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Wholesale prices rose sharply in February, providing another sign that inflation continues to percolate even aside from rising energy prices.The producer price index, a measure of pipeline costs that producers receive for their products, increased a seasonally adjusted 0.7% on the month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, the so-called core PPI increased 0.5%.Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for increases of 0.3% for both measures.For the all-items index, prices rose faster than the 0.5% pace in January. However, the core increase was less than the 0.8% for the prior month.

A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour while its citizens were paid one-tenth what West Germans earned. Today its economy has edged past Switzerland to become the world’s 20th largest with over $1 trillion in annual output. It's a historic leap from the post-communist ruins of 1989-90 to today’s European growth champion that economists say has lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people — and that the Trump administration says should be recognized by Poland’s presence at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies later this year In 35 years — a little less than...

POZNAN, Poland (AP) — A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour while its citizens were paid one-tenth what West Germans earned. Today, the economy of the country has edged past Switzerland to become the world’s 20th largest with more than $1 trillion in annual output. It’s a historic leap from the post-Communist ruins of 1989-90 to European growth champion, which economists say has lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people — and that the Trump administration says should be recognized by Poland’s presence at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies later this year. The...

Artificial intelligence adoption could lead to significant job struggles for entry-level workers as companies boost productivity, according to ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. McDermott told “Squawk on the Street” on Friday that unemployment for new college graduates “could easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years.” Across industries, businesses are slashing costs and cutting jobs with the help of new AI tools. Last month, Block announced plans to cut nearly half its workforce as AI automates more work. Meanwhile, software firm Atlassian, which has seen its stock dive 54% this year on AI disruption fears, said this week...

Canada sheds 83,900 jobs in February, after January decline Jobless rate up to 6.7% led by losses in full-time jobs Average hourly wage of permanent employees grows 4.2% Analysts predicted 10,000 job gains, jobless rate 6.6% SNIP

Canadian Economic Downturn Structural, Not Cyclical The BoC delivered an unusually political message this week: The country’s downturn isn’t cyclical, but structural. Cyclical issues are related to the business cycle, rising and falling with the natural booms and busts we’ve all come to love and hate. Structural changes are permanent and require drastic changes for the economy to operate. The Governor attributes this shift to three forces: slowing population growth, a breakdown in US trade relations, and artificial intelligence. “The impact of these forces on the Canadian economy will not be a temporary cyclical fluctuation. These are deep structural changes…”...

The Senate will today debate the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Buried in the sprawling legislation is a section reportedly written by Sen. Elizabeth Warren titled “Homes Are for People, Not Corporations.” It has the backing of the White House and broad support in the Senate. The idea sounds politically appealing. In practice, it could sow the seeds of the next housing crash. The provision targets large institutional investors that own single-family rental homes. It effectively blocks investors that own more than 350 homes from buying additional single-family houses except under narrow circumstances. Even those purchases must generally be...

Last Friday’s jobs report from the BLS shocked the market by claiming 92,000-jobs were lost in February, after the economists’ consensus called for +55,000-new jobs. Two-days previously, ADP had reported 63,000 private-sector payroll jobs being created in February – the strongest monthly private payroll gain reported by ADP since last July. ADP chief economist Nela Richardson explained this surge in jobs: “We’ve seen an increase in hiring and pay gains remain solid, especially for job-stayers,” adding this caveat: “But with hiring concentrated in only a few-sectors, our data shows no wide-spread pay benefit from changing jobs. In fact, the pay...

Investing.com - U.S. stocks were a sea of red on Monday as the escalating conflict in the Middle East pushed oil prices to $100 a barrel, raising fears that higher energy costs could weigh on the economy. At 09:43 ET (13:43 GMT), the benchmark S&P 500 index slid 1.2% to 6,655.57 points, the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite slumped 1.3% to 22,103.06 points, and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1.4% to 46,846.08 points.

As gas prices continue climbing in California — already the highest in the nation — residents are increasingly venting their frustration at Gov. Gavin Newsom, accusing him and Sacramento of piling on policies and “taxing us to death.” The backlash centers on draft regulations tied to the state’s Cap-and-Invest program, overseen by the California Air Resources Board, which sets a statewide cap on greenhouse gas emissions and requires major polluters to purchase allowances for each ton of carbon they emit. Critics say tightening those caps — strongly backed by Newsom — could further drive up the cost of gasoline and...

