Clik here to view.
Employment for working-age Americans is finally back to where it was before...
It’s been more than a decade since the twin calamities of a housing crash and financial crisis savaged the US economy. At long last, its workforce is returning to pre-crisis shape. In October, 79.7% of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The economy still matters for US elections, but not in the way many people think
The US economy is doing well. GDP growth is robust and the job market is strong. Yet Donald Trump’s approval rating is low, and his party is expected to lose a lot of seats in midterm elections on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Here’s how markets will react to every possible outcome of the US midterms
What’s happening in Washington has always had a big impact on global markets. That’s been especially true since Donald Trump won the US presidential election with his America First agenda, ushering an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Despite US tariffs, China’s trade soared in October. It may not last.
Is China’s economy slumping? Is the trade war dousing Chinese business activity? Not according to the October trade data. China’s exports climbed 15.6% in October, versus the same month a year ago, in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Four out of every five San Francisco homes now cost more than $1 million
A truism of American politics is that California has its own values. That goes for real estate too, it turns out. Across the US, fewer than four out of every 100 homes are worth more than $1...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Janet Yellen says the US trade deficit is likely to get even bigger. Here’s...
Donald Trump’s America First economic policies are designed to shrink the US trade deficit. But according to Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, the deficit is on track to get bigger...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Did the trade war turn rural counties against Republicans?
Blue wave—or periwinkle ripple? The debate about whether Democrats’ gains in the House of Representatives were better or worse than expected rages on. One narrative everyone seems to agree on, though,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Trump administration is finally taking on the scourge of Chinese rubber...
China has been at it again: cheating Americans. Its latest treachery? The Chinese government has been subsidizing its native manufacturers of rubber bands, allowing them to “dump” their stretchy wares...
View ArticleClik here to view.
America’s trade deficit is now bigger than it’s been in 10 years
The gaping US trade deficit widened for a fifth straight month, as Americans bought $55.5 billion more in goods and services from abroad than they sold in October. The last time the deficit was this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
America is facing the reality of fewer, more expensive Christmas trees
The year 2008 was terrible for pretty much everyone—but for US Christmas tree growers, it was especially wretched. Right as the double-whammy of recession and financial crisis hit, a sudden glut of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Worried about the next recession? Here’s what to watch instead of the yield...
It’s notoriously hard to guess when an economic downturn is imminent. One of the few consistently reliable recession alarm bells is what’s called a “yield-curve inversion,” when yields for short-term...
View ArticleClik here to view.
GM’s decline truly began with its quest to turn people into machines
When General Motors announced last month that it was shutting down small-car production and mothballing its Lordstown Assembly plant outside of Youngstown, in northeast Ohio, the news felt inevitable....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trump is taking his long history of stiffing contractors to a whole new level
It was a moment of crackling intensity in the first 2016 presidential debate. About 40 minutes in, Hillary Clinton hit Donald Trump with an ugly accusation: “I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This chart shows why China is so desperate to protect its industries
Last year, the slowdown that China had staved off for years finally hit—just as Donald Trump began pummeling the country with tariffs. Beijing and the White House are now negotiating a trade war truce....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recessions have changed. Our tools for fixing them haven’t
To someone living in the industrialized world in 1979, devastating financial bubbles were like smallpox pandemics or famine—tragedies most knew only through history texts and…
View ArticleClik here to view.
The top economist at the “central bankers’ central bank” on the changing...
Known as the “central bankers’ central bank,” the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) provides financial services for the world’s central banks and promotes global monetary…
View ArticleClik here to view.
What will cause the next recession? Risky corporate debt is a good bet
When the global financial crisis hit in 2007, it was easy to blame Americans for their reckless mortgage binge. Their median wages had barely budged…
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to learn more about credit booms and financial crises
If you want to learn more about the arguments and data I explored in the State of Play, a solid starting point is the Bank…
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Fed thinks the US economy stinks. Markets are thrilled!
Remember back in September 2018, before markets went haywire and the Chinese economy started looking extra-shaky? In those sunnier days, even the chary folks of the Federal Reserve saw good times ahead...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Forget what the media says. These charts show why the US trade deficit should...
Forget the “wall”—it’s a trade statistic that Donald Trump has staked his presidency on. “The jobs and wealth have been stripped from our country. Year…
View ArticleClik here to view.
The US economy is coming down from a sugar high. How bad will the headache be?
A few days ago, Donald Trump tweeted a characteristically all-caps boast that was uncharacteristically accurate: 3.1 GDP FOR THE YEAR, BEST NUMBER IN 14 YEARS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
By one measure, the US job market is the strongest it’s been since 1969
The American economy is slowing. German factories are sputtering. Yield curves are inverting. But the US job market is looking up—way up. Last week, only 202,000 Americans filed to receive unemployment...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The tech IPO economy has few winners and lots of losers
We may look back on Lyft’s initial public offering as the end of a beautiful era, a time of plenty. For well-off city-dwellers, anyway. The…
View ArticleClik here to view.
The problem with the tech IPO economy
The business strategy that will land Uber on the NYSE hinges on a key element: staggering sums of venture capital money. These investments let Uber and similar tech startups collect users by...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The net impact of Trump’s new NAFTA is probably nothing
What happens when America’s deal-maker-in-chief takes on “the worst trade deal in the history of the world”? Not much, it turns out. That’s the conclusion drawn by an independent government agency in a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It’s boom time in America! For now.
