Tag: economy

He Helped Build Obama’s Legacy. The Job Cost Him His Company.

Mike Owen spent years helping build the Obama Idolatry Worship Center Obama Presidential Center. On June 25, the owner and president of Adamson Plumbing Contractors suspended operations, laid off 25 union workers, and abandoned about six other construction jobs.

Breitbart News:

“Before the center opened, Owen said the project had left his company with $3.9 million in losses tied to delays, rework, labor overruns, and changing project demands. He said he spent months negotiating with Lakeside Alliance, the project’s construction manager, before going public after failing to reach a resolution,” the article read.

Indeed, the center was reportedly also costing taxpayers more and more money as it put out a call for unpaid volunteers even though its chief executive would be paid a salary of $740,000, according to reports.

In regard to Owen’s battle over the nearly $4 million payment dispute, his company that performed the work under the name Marsh-Adamson, has filed a $1.72 million mechanic’s lien against the center’s property in an effort to be paid for the work.

“Laying off close to 30 people is something that no owner in our industry wants to do. It’s a hard thing to do, especially when you know you can finish them and the company can still make money. But we were put in a pretty bad corner,” he said.

A project promoted as an investment in Chicago’s South Side had become, in Owen’s account, the job that pushed his company to the edge.

Owen says Adamson lost about $3.9 million through delays, rework, labor overruns, and changing demands. The company performed roughly $12 million in work after starting with a bid near $6.9 million. Marsh-Adamson, the name used for its work on the center, has filed a $1.72 million mechanic’s lien against the property.

The immediate break came just before the center opened on June 19. Owen says Lakeside Alliance, the project’s construction manager, agreed to release $100,000 if Adamson supplied two journeyman plumbers for last-minute nighttime work. His crew completed the assignment, but the money didn’t arrive before the opening.

Lakeside eventually sent the $100,000, along with about $35,000 for change orders. The payments arrived more than two weeks after Adamson had suspended operations and dismissed its workers. The money reduced a debt to one supplier, but it didn’t reverse the shutdown.

Owen has moved out of his company’s building and is working from home while attorneys handle the dispute. He says Adamson may regroup in September, but its future remains uncertain.

After 35 years in the industry, he may now have to find a job.

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Illegal Immigration Made The Average New House $30K More Expensive Under Biden

Although Americans still express strong support for legal immigration, according to the latest Gallup survey, a large plurality, including Democrats, acknowledge immigration drives up housing costs and reduces availability.

The data confirm this impression. Mass immigration has contributed heavily to the dramatic housing price increases, a newly leaked draft working paper from the Federal Reserve confirms. Illegal immigration drove 30 percent of the increase in U.S. home prices from 2021 to 2024, along with 20 percent of the rise in rent prices, the researchers found.

In total, the (at least) seven million people who entered the United States illegally in those four years raised home prices by 6.6 percent, through a “housing demand shock in the face of short-run inelastic supply,” the authors observe.

The 2008 financial crisis pushed the annual growth of America’s housing supply far below the normal historical average, and it has remained well short of the norm ever since. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. households has rapidly increased.

Illegal immigration hit tsunami levels during the Joe Biden presidency, The Federalist’s Libby Bandelin reported: “From 2021-2024, the United States saw the largest influx of immigrants in its history.”

That has put an immense amount of pressure on a stagnant housing stock. The median price of new houses sold in January 2021 was $346,400, and the average price was $408,800, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Those prices rose by approximately $100,000 each, to $446,300 and $510,000 respectively, by January 2025.

That means illegal immigration, on its own, drove up the average price of a new house by $30,000 during the Biden administration.

It is important to note that the effect the Fed researchers identified was for illegal immigration only. Legal immigration pushes the total immigration effect on housing prices even higher, given that the housing supply is inelastic regardless of people’s legal status.

Net international migration to the United States was 379,000 in 2021, 1.7 million in 2022, 2.3 million in 2023, and 2.8 million in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau: that is 7,179,000 people in four years. Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Director of Research Steven Camarota put the number at 8.3 million, “larger than the individual populations of 38 states,” in a March 2025 New York Post op-ed.

