Free Republic

Americans celebrating Memorial Day by hitting the road will likely be paying the cheapest gas prices since 2003. GasBuddy, a fuel savings platform, said Tuesday that it forecasts the national average price of gasoline to be $3.08 per gallon on Memorial Day. That would make it the cheapest since 2021 in nominal terms. After adjusting for inflation, it would be the lowest since 2003. This is not expected to be short-lived. Prices of gasoline are expected to average around $3.02 per gallon between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with prices falling below three dollars on some days. That’s likely to...

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio said Moody’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating does not take into account the risk of the federal government printing money to pay its debt. Bond holders would suffer losses due to the depreciating value of the money they are getting paid, Dalio said. ... Bridgewater Associates founder and billionaire Ray Dalio warned Monday that Moody’s downgrade of the U.S. sovereign credit rating understates the threat to U.S. Treasurys, saying the credit agency isn’t taking into account the risk of the federal government simply printing money to pay its debt. “You should know that credit ratings...

How bad are things for Joe Biden? On top of the latest poll showing him with a minuscule 33% approval rating, here comes a certified member of the liberal media noting the similarities between Biden's presidency and that of Jimmy Carter.On Friday's Morning Joe, Ed Luce was invited to discuss his current Financial Times column, "America's Nagging Echoes of the 1970s." Luce saw parallels in terms of inflation, crime on the rise, and threats from Moscow. But the most dread similarity he drew was: "The sense of drift, the general sense of drift. The sense we have a president that...

The U.S. Federal Reserve just pulled off something stealthy — over four days last week, without fanfare, the Fed vacuumed up $43.6 billion in U.S. Treasurys. That’s $8.8 billion in long-dated 30-year bonds on May 8 alone, plus another $34.8 billion earlier in the week. Not exactly small change. Quietly returning to the quantitative-easing trough isn’t standard Fed housekeeping — it’s like a bank robber returning to the scene because he forgot his car keys.

CNN dismissed President Donald Trump’s claims about falling grocery prices just weeks before government data confirmed the sharpest monthly decline in food-at-home costs in nearly five years. The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) showed the food-at-home index dipping 0.4% in April — the steepest drop since September 2020 — with egg prices alone falling 12.7%, the biggest one-month plunge since 1984. Those numbers landed Tuesday, the same day CNN Business conceded the president’s previous claims about egg prices are “true now.”

VIDEOAh! What a difference a mere week makes. A week ago, much of the media was eagerly anticipating a SURGE in inflation due to President Trump's tariffs. They repeatedly cited "experts" proclaiming the inevitability of such a rise in inflation with NO alternative scenario possible. Unfortunately for them, reality did not cooperate with liberal fantasy yet again.

Inflation unexpectedly slowed in April to 2.3% over the year, progressing toward the Federal Reserve's 2% target and the smallest increase since February 2021

This week, much of the mainstream media ran with the headline that the economy contracted in the first quarter of this year. Predictably, they promptly blamed President Donald Trump. But a quick glance under the hood shows the data points to a much stronger economy than the headlines suggest. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its estimate of economic growth measured by gross domestic product (GDP) for January through March. The topline figure pointed to a contraction of 0.3 percent—a number that certainly doesn’t seem positive. If we learned anything from economic data under former President Joe Biden,...

Colorado's economic report card is in, and my beloved home state — formerly a solid A and B student — just flunked every subject. Once upon a time, Colorado was a devilishly weird purple state — home to moderate-to-conservative Republicans like Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Tom Tancredo, idiosyncratic Democrats like Gary Hart and Richard Lamm, and (outside the Denver-Boulder Axis) a healthy libertarian streak. It was such a swirl that one of those famous Republicans, Campbell, was originally a Democrat. That all began to change around 2008 when my purple state went deep blue for Barack Obama. By 2018, the...

We have a big event happening tomorrow. Katie will get the official unveiling, but a major trade deal was struck between the United States and “a big, and highly respected, country.” Is it the United Kingdom? That’s been circling the rumor mill. We are in trade talks with our cousins across the pond, but they’re not the only ones. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will meet with Chinese officials in Switzerland over the weekend. Talks with India are ongoing, but their recent armed spat with Pakistan might put those on hold. Who knows, but trade deals are being hashed out, as...

