Lending by private equity firms and other nonbank financial businesses has become so widespread that it could become a “locus of contagion” in any new financial crisis, a research group that includes researchers from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Moody’s Analytics said last week.
Now that the U.S. government’s interest payments on the national debt have topped $1 trillion—about 14 percent of the annual federal budget—more of the financial industry’s leaders are speaking, and speaking more urgently, about it.
U.S. factories’ output diminished a little more last month as manufacturers hesitated to make commitments amid Donald Trump’s swirling trade policies, The Wall Street Journal reported.
As we had long forecast, President Trump will keep pushing the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. After the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs in May—more than expected—Donald Trump took to social media to demand that the U.S. Federal Reserve and its Chairman Jerome Powell lower the central bank’s interest rate.
The number of U.S. nonfarm jobs grew by 139,000 last month, less than the adjusted 147,000 in April but still more than the 125,000 economists forecasted in a Dow Jones poll.
In May, U.S. businesses announced they plan to drop about 100,000 workers from their payrolls, 47 percent more than were announced in May 2024, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported in new data.
Over 100 Palestinians have been killed at Israeli- and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites in southern Gaza since 27 May, and hundreds have been injured, after warnings from the UN and NGOs that the project was doomed to fail from the start.
The death toll in Gaza reached 54,927 on Tuesday and 126,615 have been wounded. There are another 11,000 missing.
The economic landscape has presented an array of challenges that will profoundly affect the business community this year.
The number of U.S. workers laid off in May was 47 percent higher than May last year, according to a report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The firm reported 93,816 layoffs by U.S. employers in May, up from 63,816 layoffs last May. The total number of job cuts through the end of May was 696,309, an increase of 80 percent from the 385,589 job cuts in the first five months of last year.