These are net changes in population, the CIS noted in 2024, “offset by emigration and net mortality among the immigrant population,” thus representing the actual increase in the foreign-born population, not the number of immigrants (which would be higher, of course).

Compounding the problem was the fact that most of the new immigrants were not working, let alone building new houses. Less than half of all immigrants in the United States work. “The figures show that in the first quarter of 2024, 46 percent of those who arrived in 2022 or later were employed,” the CIS study states. “Many new immigrants are children, elderly, disabled, caregivers, or others with no ability or interest in working.”

Even able-bodied immigrants are far less likely to work than Americans. “The increase in immigration since the 1960s has coincided with a steady increase in the share of US-born men (ages 16 to 64) without a bachelor’s degree not in the labor force — neither working nor looking for work,” Camorata writes. “The percentage was 28% in January 2025, up from 20% in January 2000 and single digits in the 1960s. These individuals are not counted as unemployed because they are not actively looking for a job.”

Many of those non-workers add even more to the burden on the U.S. economy by taking government welfare benefits, including by exploiting poor monitoring of government programs for which they are not eligible. Illegal aliens are far more likely to go on welfare than native-born Americans. “Based on government data, we estimate that 59 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants use one or more major welfare programs, compared to 39 percent of households headed by the U.S.-born,” Camorata testified to a House Judiciary subcommittee in 2024.

Those immigrants’ children attend taxpayer-funded schools, costing an estimated $78 billion in 2022, according to the Foundation for American Immigration Reform. 29 percent of U.S. school-age children have an immigrant parent, Camorata wrote in his New York Post op-ed. Providing emergency medical care to illegal aliens costs American taxpayers another $7 billion a year, Camorata stated in his congressional testimony.

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The World’s Biggest Shell Game

In 2001, Enron’s collapse revealed that a corporation could manufacture the appearance of financial health by creating thousands of shell companies, the purpose of which was to buy the real corporation’s toxic assets, keeping them hidden from investors and regulators. Enron created more than 3,000 such shell companies, officially dubbed “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPV). When the shell game unraveled, $30 billion in hidden debt materialized overnight.

Lehman Brothers used this principle with “Repo 105,” temporarily moving $50 billion in assets off its balance sheet at quarter-end to SPVs, then retrieving them days later after reporting deadlines passed. Lehman’s bankruptcy examiner documented the fraud across 2,200 pages. No one went to prison.

Citigroup ran $80 billion through off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicles. When the commercial paper market froze in 2008, Citigroup had to re-absorb $58 billion, requiring a $45 billion government bailout. Bear Stearns created hedge fund SPVs housing toxic mortgage securities. When they imploded in 2007, they served as the canary in the coal mine for the entire financial system.

Bigger Than Corporations

The crucial question is: Does the same architecture operate at the level of nation-states? It does, through the mechanism of dollar reserve requirements and Treasury market structure.

Here is how it works. The United States issues Treasury bonds to finance deficit spending. Under the post-Bretton Woods dollar reserve system, central banks worldwide are expected (and in practice effectively required) to hold significant portions of their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollar-denominated assets, primarily Treasury securities. The Bank for International Settlements and International Monetary Fund frameworks for reserve adequacy create structural pressure on smaller countries to accumulate Treasuries as a demonstration of financial stability and as insurance against currency crises.

The result: Japan holds approximately $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasuries. China holds approximately $760 billion. The United Kingdom, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, Belgium, and Ireland each hold hundreds of billions. Together, foreign countries hold approximately $8.5 trillion of the $36 trillion U.S. national debt.

The Carrot and the Stick

These countries are not freely choosing to hold American debt the way a private investor chooses a stock. Many are incentivized, and in some cases coerced, into doing so by the international monetary system.

Countries that attempt to de-dollarize their reserves face currency instability, reduced access to dollar swap lines, and in some cases direct U.S. diplomatic and financial pressure. Iraq announced it would price oil in euros in 2000. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi proposed a gold-backed African currency to replace the dollar for oil transactions. Both countries experienced U.S. military intervention shortly thereafter. Correlation is not causation, but the pattern has not gone unnoticed by smaller nations.

