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.

The first month of the Trump administration featured among other things a highly-publicized spectacle of Elon Musk and his DOGE team being unleashed on various parts of the federal bureaucracy and sparking sharp partisan exchanges, with Democrats raging about a “constitutional crisis” triggered by Trump crudely ignoring many of the finer legal points regarding appropriated funds, bureaucratic organization, and civil service oversight (and darkly h

In “Their Target Is ‘the Very Core of Modern American Liberalism’,” Thomas Edsall—a long-time New York Times columnist I’ve never heard of—is outraged at Trump and Elon’s desecrations. In another recent opinion piece, Edsall, and the editors choosing his title, thinks of the new President and its administration as “a hostile takeover of the federal government.”

Recently the legacy media experienced yet another blow to their credibility when it was discovered by Elon Musk’s DOGE that Politico had received over $8 million taxpayer dollars.