Breitbart Business Digest: Ask Not for Whom the Hormuz Tolls
This week, the war almost escalated into the destruction of an ancient civilization; but instead it turned into an argument about toll collection. Progress and peace!

This week, the war almost escalated into the destruction of an ancient civilization; but instead it turned into an argument about toll collection. Progress and peace!

In each month this year, the number of consumer goods categories declining in price has grown.

Consumer sentiment plunged in early April to the lowest level in the survey’s seven-decade history, as the Iran conflict weighed heavily on Republican household views of the economy.

Higher gasoline prices pushed up the consumer price index in March but price pressures were muted outside of energy.

President Donald Trump warned Iran on Thursday against charging fees on tanker ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

A careful reading of the latest data shows an economy where the inflation problem is largely behind us.

The spending data indicate strong consumer demand, undermining suggestions that consumers have been exhausted by persistent inflation or are retreating due to concerns about slowing job growth.

The idea that the United States might accept an Iranian fee regime in the Strait of Hormuz has produced something close to panic in the usual quarters.

Stocks rose all around the world and oil prices plummeted on the hopes that a two-week ceasefire will lead to a longer-lasting peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran.

U.S. stock futures jumped higher and oil prices fell after President Trump announced a two-week cease fire and a potential longer peace deal with Iran Tuesday night.

Immense shifts in immigration and border policies from the Biden era to the Trump era have impacted the way we calculate the labor force participation rate.

Powell’s term ends May 15. But he and NY Fed honcho John Williams are scheming to keep him in place if Kevin Warsh’s confirmation is delayed.

Here is a question that has been nagging at economists: why has wage growth held up so well when payroll growth has been so weak?

New orders for services rose to their highest level in more than three years in March, the Institute for Supply Management reported Monday, as strong demand across the economy proved resilient to the spike in energy prices driven by the U.S.-Israel military campaign against Iran.

The break-even rate of employment growth — the number of new workers needed on payrolls each month to hold the unemployment rate steady — has collapsed to near zero, according to converging analyses from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

As the Biden immigration-driven labor force disaster is healed by Trump’s immigration policies, breakeven employment falls to historic lows—rewriting the rules for reading jobs data.

Jobs boomed in March, exceeding expectations by nearly 300%.

One year after Liberation Day, with many tariffs only taking full effect mid-year amid heavy front-loading, the policy has delivered measurable results.

The Labor Department said Thursday that new claims for state unemployment benefits dropped by 9,000 to 202,000 in the week ended March 28, from the prior week’s revised level of 211,000.

A year ago, President Trump said he would bring egg prices down. That is a promise made and a promise kept.

The people telling you the labor market is cracking probably failed to update their models for the single biggest structural change in the U.S. labor force in a generation.

American factories expanded at their fastest pace in nearly four years in March, shrugging off a war-driven surge in input costs that has dominated headlines but failed to dent the sector’s momentum.

American consumers came roaring back in February, with retail sales beating expectations across the board and snapping a two-month streak of disappointing readings.

Private employers added 62,000 jobs in March, blowing past the 40,000 gain economists had forecast, according to the ADP National Employment Report released Wednesday.

The JOLTS report looks less like a labor market losing steam than one settling into full employment in a country where the labor force has stopped growing rapidly.

American consumers shrugged off the Iran war and rising gas prices in March, pushing the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index up to 91.8 from 91.0 in February — well above the 87.9 reading economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected. It

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that the Fed is inclined to look past the energy shock stemming from the war in Iran.

Speaking to undergraduate economics students at Harvard University, Powell said the standard central-banking response to energy shocks is to wait them out rather than react with policy changes.

This is the Breitbart Business Digest weekly wrap, where we review a selection of the economic and financial events of the past week without incurring any unnecessary labor costs or burning excess petroleum.

Americans’ concerns about energy costs have not increased since the start of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, even as gas prices have jumped nearly a dollar a gallon, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent excoriated the Financial Times on Thursday, calling the British newspaper “tabloid trash” and accusing its journalists of fabricating a story claiming he had praised the Bank of England’s governance structure as a model for tightening oversight

The March survey also suggests some political trouble for the Trump administration and Republicans eight months ahead of the mid-term elections. The index tracking expectations among Republicans fell sharply, from a reading of 100.3 to 94.2.

Rebalancing of America’s international accounts should have been a central policy objective of any presidential administration over the past three decades. The Trump administration, however, is the first to recognize this.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cast the confrontation with Iran as a two-front war on Thursday, telling President Trump that American economic strength has been as critical to the campaign as the military operation unfolding across the Persian Gulf.

While the OECD sees higher headline inflation from rising energy prices, this doesn’t mean higher underlying inflation for the U.S.

Without the assurance of millions of new workers arriving—three million arrived on average in each of President Biden’s final two years in office—employers are deciding to keep current jobholders in place.

Although this week brought what looked like bad news on productivity, the underlying story was much milder than the initial diagnosis suggested.

A swing in investment income drove the largest quarterly improvement in two years.

Mainstream macroeconomists argue endlessly about why America runs trade deficits. The answers they give are deeply unsatisfactory because they are so far removed reality.

U.S. business activity growth slowed to its weakest pace in nearly a year in March as the war with Iran sent energy prices surging and rattled consumer and business confidence, according to a closely watched survey released Tuesday.