Without foreign central-bank demand structurally supporting the Treasury market, the interest rates required to attract voluntary buyers would be considerably higher. Foreign reserve requirements effectively subsidize American borrowing costs, suppress Treasury yields, and support the dollar’s reserve status in a mutually reinforcing cycle that benefits the issuer enormously.

Enron’s SPVs kept toxic assets off the balance sheet, allowing rating agencies such as Moody’s and S&P to maintain investment-grade ratings until days before the collapse. The structural foreign demand for Treasuries similarly influences how sovereign debt markets evaluate American creditworthiness. When Moody’s downgraded the United States from Aaa to Aa1 in May 2025, it cited the $36 trillion debt and deficit trajectory. But that downgrade was decades late relative to what the raw numbers would suggest.

Loss Is Inevitable

The difference between Enron’s SPVs and the sovereign SPV system is that Enron collapsed suddenly. The dollar reserve system is unwinding slowly — through BRICS de-dollarization efforts, bilateral currency swap agreements between China and trading partners, Saudi Arabia’s acceptance of yuan for oil sales, and the gradual diversification of central bank reserves away from Treasuries toward gold, which global central banks purchased at record rates in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

When enough of the SPV network decides to stop absorbing the parent’s liabilities, the parent’s true balance sheet becomes visible. What happened to Enron in 2001, and to Lehman in 2008, will eventually happen to any entity that has confused the appearance of solvency with its substance.

The shell game always ends the same way.

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Wars End With An Invoice – IMF Drops Global Growth Forecast

The IMF has once again reduced its outlook for global growth, pointing to persistent geopolitical tensions, expanding trade barriers, and growing uncertainty surrounding conflicts stretching from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Global output is now expected to grow at roughly 3% this year, a pace well below the historical average.

Modern economists often separate military conflict from economic performance as though they are unrelated subjects. Every prolonged conflict diverts resources away from productive investment and toward military production. Steel that might have built factories instead becomes armored vehicles. Microchips are directed into missile systems rather than consumer electronics. Governments absorb increasing amounts of capital through debt issuance while businesses delay investment because they cannot predict where the next geopolitical crisis will emerge. Those developments do not remain confined to defense ministries. They eventually work their way into every household through higher prices, slower growth, and declining purchasing power.

Europe is steadily increasing defense budgets after decades of reducing military expenditures. Germany has abandoned many of the fiscal restraints that once defined its economic policy. Poland continues purchasing military equipment on a scale unprecedented in its modern history. Finland has spent years constructing extensive underground civil defense infrastructure capable of sheltering nearly its entire population. Governments are discussing emergency preparedness, strategic stockpiles, expanded ammunition production, and even renewed conscription. These are not isolated policy decisions. They represent an entire continent reorganizing itself around the assumption that geopolitical confrontation will remain a defining feature of the years ahead.

Every additional defense commitment must ultimately be financed either through taxation, inflation, or borrowing. Since raising taxes remains politically unpopular, governments overwhelmingly choose debt. The United States is approaching $40 trillion in federal obligations. France continues struggling with chronic deficits while attempting to finance both social spending and military expansion. Britain faces rising borrowing costs alongside growing defense commitments. Similar pressures exist throughout much of the developed world because every government believes it can postpone today’s expenses until tomorrow’s taxpayers arrive.

Most forecasting models begin with the assumption that political conditions remain reasonably stable. Once that assumption disappears, many of the underlying projections quickly lose their value. Energy markets respond to military developments rather than supply and demand alone. Shipping costs fluctuate because of security concerns instead of commercial activity. Capital begins seeking jurisdictions perceived as politically safer rather than merely offering higher returns. Central banks discover that adjusting interest rates cannot reopen disrupted trade routes or restore confidence damaged by expanding conflicts.

Wars have always carried two battlefields. One is fought with soldiers and weapons. The other is fought on government balance sheets, in bond markets, and through the purchasing power of national currencies. Politicians generally devote far more attention to the first battlefield because the second is less visible to the public. Yet history repeatedly shows that financial exhaustion has brought down governments every bit as effectively as military defeat. That is why the economic consequences of prolonged conflict deserve far greater attention than another routine revision to a global growth forecast.