Around the world, things are looking a little shaky. South Korea’s GDP just shrank unexpectedly. Germany is barely growing, dragging down an already sickly euro-zone economy. Japan is sputtering....
View ArticleClik here to view.
China’s gargantuan money market fund is a sign of strength—and deep imbalances
When Ant Financial added a money market fund to its payment app, few people expected it to become the biggest in the world a couple…
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to escalate a trade war, Chinese Communist Party style
The trade war is back on. This week, China vowed to raise tariffs on $60 billion of US goods, retaliating against tariffs the US government imposed on May 10. The White House is now threatening to levy...
View ArticleClik here to view.
China’s debt disease might wreck its uncrashable housing market
For decades, the burgeoning power of China’s middle-class has been promised as a cure-all for many of the global economy’s troubles (not to mention its own). Enriched by three decades of rapidly rising...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The trade war is already pushing businesses out of China—and it could be...
The seemingly unexpected collapse of trade negotiations between the US and China last month hinted that existing Sino-US tariffs may now be the new normal. But recent data reveal that, well before...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watch: Our call about China and Hong Kong
Join Quartz staffers Gwynn Guilford, Isabella Steger, and Sam Grobart as they discuss the latest news coming out of Hong Kong and talk about China’s…
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ravenous armyworms are eating their way across China
Foreign invaders have conquered China. An all-out battle is looming. But the attackers are a far cry from the northern barbarian hordes of yore. Rather, they are mud-colored grubs from the Americas,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Huawei tells us about Trump, trade, and technology
Even by his own rhetorical standards, Donald Trump’s trade war policies don’t make a ton of sense. The president says his confrontation with China is…
View ArticleClik here to view.
The quiet campaign to reinstate the gold standard is getting louder
The once-fringe fantasy of a return to the gold standard is creeping back into the mainstream. It has long been dismissed as a fool’s errand, on par with abandoning the Federal Reserve and other...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trump’s war on Huawei risks hobbling US innovation
For the last two months Huawei, China’s top global tech company, has been facing down what some call a “death sentence” imposed by the Trump administration, which in mid-May banned US firms from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The US economy is just fine. But the Fed wants to make it even finer
Global growth seems to be weakening fast, and the world’s central bankers are preparing their monetary arsenal for a rate cut. But on the mid-North American front—which includes, of course, the Federal...
View ArticleClik here to view.
With today’s rate cut, the Fed is jeopardizing its credibility
The Federal Reserve just cut rates for the first time in a decade—and landed itself in a dilemma. This afternoon (July 31), the Fed open market committee trimmed the target range of the federal funds...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watch: Our video conference call about a global currency war
In this conference call, senior reporter Gwynn Guilford and finance editor Jason Karaian took your questions about the potential for a round of competitive devaluation,…
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watch: our call on the state of global trade
Quartz senior reporter Gwynn Guilford and deputy finance editor Oliver Staley discuss the state of global trade, amid the trade war, Brexit, and other developments.
View ArticleClik here to view.
5G explained: The reality behind the hype
This much is clear: 5G is here. What exactly that means is somewhat hazier. Does it mean you should hold off on upgrading your phone?…
View ArticleClik here to view.
Who’s winning the race to 5G? Uh, no one
Even if you’ve absorbed nothing else about 5G, you almost certainly know these three things: There’s a race to build it. China is winning. And…
View ArticleClik here to view.
The tricky—and really expensive—business of building 5G
Simply put, 5G will make the ability to analyze colossal volumes of data cheaper and more accessible—at a scale of magnitude that turns what now…
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watch: Our call on what 5G really means
Quartz tech editor, Mike Murphy and senior reporter, Gwynn Guilford separate the facts from the hype to map out what we can expect from the…
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wage growth is slowing—which could be an ominous sign for the economy
America’s unemployment rate is brushing historical lows once again, as the United States’ closely-watched jobs data report revealed on Friday. Hiring continues to steam ahead. Given all that, you’d...
View ArticleClik here to view.
One fix for China’s alarming pork shortage: giant pigs
A deadly virus has wiped out as much as half of China’s pig population. That’s a big problem for a country whose default meat is pork. As prices soar, the government is trying to induce farmers to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tree thieves are the scourge of national forests
The name “Maple Fire” doesn’t quite do it justice. In August 2018, a wildfire razed 3,300 acres of ancient forest in Washington state—burying Seattle in smoke and costing taxpayers $4.5 million before...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Good news! China’s economy is slowing
Sound the alarm! China’s economy grew by 6% in the third quarter, the slowest annual rate in 30 years. This was down from 6.4% in the first quarter and 6.2% in the second. The main culprits include...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nokia is having one of the worst days in its history, thanks to 5G
Nokia’s share price tanked by nearly 25% at one point today—the biggest daily drop since at least 1991—after the Finnish telecom equipment vendor announced a sudden and acute shrinking of its network...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How the stock market could trigger the next recession
As US business spending tanks and residential investment fizzles, one bulwark against recession remains: the American consumer. That’s why economists are glued to data on hiring, wages, and interest...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The great American labor paradox: Plentiful jobs, most of them bad
The numbers tell one story. Unemployment in the US is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. More Americans have jobs than ever before. Wage growth keeps climbing. People tell a different story. Long job...
View Article