John Cassidy

As Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans were struggling to pass their budget-busting tax-and-spending bill last week—they eventually got it through by a single vote—my mind went back more than three decades to February, 1993, when, in a meeting in […]

Last weekend, in Omaha, Nebraska, at the annual meeting of Warren Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett announced that at the end of this year he will give up his post as C.E.O. According to reports, some people in the

Nobody has ever accused Donald Trump of being an economic philosopher, but maybe we have been missing something. In a televised Cabinet meeting last Wednesday, the President brought up the possibility that his trade war, and particularly his punitive tariffs

Two months into Donald Trump’s second term, his Republican attack dogs, including Elon Musk and his minions at DOGE, are still busy chewing into many parts of the federal government. But the Trump Administration continues to promise that it will

The other morning, as Donald Trump was writing on social media that the “Entire World is RIPPING US OFF!!!” and threatening to impose tariffs of two hundred per cent on wine and champagne from the European Union, and as investors

Economists have long recognized that when the future is foggier than usual, consumers and businesses may put off making big purchases. John Maynard Keynes, in his famous tome “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” which was published in

The Trump Administration’s assault on federal workers is intensifying, but it remains infuriatingly opaque. With no official tally of layoffs, media organizations are doing their own sums based on announcements from individual agencies. Reuters estimates that, so far, “tens of

John David Rainey, the chief financial officer of Walmart, America’s biggest company both in terms of annual revenue and number of employees, told the Associated Press last week that Donald Trump’s tariff policy was already affecting its decision-making and creating

For almost twenty-five years, William Easterly, a free-market economist at New York University, has been a prominent academic critic of foreign-aid programs. In his 2001 book, “The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics,” Easterly wrote

More than a decade and a half ago, I watched Elizabeth Warren bring a crowd in Washington to its feet with a ringing indictment of Wall Street and the toxic mortgage securities that had pushed the American banking system to