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Mamdani’s Affordability Agenda Flops As NYC Rents Surge To Record Highs

New York City’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and his radical-left lieutenants in City Hall promised voters free bus rides, government-run grocery stores, cheap housing, and much more. Yet the dream of a left-wing utopia has not materialized. In fact, rents in the NYC metro area just hit a record high.

New data from The Corcoran Group, a major residential real estate brokerage founded in NYC, shows that rents in the metro area have climbed to a new record high.

Manhattan’s median rent rose 8% from a year earlier to $5,295, while Brooklyn reached $4,350, also up 8%, according to the report. Manhattan’s vacancy rate narrowed to 1.49%. In Queens, Rego Park posted particularly sharp increases, with one-bedroom rents up 12% and studio rents up more than 20%.

“Manhattan renters are chasing a shrinking pool of available apartments, and the result has become predictable — record rents. Available listings dropped 16% year-over-year in June, while the borough’s median rent climbed to a new high of $5,295 . Leasing activity clocked in 7% below last year’s pace due to the lack of inventory, causing competition to remain fierce. Additionally, June marked one year since implementation of the FARE Act, a milestone that may still be influencing pricing trends, particularly within the non-doorman market. Across the board, quality apartments are commanding a premium, and renters have little room to negotiate,” Corcoran COO Gary Malin wrote in the report.

Malin continued, “Brooklyn’s rental market is also rewriting the record books. Median rent jumped 8% year-over-year to an all-time high of $4,350 and apartments spent 30% fewer days on the market. This steep annual decline underscores how tight the market has become, with flat inventory and strong demand strong causing available units to rent far faster than a year ago. While lease signings were lower on an annual basis, activity picked up from May as renters moved quickly to secure apartments ahead of the busiest stretch of the summer season. Throughout the borough, competition.”

City Comptroller Mark Levine commented on the new report, saying, “NYC’s housing affordability crisis is at DEFCON 1. We need to push harder on every front to address our housing shortage.”

“Update zoning, invest more City $ in affordable units, lower the time & cost City bureaucracy imposes on construction, get 1000s of vacant regulated units back on the market. We need bold action. This is a crisis,” Levine added.

Yet, as Libs of TikTok on X pointed out, “We don’t have a housing shortage. We have an illegal alien invasion,” adding, “Forty percent of NYC rentals are occupied by people born outside the US.”

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Zohran Mamdani’s New York City Includes a 12-Block-Long Homeless Encampment in Manhattan

New York City appears to be on the verge of replicating Los Angeles by establishing its own crime-ridden skid row in the form of a 12-block-long homeless encampment that continues to grow on Manhattan’s West Side.

Those who live, work and visit nearby are telling at least one news outlet that the city is failing to address the tents, trash and reported illegal activity in the alarming stretch of vagrant dwellings between the Intrepid Museum and the Jacob Javitz Center.

“I think it’s embarrassing,” said Joan G., a woman who asked for anonymity told Fox News Digital near the encampment.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, told reporters he’d do something about the mess but failed to give a timeline, the New York Post reported this week.

“This site has been noticed and it will be cleared,” the mayor said. “As with any site once we notice there is seven days until the point of clearing. Each of those seven days is characterized by outreach from city workers looking to connect those who are present with services, whether it be services at a shelter, medical services, or supportive services beyond that.”

He did not say when the seven-day waiting period kicks in, according to the Post report.

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The Fed Still Doesn’t Understand Where Inflation Comes From

New York Federal Reserve President John Williams now says inflation has likely peaked and that monetary policy is “well positioned” to bring inflation back toward the Fed’s 2% objective. Williams acknowledged inflation remains “unquestionably too high,” but argued that the worst of the tariff effects have passed, housing inflation is moderating, oil prices have peaked, and disruptions tied to the Middle East conflict should ease over time. He forecasts inflation falling to roughly 3.25% by the end of the year and gradually returning to 2% by 2028.

