Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana write: The nation’s housing affordability crisis has become so acute that even our presidential candidates are paying attention to it. Former President Donald Trump blames immigrants for driving up prices and vows he will reduce demand by banning mortgages for “illegal immigrants” and deporting them. For her part, Vice President Kamala Harris promises to increase supply by building 3 million new homes. But the number of  housing units in the nation has grown faster…

Read More Read More

How Hurricane Helene could have widespread consequences for homeowners

How Hurricane Helene could have widespread consequences for homeowners

The Washington Post reports: When Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida on Thursday night, it made landfall in the state’s sparsely populated Big Bend, far from the glittering cities with expensive waterfront property to the south. But that didn’t stop Helene from becoming another multibillion-dollar superstorm. The hurricane’s massive size and record-breaking storm surge left an equally massive footprint of destruction across the Southeast, from Florida’s Tampa Bay region to Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. The storm likely caused $15 billion…

Read More Read More

How Kamala intends to bring prices down

How Kamala intends to bring prices down

Robert Reich writes: [T]he administration should be using the threat of antitrust enforcement to force corporations in concentrated industries to lower their prices. Biden’s trust-busters — Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department — have been doing excellent work but they need to do more targeting and threatening. This is the direction Kamala Harris wants to go. Since the 1980s, after the federal government all but abandoned antitrust, two-thirds of all…

Read More Read More

Massive appropriation of labor from the Global South enables high consumption in rich countries

Massive appropriation of labor from the Global South enables high consumption in rich countries

Phys.org reports: The high levels of consumption enjoyed by wealthy countries in the Global North are only possible because of mass appropriation of labor from the population of the Global South. This is evidenced by research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which indicates that this appropriation takes place through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. The new study, published in Nature Communications, measured the flows of labor…

Read More Read More

Food as you know it is about to change

Food as you know it is about to change

David Wallace-Wells writes: From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay. But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system…

Read More Read More

More immigrants boost economy, reduce budget deficit, Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper says

More immigrants boost economy, reduce budget deficit, Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper says

HuffPost reports: A “surge” of immigrants has boosted the U.S. economy recently and is projected to add almost $9 trillion to it through 2034, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Tuesday. The CBO, in an update to budget and economic forecasts made in February, said the current level of immigration of “other foreign nationals” was well above historical patterns and would continue to add to the overall size of the U.S. population, providing more workers for…

Read More Read More

Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought, report finds

Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought, report finds

The Guardian reports: The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found. A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C…

Read More Read More

The obscene energy demands of AI

The obscene energy demands of AI

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In 2016, Alex de Vries read somewhere that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as the average American household uses in a day. At the time, de Vries, who is Dutch, was working at a consulting firm. In his spare time, he wrote a blog, called Digiconomist, about the risks of investing in cryptocurrency. He found the energy-use figure disturbing. “I was, like, O.K., that’s a massive amount, and why is no one talking about…

Read More Read More

The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason

The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason

The Washington Post reports: Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world. That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of…

Read More Read More

Blow to Putin as Europe breaks free of Russian oil for good

Blow to Putin as Europe breaks free of Russian oil for good

The Telegraph reports: Western Europe has broken free of direct Russian oil imports for good in a blow to Vladimir Putin, research by the European energy consultancy Rystad suggests. Analysts found that the UK and much of Europe have reversed a years-long rise in reliance on Russian oil and gas before the Ukraine conflict, shifting instead to other suppliers such as the US and Canada. Jorge Leon, Rystad’s senior vice president for oil markets, said: “I think people underestimated how…

Read More Read More

As Ukraine’s economy burns, Russia clings to a semblance of prosperity

As Ukraine’s economy burns, Russia clings to a semblance of prosperity

The Guardian reports: Factories destroyed. Roads blown to pieces. Power plants put out of action. Steel exports decimated. A flood of refugees out of the country. Ukraine – the poorest country in Europe – has paid a heavy economic price for a two-year war against Russia waged almost entirely on its own soil. The figures are stark. More than 7 million people – about a fifth of the population – have been plunged into poverty. Fifteen years of human development…

Read More Read More

For the first time in two decades, U.S. buys more from Mexico than China

For the first time in two decades, U.S. buys more from Mexico than China

The New York Times reports: In the depths of the pandemic, as global supply chains buckled and the cost of shipping a container from China soared nearly twentyfold, Marco Villarreal spied an opportunity. In 2021, Mr. Villarreal resigned as Caterpillar’s director general in Mexico and began nurturing ties with companies looking to shift manufacturing from China to Mexico. He found a client in Hisun, a Chinese producer of all-terrain vehicles, which hired Mr. Villarreal to establish a $152 million manufacturing…

Read More Read More

Study of Indigenous and local communities finds happiness doesn’t cost much

Study of Indigenous and local communities finds happiness doesn’t cost much

Autonomous University of Barcelona: Many Indigenous peoples and local communities around the world are leading very satisfying lives despite having very little money. This is the conclusion of a study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which shows that many societies with very low monetary income have remarkably high levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those in wealthy countries. Economic growth is often prescribed as a sure way of increasing the…

Read More Read More