Over the weekend, President Trump made headlines for refusing, on two occasions, to rule out the possibility that the US will experience a recession this year. The comments came days after the Atlanta Fed announced it now projects GDP to fall by nearly three percent in the first quarter of this year.

Columbia University student and legal US resident, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested last week by federal agents. Although Khalil is a legal resident with a green card, and has not even been accused of any immigration-related infraction, he is being held at an immigration detention center.

Five years ago, politicians and bureaucrats went berserk and pointlessly ravaged Americans’ freedom. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the pretext to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses, padlock churches, close down schools, and effectively place hundreds of millions of Americans under house arrest. Despite all the forced sacrifices, most Americans contracted covid and more than a million were listed as dying from the virus.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model projection for real GDP growth in the first quarter of 2025 (Q1 2025) is now showing a slump to -1.5 percent. This marks a significant downward revision from the previous estimate of 2.3 percent on February 19, 2025.

Such an enormous decline is strange. How did we go from +2.3 percent to -1.5 percent in less than a month? That kind of collapse in an economy as large as the United States is exceedingly rare.

David Lammy, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, has lent his voice to the growing call for reparations for former colonies in the British West Indies. Advocates argue that financial compensation would provide a much-needed economic boost to these nations, helping them overcome the burden of low economic growth. However, this view is fundamentally flawed. Akin to foreign aid, reparations are unlikely to catalyze genuine economic development. Decades of evidence demonstrate that foreign aid has been unable to foster sustainable growth in developing countries and reparations would function as such.

Since the financial crisis, industrial policy has experienced a renaissance in the Western world. “Missions” or “moonshots” are put in place by policymakers in order to address societal challenges. Government programs are launched, then large pools of subsidies, targeted R&D funds, and cheap loans are made available for corporations.

Economic progress is sometimes seen as inimical to the bonds of “family, faith, and flag” that many people value. Many place such a high priority on their way of life within their own neighborhoods or communities, that losing their traditional cultural values in exchange for economic progress may not be a price they would wish to pay.

We often hear from central bank officials that their decisions regarding the interest rate policy is determined by the state of economic conditions as depicted by economic indicators. Policymakers are of the view that, in order to ascertain the state of economic conditions, they require the most recent information on some key economic data such as the gross domestic product (GDP). Thus, an increase in the GDP growth rate is seen as economic growth. A weakening in the growth rate of GDP raises the likelihood of the officials lowering the policy interest rate.

Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference delivered a sharp critique of recent developments in Europe, particularly regarding freedom of expression, migration, and democracy. He highlighted the annulled election in Romania and the exclusion of the German party AFD from most public discourse by the political establishment.