Data unveiled early Wednesday morning showed US GDP fell -0.3% annualized in Q1, missing expectations for a 0.4% rise—and playing right into widespread fears.[i] Most headlines cast this “weak” report as a sign of what lies ahead as tariffs’ teeth really start to bite. But slow down. While there are clear signs of tariffs’ effects here, there are also mitigating factors and underlying health in these data worth acknowledging. First, let us get this out of the way: Tariffs did affect this report in all likelihood, but probably in ways that mask underlying health. The former was easy to see...

In less than two weeks, two extraordinary elements of the Donald Trump legal saga will collide — the battle to bring down Trump’s tariffs, and the Trump administration’s fight to prevent judges from blocking his policies across the country. The Court of International Trade is set to hold oral argument on May 13 in one of the growing number of cases that challenge the bulk of the Trump tariff regime. The lawsuits, which are strong on the merits, argue that the tariffs are not legally authorized under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, the law that Trump has invoked.At issue...

Democrats have been trying to attack President Donald Trump over the economy. The problem with this tactic is that they keep getting refuted by the facts. Another big fact knocked out their narrative on Friday: the latest jobs numbers. Employers across the U.S. added 177,000 jobs to non-farm payrolls in April. 🚨 CNBC: "Nonfarm payrolls — a GREATER 177,000. We were expecting... 133,000." pic.twitter.com/cs4TLSAvs1— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 2, 2025That's a "better than expected" number; they were thinking it was going to be around 133,000. Unemployment remained the same at 4.2 percent. Economist Stephen Moore pointed to the household...

The stock market rallied Friday after a stronger-than-expected jobs report eased concerns that President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs could tank the U.S. economy, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average extending their winning streaks to nine days.The S&P 500 closed at 5,686.67 — up about 1.5 percent for the day — and has now recovered all the ground it had lost since April 2, when Trump announced plans for sweeping tariffs. The Dow jumped more than 500 points to close 1.4 percent higher. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index gained 1.5 percent.Friday’s strong jobs report boosted Wall Street’s confidence...

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) stated that “the vast majority of immigrants who happen to be here unlawfully” “are so critical to keep our economy going” and blamed the Trump administration’s immigration policies for GDP shrinking in the last quarter despite “inheriting a strong economy from President Biden.” Padilla stated, “You were talking in previous segments about the state of the economy. Prices are up, right? There [are] a lot of consumers on edge. When immigrants represent such significant elements of the necessary workforce in agriculture, in hospitality, in construction, in transportation, in health...

Stocks rose on Friday as Wall Street digested a better-than-expected nonfarm payrolls report for April, which eased recession fears and lifted the S&P 500 for its longest winning streak in just over two decades.

Employers in the United States added 177,000 workers to their payrolls in April, the Department of Labor said Friday, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.2 percent, defying predictions of labor market sluggishness following President Trump’s announcement of tariffs. Economists had been expecting 130,000 jobs and an unemployment rate unchanged at 4.2 percent. The prior month’s jobs figure was revised down to 185,000 from 228,000

The U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter, raising the question: Are we in a recession? Economic growth, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product, has to be negative for more than one quarter for a recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the nonprofit research group that officially calls recessions. According to the NBER: "A recession involves a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months." The NBER has not yet declared a recession. The current downturn also hasn't met an unofficial definition of recession, which is...

The U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter despite underlying strength in consumer and business spending. Gross domestic product contracted at an annualized rate of 0.3 percent, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. The decline in U.S. gross domestic product marks a sharp reversal from the 2.4 percent growth rate recorded at the end of last year. This was the lowest rate of growth since 2022, when the economy avoided an official recession but contracted for two consecutive quarters. Final sales to private domestic purchasers, a closely watched measure of business and consumer health, expanded at a healthy pace...

The U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of 2025, as businesses rushed to stock up on imports ahead of tariffs and consumers eased their pace of spending. The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 0.3% annual rate in the first quarter. That was the steepest decline since the first quarter of 2022. The reading fell short of the 0.4% growth that economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected. The decline in GDP in the first quarter reflected front-running ahead of...