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Talk about having egg on your face. In an article published Tuesday on their website, CNN decided to make a badly-cooked omelette out of itself by admitting President Donald Trump was actually on to something about falling egg prices, but still attempted to say he was still peddling “fiction.” CNN Business Executive Editor David Goldman just couldn't bring himself to fully admit that Trump was right and wrote an oxymoronic headline that reeked of contradiction, “Trump’s egg price fiction has suddenly become reality.” Yeah, we couldn’t make sense of that logic either.

President Donald Trump’s unprecedented tariffs, particularly on China, and recent attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell caused alarm among some of his top advisers and America’s biggest CEOs, who warned of financial chaos and store shelves that could go bare, people familiar with the conversations said. The warnings — and the markets’ own volatility this week — seemed to have broken through. Trump backed down Tuesday from his threats to try to remove Powell from the job, telling reporters in the Oval Office: “I have no intention of firing him.” That prompted sighs of relief on Wall Street. A...

China’s leader Xi Jinping will meet President Biden Nov. 15 in San Francisco with four high cards in his hand. Policy advisers close to Xi express an unprecedented kind of confidence in China’s strategic position. First, the collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces and its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” is a setback for America’s strategic position and a gain for China, which has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Second, the US tech war on China has flopped, as Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processers in place of...

American and European military observers in Ukraine described the Ukraine Army’s efforts of the past two days as a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics. “If you want to conduct an offensive and you have a dozen brigades and a few dozen tanks, you concentrate them and try to break through. The Ukrainians have been running around in five different directions,” complained a senior European officer. “We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with proper infantry support and then do what they can,” the officer added. They were trained...

NEW YORK – The US banking system is broken. That doesn’t portend more high-profile failures like Credit Suisse. The central banks will keep moribund institutions on life support. But the era of dollar-based reserves and floating exchange rates that began on August 15, 1971, when the US severed the link between the dollar and gold, is coming to an end. The pain will be transferred from the banks to the real economy, which will starve for credit. And the geopolitical consequences will be enormous. The seize-up of dollar credit will accelerate the shift to a multipolar reserve system, with advantage...

A gloomy assessment of Ukraine’s prospects for victory against Russia emerged from a recent private gathering of former top US soldiers, intelligence officials and scholars with resumes reaching from the Reagan to the Trump administrations. Short of trained personnel and ammunition, one speaker argued, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky might consider a Chinese peace plan, especially after Beijing’s successful mediation of the Iran-Saudi dispute. The several dozen attendees, many of whom had held cabinet or sub-cabinet positions, met under Chatham House rules, which forbid identification of individual participants but allow the content itself to be presented. Overwhelmingly, the sentiment of participants...

US stock prices and President Biden’s approval rating continued to tank, as inflation swamped household income. Only 39% of Americans approve of Biden’s performance, and just 33% of Democrats think the country is heading in the right direction. That’s no surprise, given the nearly 40% collapse of retailers’ stock prices this year. The S&P 500 is teetering on the edge of a bear market – that is, a peak-to-trough decline of 20% or more. The Biden stimulus – compounding the errors of the Trump Administration – amounted to a Ponzi scheme that threw $6 trillion of spending power at US...

The US Consumer Inflation Report for October was horrible, showing a 12% annualized rate of price change. But it’s even worse than it looks. The shelter component of the index lags the more reliable private gauges of rent inflation. That means worse is to come. Three US companies publish national rent indexes – CoreLogic, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com – and their readings of year-on-year rent inflation range from 9% to 16%. But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a year-on-year rise in the rents of just 3.4%. Shelter represents a third of household expenditures according to the Consumer Price Index....

If the end of the world came, but nobody told you about it, would you care? Here’s a stunning piece of information that appeared in exactly no American news media, right, left or center. I read about it in Global Times, the Chinese government’s English-language newspaper.The Pew Research Institute, a respected non-partisan opinion research organization, polled the world’s major countries about American democracy. Only 17% said the U.S. “is a good example for other countries to follow,” while 57% said it used to be. Twenty-three percent said it never was.It’s troubling that Americans have similar views. Only 19% of Americans...

In all the perfervid reporting this week (Victor Davis Hanson calls this “concocted melodramas”) there are only three big stories to my mind: The President’s stunning success in the Middle East, Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos’ brilliant parlay to Princeton’s virtue-signaling president and the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each of these are likely to further tip Trump toward an election victory in which according to Rasmussen he’s already reached 53% approval among likely voters.No one has better described the significance of the Abraham Accord than Spengler (David Goldman). The President, defying the conventional wisdom of decades of...

Before we wax too eloquent about the democratic aspirations of the great Iranian people, we should keep in the mind that the most probable scenario for Iran under any likely regime is a sickening spiral into poverty and depopulation. Iran has the fastest-aging population of any country in the world, indeed, the fast-aging population of any country in history. It has the highest rate of venereal disease infection and the highest rate of infertility of any country in the world. It has a youth unemployment rate of 35% (adjusted for warehousing young people in state-run diploma mills). And worst of...

A considerable portion of America’s permanent bureaucracy, including elements of its intelligence community, is engaged in an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny against the elected commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party and a fair sampling of the Republican establishment wants to force Trump out of office, and to this end undertook an entrapment scheme to entice the president and his staff into actions which might be construed after the fact as obstruction of justice.

The US President is the first Western leader to stand up and announce that the whole sick business of terrorism has to stop. He means it. ___ When three knife-wielding Muslims charged into the Black and Blue Steakhouse near London Bridge on the night of June 3, they had the bad luck to encounter Mr. Roy Larner, who shouted, “F**k you, I’m Millwall,” referring to the South London football club supported by England’s most notorious hooligans. Mr. Larner fought them off with his fists and doubtless saved many lives. Millwall’s chant is, “No-one likes us. We don’t care.” President Trump...

I will be on The Kudlow Report this evening (slated for 7:20), Discussing China March 15th, 2010 By David Goldman I’m slated to join the discussion at 7:20 on CNBC’s The Kudlow report on whether the US should try to force China to revalue the yuan. As Reuven Brenner and I wrote in December in First Things, the issue is NOT a minor adjustment in the relative price of US vs. Chinese goods, but the fact that the Chinese save more than half of their income. They should save less and spend more and buy American goods. Currency instability promotes...

The Society of Professional Journalists condemned NBC News for practicing "checkbook journalism" by chartering a jet that carried a New Jersey man involved in a bitter custody battle and his son home from Brazil. David Goldman, who successfully fought the Brazilian family of his now-deceased ex-wife for custody of 9-year-old Sean, granted an interview to Meredith Vieira of NBC's "Today" show that aired Monday. NBC said Goldman was booked for "Today" before the network invited him on the plane. The network had already arranged for the plane to bring its own employees home for Christmas, NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp...