A hiring sign is displayed in an Auto Zone store window on June 25, 2025 in Austin, Texas. Brandon Bell | Getty Images For all its perils, artificial intelligence appears to have helped alleviate a longstanding problem in American business. Since around 2017, other than the brief spike in unemployment during the pandemic, there were…
Customers line up at the check out booth on April 18, 2025 at a Costco branch in Niantic, Connecticut. Robert Nickelsberg | Getty Images The annual inflation rate ticked higher in June, in line with expectations, as lower prices at the gasoline pump somewhat offset higher prices at the grocery store. Economists said they expect…
Allen J. Schaben | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images The Port of Los Angeles reported its best June ever for shipping container traffic, an increase in ocean freight that port executives described as a tariff whipsaw effect, with shippers racing to beat President Trump’s trade taxes, especially a mid-August deadline for tariffs on Chinese…
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 14, 2025. Kevin Lamarque | Reuters National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Sunday that whether the Trump administration has the authority to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is “being looked into.” “But certainly, if there’s…
U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on “The Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 24, 2025. Kevin Lamarque | Reuters As the Trump administration escalates its criticisms of the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell, the central bank is…
To offset the rising costs of tariffs and trade war uncertainty, companies are using U.S. Customs-sanctioned foreign trade zones (FTZs) and bonded warehouses to delay or reduce product taxes. FTZs have a long history dating back to a previous period of trade conflict, created during the Great Depression by Congress to encourage international trade and…
The odds of a recession may be falling, but states appear to be betting that corporate leaders are still nervous. An analysis of all 50 states’ economic development marketing efforts — part of CNBC’s annual America’s Top States for Business study — finds that a strong economy is the most frequently mentioned selling point to…
With the U.S. economy solid but still facing elevated risk of recession — or, as President Trump described it in May, in a “transition period” — states are pitching themselves as the most stable place for companies to locate no matter what happens to the economy. “Multiple international headquarters, hundreds of billions of committed investments…
One of the biggest problems with inflation is that once it has burrowed into an economy, it is very difficult to rid of it. Just when Federal Reserve policymakers thought they might have finally gotten the better of the inflation that gripped the U.S. economy following the pandemic, along came the specter of tariffs. Inflation…
Inflation has fallen considerably, but it is still too high for Federal Reserve policymakers’ tastes. And tariffs make the calculation even more complicated. “We’ve had goods inflation just moving up a bit,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell at a news conference last month. “We do expect to see more of that over the course of…