Germany’s “social-ecological market economy” is a textbook illustration of this dynamic. The state declares hydrogen and other favored technologies to be the “future,” pours billions into subsidies, and attempts to construct markets by decree. Yet even an official body like the Federal Audit Office now describes this as a “planned economy approach” and doubts that the government will reach its own goals. In all likelihood, Germany is about to confirm once again what Mises showed in theory a century ago: planned economies do not deliver their promised outcomes. Instead, they generate rising costs, failing projects, and increasing chaos—while making society...

President Donald Trump is just incredibly lucky. He kept rolling the dice on the economy and somehow the doom-sayers keep losing. All the experts said his tariffs would drastically increase inflation; instead it went down. Democrats projected at the end of 2024 that "Mass Deportations Would Deliver a Catastrophic Blow to the U.S. Economy." It has not.This luck just has to stop at some point. Such is the weird attitude of Politico's economics correspondent, Victoria Guida. She thinks that the economic success of the Trump administration is based just on the sheer luck of making the correct gambles as reflected...

The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, Labor Department data released Friday showed, sharply missing economists' expectations and stalling the nascent hiring growth that started the year. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.4%, while the share of people who have been without work for 27 weeks or more as a percentage of all unemployed hit 25.3%. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had anticipated 55,000 new positions after January's surprise print of 130,000 payrolls. Those gains were also revised lower by 4,000 positions, while December's previously reported addition of 48,000 jobs was updated to a loss of 17,000 — a...

We live in a golden age that far surpasses all previous golden ages. Some call it the Industrial Revolution. Some say it is the digital revolution. This correspondent refers to it as the petroleum age.The cost of firearms and ammunition, in terms of labor, is near an all-time low. .22 Long Rifle cartridges can be had for under six cents a round, with free shipping, on the Internet. The all-time low, in constant dollars, would be about five cents per round, not including sales and seconds, from 1993 to 2006. Nominal prices are higher, but costs in labor are much...

Wholesale prices rose at a faster-than-expected pace in January, countering hopes that inflation was easing, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The Producer Price Index which excludes volatile food and energy prices, increased a seasonally adjusted 0.8%, more than the 0.6% gain in December and well ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 0.3%. On an all-items basis, the headline PPI rose 0.5%, also above the forecast for 0.3% and 0.1 percentage point more than the prior month.

Sometimes people just vote with their feet. And a new poll out this week suggests many New Yorkers might be willing to do just that. The Marist poll reveals that one in three New Yorkers are planning to leave the State in the next five years. After the week we’ve just had I suppose you might sympathize with the 7% of respondents who said they want to leave because they’re fed up with the weather. It hasn’t been much fun trying to get around the streets as Mayor Mamdani´s paid volunteers made their unsupervised efforts to push the snow around....

Tuesday’s State of the Union address gives President Trump a big platform to tout the economy’s performance on his watch. He has already given himself a grade—“A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” he told Politico in December. The report card for the economy is a bit more mixed, however, after his first year back in office. Here are the grades for some key metrics. JobsNeeds improvement It is rough out there for job seekers, unless they are looking for work in healthcare. U.S. employers added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, down sharply from the prior year to the lowest figure outside of a recession in...

For the second straight day, CNN This Morning host Audie Cornish served up carefully curated anecdotal voices to suggest broad economic discontent under President Trump. On Monday, we caught Cornish spotlighting one Republican voter — out of tens of millions nationwide — to imply GOP unease over the economy. On Tuesday, she swapped that single poll respondent for a montage of social media complaints. The segment opened with a young woman declaring, “Everything is so expensive, and our wages haven’t changed.” Minutes later, viewers saw a trio of social media clips — including that same young woman again — lamenting...

The Boston Globe ran a poll last December which found that a full third of respondents were thinking about leaving the state because of the high cost of living.The Globe/Suffolk survey found that about one-third of Massachusetts voters have seriously considered leaving the state in the past year because of affordability pressures, even as a majority still believe the state is generally moving in the right direction. Inflation, health care costs, housing, taxes, and soaring utility bills topped the list of financial stressors.Boston.com asked their readers how they felt and and even higher percentage said they were looking to move....

Can science fiction shape market reality? Hours after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s emergency power tariffs, the President imposed a new 10% 15% global tariff for 150 days. But as stocks fell on Monday, financial media outlets like Bloomberg offered an alternative explanation for the decline: a social media post. While the northeast was hunkering down for a once-in-a-decade blizzard this weekend, financial research firm Citrini Research published a macro note that made waves among the highly online tech bro and finance bro crowd on X (formerly Twitter). In the lengthy read, Citrini augurs a world where...