Today, April 2, 2025, is what Donald Trump and his team are calling “Liberation Day.” Because later, the president will host an event in the Rose Garden to sign reciprocal tariffs that, in the words of his press secretary, “will roll back the unfair trade practices that have been ripping off our country for decades.”

For the first five months of the 2025 fiscal year, federal spending is coming in at the highest level ever. This is true even when we adjust for CPI inflation. 

The Federal Reserve continues to lose money—$77.6 billion last year according to the Wall Street Journal. The previous year the nation’s central bank lost $114.3 billion. And, there is no end in sight. The Fed is paying 4.4 percent on $3.4 trillion in reserves while earning only 2.6 percent on its securities portfolio. This is a side effect of ZIRP. 

“Economics, in its most elegant form, is the study of cause and effect.”—John Rogers, Voting in Context: A Brief Economic History of American Politics

I recently joined Lena Petrova on the World Affairs in Context podcast to talk about the alleged gold at Fort Knox, how the federal government stole all that gold, and whether or not governments need a gold a Bitcoin reserve. We also speculate a bit about what would happen if the official numbers about the US gold reserve turn out to be wrong. But, we may never know because DOGE and the Trump administration have already stopped talking about auditing the gold reserve: 

To those familiar with constitutional history, it may seem trite to observe that the meaning of the Constitution is contested. Yet many contemporary political commentators treat the Constitution as a document whose meaning is plain and obvious.

Over the past year, pundits and columnists have been forced to keep asking why Europe’s economy is stagnating and falling behind the US economy. Many of those asking the question are Europeans.

On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk—who was wearing a hajib—is a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University.

She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal prison system. The Trump administration ignored a federal court order and took Ozturk from Massachusetts to Louisiana federal detention facilities.

Many believe the key cause to a general increase in prices are so-called “inflationary expectations.” For instance, if there is a large increase in the prices of oil, individuals will start forming expectations for higher inflation ahead. Consequently, individuals will speed up their purchases of goods and services at present, thereby raising the demand for goods and services, all other things being equal. This is supposed to set in motion general price increases.