Breitbart Business Digest - Page 4

Retail sales fell in May, but beneath the surface, the picture of the American consumer remains solid—and in many categories, unexpectedly strong.

Tariffs aren’t squeezing consumers. They’re squeezing foreign suppliers and protecting the American wage base.

Real wages are rising. Prices are not. The economy is healing—not in theory or through tortured revisions, but in real-time and at the household level.

The rare earths crisis was always going to arrive eventually. The surprise is not that it happened, but how little we did to prepare.

Tariffs aren’t just tools of trade. They’re instruments of tax reform. And in the hands of a new generation of economic nationalists, they’re poised to become something more: a new foundation for American prosperity.

President Trump’s policy combination of renewed tariffs and extended tax cuts amounts to a reallocation of the tax burden away from domestic work and production and toward imported goods and global supply chains.

As the Trump administration looks to resolve the long-running conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, three priorities have emerged.

Trump’s trade actions are not outside the law—they are exactly what the law was designed to enable.

The legal battlefield is shifting, but Trump’s tariff agenda is very much alive. The next phase may be slower and more contested, but don’t mistake litigation for surrender.

Shares of Fannie and Freddie surged to their highest levels since 2008, driven by renewed hopes that Trump would a release them from federal conservatorship. But the fundamentals suggest that these shares are still worth little or nothing.

The Baby Boomers built the bond bull, and heir retirement is dismantling it. But Washington still spends as if there’s an endless pool of capital waiting to buy Treasuries.

Trump’s threat of a 50 percent tariff on EU imports might actually help the European Union overcome its dysfunction.

Many Wall Street pundits were quick to hit the panic button after Wednesday’s soft 20-year Treasury auction. Yields jumped. Stocks fell. And commentators wasted no time diagnosing a crisis.

We don’t need to fiddle with the retirement age. We need to build an economy that can actually support the promises we’ve already made.

Opponents of the One Big Beautiful Bill are turning once again to their most familiar weapon: the deficit forecast.

It’s axiomatic that if you follow a bad map, you will end up in a bad place. Such is the power of bad ideas, including the bad thinking that guided U.S. economic policymaking in the latter half of the 1960s and all through the 1970s. 

At the U.S. Capitol on May 13, guests at a festive dinner celebrated an anniversary that’s not on any official calendar, but it should be.

April’s inflation reports were supposed to show the U.S. consumers were bearing the burden of President Trump’s new tariffs, but they didn’t.

For decades, American consumers have been paying the world’s highest drug prices—not because we use more medicine, or demand higher quality, but because our government chose not to negotiate.

After a weekend of high-level negotiations in Geneva, the United States and China agreed to a dramatic temporary rollback of tariffs.

The election of the first American pope has tax lawyers wondering if the IRS will try to collect taxes on the new Pontiff’s in-kind compensation.

When Trump calls for tax cuts to boost American growth, we can debate their fiscal merits; but let’s not pretend they’re a guaranteed path to trade imbalance. The theory behind that claim is old, contested, and, in many cases, simply wrong.

Many economists have successfully challenged the idea that budget deficits lead to higher trade deficits.

The Fed is stuck between crosscurrents: too strong to ease, too shaky to hike. The best they can do is what they’ve been doing—waiting for the fog to lift.

This week, America’s new economic doctrine came into focus thanks to a pair of speeches from Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Yesterday’s Breitbart Business Digest explained that the front-running on tariffs came from businesses and not from consumers. Today we expand on the evidence and explain why this is bullish for the economy.

The supposed culprit of the import surge—consumer panic buying—simply isn’t real. Consumers are not front-running the tariffs, and that is good news.

The American economy, like Mark Twain, may be forced to declare that rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated.

Consumer sentiment remains deeply depressed; and the division between Democrats and Republicans has reached historic, almost unimaginable levels.

If Trump’s tariffs are such a favor to entrenched business interests, why are those very businesses sounding the alarm?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before the Institute of International Finance this morning and delivered a speech that ought to be remembered as a turning point in U.S. economic diplomacy.

Removing Jerome Powell as Fed chair might not give Trump the interest rate cuts he wants.

President Trump has been calling for the Federal Reserve to begin cutting interest rates, arguing that its policy is too tight for a slowing economy. Investors increasingly seem to agree with Trump.

Call it protectionism if you like. But the proper name is older and more precise. It’s called the optimum tariff. And at long last, it’s being put to work for America.

Some of the most brilliant economists in history developed a theory proving that under the right conditions, tariffs can make a country richer.

What looked like the start of a global financial panic turned into a show of strength from the White House and a stunning rally on Wall Street.