Free Republic

By the time the Pilsen Food Pantry opened on a recent morning, Ulysses Moreno had been there for two hours — with a line of people behind him that snaked around the corner. “This is a lifeline for me,” said Mr. Moreno, 39. He had lost his construction job a few days earlier, and with three teenagers at home, he wanted to make sure he could stock up. “Our food budget doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.” A few miles away, on Chicago’s glitzy Magnificent Mile, luxury hotels are bustling. Jewelry stores and designer boutiques do brisk business....

The New York Times is still force-feeding its readers agitprop that the long-awaited inflation Armageddon it's been hawking for months is still nigh. That’s despite a bevy of welcome economic news in recent weeks that has defied the retrospectively stupid predictions of President Donald Trump’s most pompous critics still high on their bloated egos. “Where’s the Inflation From Tariffs? Just Wait, Economists Say,” doom-mongered Times reporter Colby Smith in a June 13 crystal ball item passed off as news. They always locate "Economists" to say what they want to impose as conventional "wisdom." “Tariffs raise consumer prices. It’s a view...

Why you should care Beijing’s recent sales of securities are triggering concerns that it might dump U.S. securities for leverage in the ongoing spat with Washington. It was an unnerving piece of data for investors two weeks back, buried halfway down an esoteric spreadsheet released by the U.S. government that tracks how many Treasuries foreign investors buy and sell. China, the largest foreign creditor to the U.S. government with total Treasury holdings in excess of $1.2 trillion, sold $20 billion of securities with a maturity exceeding one year in March, according to U.S. government data. The sales amounted to China’s...