This is precisely where central bankers always get it wrong. They continue assuming the geopolitical landscape will cooperate with their economic forecasts. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that assumption. If anything, the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction. The Middle East is becoming more unstable, not less. Ukraine remains a war of attrition consuming enormous military resources every day. Europe is dramatically expanding defense spending. China is eyeing Taiwan and waiting for the US to stretch itself too thin to protect it. NATO members are rebuilding their militaries at levels not seen in decades. Governments everywhere are preparing for a world of prolonged geopolitical confrontation.

Wars are the most inflationary events imaginable.

Williams argues that oil prices have peaked and that disruptions in the Middle East should gradually subside. That is an assumption, not a forecast supported by events. The ceasefire that briefly lowered energy prices has already broken down. Shipping risks remain elevated. Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and the Red Sea continue presenting risks capable of sending commodity prices sharply higher overnight. It only takes one escalation to completely invalidate months of inflation projections.

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Money printing is the greatest fraud perpetrated on the Middle Class in 100 years

There is no middle class left because of this. What people call middle class is just lower class with worse purchasing power than anytime in the past. Inflation is covert taxation that lets governments spend even more recklessly. Boomers got overleveraged in homes they can’t sell while prices stay propped up. Gen Z can’t even touch a starter home. Argentina’s peso went worthless and the bread and circus distractions won’t save them forever. This is the boiling frog on steroids.

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Price Fixing at the Pump

Conservatives often criticize Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani for believing that government should direct private economic decisions. Yet when President Donald Trump recently warned gasoline retailers to lower their prices, or face “big problems,” he embraced a remarkably similar premise: that politicians should pressure private businesses to charge prices that the government considers acceptable.

According to a recent Fox News report, President Trump demanded that gasoline retailers immediately lower their prices, renewing his call for $2.50 gasoline. On Truth Social, he urged retailers to “DROP YOUR PRICE FOR OUR GREAT AMERICAN PEOPLE!” and warned that if they failed to do so, “big problems lie ahead.”

That matters because when politicians discuss gasoline prices, many Americans picture giant oil companies. In reality, roughly 95% of US gas stations are independently owned small businesses. Most do not buy gasoline directly from refiners. Instead, they purchase fuel through wholesale distributors, or “jobbers,” who deliver it to local stations. It’s these independent owners, not major oil companies, who set retail prices, based on local competition, taxes, operating costs, and, perhaps most importantly, the cost of replacing the fuel once their underground tanks are empty. Because gasoline profit margins are razor-thin, many stations rely more on convenience-store sales than on gasoline sales to remain profitable.

None of this means that government policy is irrelevant. President Trump is correct to criticize California’s role in high gasoline prices, for instance. California consistently has some of the highest gasoline prices in the nation, often $1.50 to $2.00 per gallon above the national average. Those higher prices reflect, in part, the state’s nation-leading gasoline excise tax (which climbed to 63.4¢ per gallon), state sales taxes, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, cap-and-trade programs, and unique fuel formulation requirements. All of these state-mandated policies increase the baseline expense of supplying gasoline.

Many economic conservatives and libertarians, myself included, have criticized Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani for advocating a larger government role in directing private economic decisions. At the very least, their calls for greater government intervention are consistent with the philosophy they have long espoused. The same standard should apply when a Republican president threatens private businesses over the prices they voluntarily charge. Free-market principles should not depend on which political party holds political power.

The real question is simple: Is it the legitimate role of government to pressure or threaten private businesses over the prices they voluntarily charge for their own property?

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These Are The States Driving America’s Economic Growth

The U.S. economy grew 2.1% in real terms in 2025, but that national figure tells only part of the story. While every state economy expanded, some grew nearly ten times faster than others.

Using the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), this map, via Visual Capitalist’s Gabriel Cohen, compares real GDP growth across all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

The Sun Belt Ascendant

No states grew more in 2025 than Florida and South Carolina, which both expanded by 3.1%. Their strong growth rates reflect the continued economic momentum of the American South and the broader Sun Belt.

Arkansas (2.2%), North Carolina (2.7%), and Texas (2.5%) also performed better than the national average.

This data table ranks U.S. states based on their 2025 real GDP growth, measuring the change in overall economic output after adjusting for inflation.

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