The government shut down at midnight Wednesday, the eleventh in modern history and the first since 2019 — and within hours, the White House wasn’t just furloughing workers. It was picking winners and losers by zip code.
Monday afternoon, with roughly thirty-six hours left before federal funding expired, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries walked out of the White House and stood in front of cameras — a meeting that produced photographs, statements, and no actual deal.
Friday, the Supreme Court let the Trump administration keep $4 billion in foreign aid Congress had already appropriated — not by ruling the withholding was legal, but by letting a procedural trick outrun the calendar it was designed to dodge.
By Monday, the panic phase of the H-1B fee had passed, but the repricing hadn’t — trading desks and corporate HR departments alike spent the weekend running the same spreadsheet, and it kept returning the same answer: onshore skilled labor had just gotten structurally more expensive, in a way that d
Friday afternoon, without warning to the companies that would have to comply by Monday, Trump signed a proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa petitions — plus a separate “gold card” residency visa priced at $1 million for anyone who could simply afford it.
Wednesday’s rate cut was, on its face, unremarkable — a quarter point, taking the federal funds rate to 4.00-4.25 percent, exactly what markets had priced for weeks. What made the vote extraordinary was who was in the room casting it.
Tuesday, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear the tariff case that had already worked its way through two lower courts and one 7-4 appellate ruling — agreeing to a compressed briefing schedule with oral argument set for early November, a pace that signals the justices know exactly how much m
By Monday, the question on every trading desk wasn’t whether the Fed would cut rates in ten days. Futures markets were already pricing that at a probability approaching certainty. The real question was how the market should position for a Fed that everyone now expected to move for reasons that looke
Friday’s jobs report didn’t just miss. It rewrote the story of the year in one release — 22,000 jobs added in August against expectations for 76,500, and buried in the revisions, a finding that hadn’t happened since the depths of the pandemic: the US economy actually lost 13,000 jobs in June.
Tuesday’s ISM manufacturing survey landed at 48.7, a hair below the 49.0 economists expected, marking the sector’s sixth straight month below the line that separates growth from contraction — and the dollar, already down roughly 10 percent for the year, weakened further within minutes of the release
Eleven judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spent the summer deciding a question that touched nearly every price tag in the country, and on Friday they answered it: 7-4, the tariffs Trump imposed under a 1977 emergency-powers law were not authorized by that law.
By Thursday, markets were positioning for two entirely different Federal Reserve stories landing within twenty-four hours of each other — Jerome Powell’s marquee Jackson Hole speech, due Friday morning, and the still-unresolved fight over whether Lisa Cook would still hold her seat by the time he ga
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