Breitbart Business Digest

One year after Liberation Day, it’s clear that the critics and panicans were largely wrong.

You’ve heard it from the whole spectrum of Democrats—from the rich hypocrites like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and to hapless spenders like Joe Biden who are just horrible with money. They all declare that the wealthy need to “pay their fair share” in taxes.

The more of the world’s oil market that is controlled by the U.S., the better, and it seems as though Donald Trump is aware of this fact.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The mood on the political right in America has dimmed fast in the early weeks of the war with Iran.

This week, we saw Jerome Powell insist that he can be Fed chairman forever or at least until his successor is confirmed, whichever comes first, we guess.

Jerome Powell can stay on the Federal Reserve board. He cannot stay as chairman. And on that question, the law does not give him the choice.

Somewhere between the economics department and the checkout line, the great tariff inflation failed to arrive.

Saint Patrick’s Day is a $7.7 billion consumer event that is driven by consumption in the most literal sense: eating, drinking, dressing up, and going out.

We have argued since the opening days of Operation Epic Fury that the economic consequences of the Iran war depend less on the price of oil this week than on one question: how long does this last?

This is the Breitbart Business Digest weekly wrap, which has decided that we’re never going to die in Zohran Mamdani’s New York because it is too unaffordable.

The establishment case against tariffs got a polished restatement this week. It is worth examining carefully because it gets the problem wrong, gets the causation wrong, and offers wishes in place of solutions.

On the 250th anniversary of “The Wealth of Nations,” it is worth noting that Adam Smith defended the policy mix now advanced by President Trump.

Two hundred and fifty years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, the public figure who most embodies Adam Smith’s ideals is Donald Trump.

It took Wall Street a while to come around, but the stock market has finally embraced the president’s worldview.

This is the Breitbart Business Digest weekly wrap of business and economic news, where we strive to increase output despite no increases in our newsletter’s payroll.

Randolph Bourne said war is the health of the state. Fine. Then let’s say the other part out loud: war is a disease in the economy.

The war may continue. But the market panic, at least for now, seems to be looking for an exit strategy.

The market is doing the only honest thing it can do in the fog of war: trying to price the duration of the conflict.

Financial markets on Monday indicated that any damage to the U.S. economy from the military conflict between the U.S. and Iran is likely to be minimal.

This week President Trump reminded us that the state of our union is great again, the economists spilled nerd blood over the definition of a balance of payments problem, and AI came for the technology companies.

The Supreme Court’s recent tariff decision has created an unusual near-term setup: a temporary “tariff valley” that could trigger another wave of import stockpiling in the months ahead.

President Trump led off his State of the Union speech by addressing the state of the economy, highlighting the progress on bringing down inflation after the Biden-Powell surge that undermined America’s post-pandemic recovery.

A new NBER working paper claims to show that tariffs reduce trade, output, and manufacturing. But the paper’s findings are being oversold.

The Trump administration’s use of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose temporary tariffs has drawn sharp criticism from a gaggle of anti-Trump economists and self-styled trade experts.

The Supreme Court invalidated President Trump’s sweeping tariff policy, ruling 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not grant the president the authority to impose tariffs.