by Dean Baker | Mar 17, 2026 | AI, Article, big tech, China, Economy, Economy and Inequality, Reprint
This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.
A bit less than 20 years ago, a nationwide housing bubble collapsed, giving us the Great Recession. Millions of homeowners had their houses foreclosed. We had high unemployment for the better part of a decade. And the subsequent falloff in construction created the basis for another extraordinary run-up in house prices during the pandemic. In other words, it was pretty bad news.
The current bubble in AI is laying the groundwork for another bad story. As was the case both before and after the collapse of the housing bubble, there is a tremendous premium in intellectual circles on making the problem more complicated than it is.
My latest poster child for this point is a column in the New York Times by Richard Bookstaber, a hedge fund manager who had predicted the financial crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble. His column notes the AI bubble, but then argues that the big problem is that we are also facing risks from the private credit market, as well as geopolitical risks, like the fact that China could cut off the supply of chips from Taiwan and also the price shock associated with the cutoff of the oil flow through the straits of Hormuz.
The collapse of the stock prices of the companies that are big factors in AI will then have huge spillover effects, devastating people’s 401(k)s, as well as whacking pension funds. This will lead to a huge fall in consumption, which would likely lead to a recession.
The warnings are well-taken, but the story is actually not complicated.
by Alex N. Press | Mar 17, 2026 | Article, Economy, Economy and Inequality, labor, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Unions
by C.J. Polychroniou | Mar 14, 2026 | Economy, Fossil Fuels, Interview, Iran, Militarism, Oil, War
Since the end of World War II, almost every U.S. president has initiated a major military conflict without congressional approval. Donald Trump attempted to portray himself as a “peace president,” promising to end the U.S.’s endless wars and bring troops home from the Middle East and other parts of the globe. But he has proven to be even more trigger-happy than most of his predecessors.
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by Steve Benen | Mar 13, 2026 | Economy, Maddowblog, News, Politics
Throughout last year, as the U.S. economy struggled, Republican officials repeatedly insisted that there was good news on the way, and Americans wouldn’t have to wait too much longer to see satisfying results. As recently as August, for example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confidently predicted to a national television audience that the U.S. economy is “really going to pick up in the fourth quarter” of 2025.
It did not pick up in the fourth quarter of 2025. CNBC reported:
Economic growth was much slower than expected in the final three months of 2025 while core inflation rose to start 2026, the Commerce Department reported Friday.
Gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced across the sprawling U.S. economy, rose at a seasonally and inflation-adjusted annual rate of just 0.7% in the fourth quarter, according to the department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The original expectations for the fourth quarter, spanning October through December, was 2.5% growth. This led to disappointment a month ago when a preliminary tally showed 1.4% growth.
This newly revised figure showed the economy grew at just half of that earlier, disappointing data.
What’s more, in light of this new information, we now know that the economy grew at a 2.1% pace across all of 2025 — down from 2.8% in 2024. Excluding the pandemic, 2025 showed the weakest economic growth in the United States in nine years.
In other words, despite endless Republican hype, economic growth and job growth were significantly stronger during Joe Biden’s final year in office compared with the first year of Donald Trump’s second term.
The White House has not yet offered a persuasive explanation as to
by Chris Walker | Mar 12, 2026 | Donald Trump, Economy, gas prices, iran war, News, oil prices, Polls, Tommy Tuberville
President Donald Trump is downplaying Americans’ concerns about rising oil and gas prices as a result of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, claiming in a recent social media post that the price increases would somehow benefit the U.S. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on…
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by Jake Johnson | Mar 10, 2026 | Article, Economy, Economy and Inequality, Iran, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump, War
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Mar. 10, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The Trump administration is quietly pursuing a regulatory change that would strip federal nutrition assistance from an estimated 6 million low-income Americans—including nearly two million children—as it spends billions on an illegal, open-ended war on Iran that has killed more than a thousand people and plunged the global economy into chaos.
The change sought by the US Department of Agriculture would curb broad-based categorical eligibility in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Broad-based categorical eligibility allows states to automatically qualify residents for SNAP if they are already enrolled in other aid programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, thus reducing administrative hurdles and costs.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimated in a blog post published late last month—the day before President Donald Trump announced the joint US-Israeli assault on Iran—that gutting broad-based categorical eligibility would likely strip modest federal food aid from around 6 million people, including nearly 2 million children.
“The people losing access to food assistance from SNAP, school meals, and [the Women, Infants, and Children Program] would mainly be working families, older adults, and people with disabilities,” the think tank noted. “In other words, the change would primarily harm groups that federal and state policymakers from across the political spectrum have long sought to help: people who work but are living near poverty; older adults and people with disabilities with low, fixed incomes; and people trying to build modest savings in order to become more economically independent.”
The Congressional Budget Office has projected that restricting broad-based categorical eligibility would result in roughly $11 billion in savings over a 10-year period—or just over $1 billion a year.
The Trump administration is currently spending
