Economy

It was the kind of line that Robert De Niro would deliver perfectly in a gangster epic. “I am the house now,” the United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared confidently last week. “And you can bet against me if you want.” It was the most aggressive attempt yet by the most powerful financial official in the world to take on and tame the traders of Wall Street. With major interventions underway to control the yen-dollar exchange rate, and the yields on America’s $40 trillion national debt, Bessent’s message was clear. They will lose money if they dare to defy his will. Well, perhaps they will in the short term. With a background at the world’s most successful hedge fund, Bessent knows more about the market than most people. There is just one snag.

Donald Trump has spent much of his second term probing the limits of presidential power. This week, he has discovered another means by which to test them: by promising every American adult $5,000 in the event Republicans retain both houses of Congress. The proposal would cost around $1.2 trillion: representing around 3 percent of America’s $40 trillion in national debt. Washington is likely to reject the idea, but even if they approve it, there is one constituency who is likely to ensure that it remains untenable. That constituency would be the people and institutions expected to lend the United States money. As a deficit mushrooms to a projected $1.9 trillion, there is still little appetite in Washington for any sort of fiscal course correction.

Earlier this summer, I sat barefoot in Berkeley with a dozen aspiring “geopolitical traders,” learning how to make money from war. We were at a conference billed as a “festival for predictions, and markets thereof” – that is, a celebration of prediction markets. The venue, a hippie-ish compound, mostly forbade shoes indoors. Our instructor, Mike, claimed to have grown his money eightfold on Polymarket, mostly by trading on politics. Now he would share his wisdom. Prediction markets were legalized in the United States in 2020 on the premise that they would “allow us, more often than not, to predict the future.” That, at least, is what Kalshi’s marketing copy claims.

It’s hard to avoid the constant prophecies of doom about how AI is going to take our jobs – with some of these already being borne out. However, AI leaders such as Elon Musk have declared that the population will be supported by Universal Basic Income (UBI) instead, in which the government will financially support everyone through the huge revenues produced by AI. “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI,” Musk posted on X earlier this year. Musk imagines that we wouldn’t be unemployed but rather liberated – UBI would allow us to live without the mundane tasks of everyday life, like making PowerPoint presentations, writing emails or finding synergies in our deliverables.

One of the sub-plots of the last twenty years has been the growth of “derangement syndromes.” It started with Bush Derangement Syndrome at the start of the century, morphed into the far more powerful Trump Derangement Syndrome, took a side trip to the other side of the Atlantic with Brexit Derangement Syndrome, and then turned into Tariff Derangement Syndrome. The basic symptoms are always the same. Some fairly minor, and probably not even very radical reforms, get reframed as an existential threat to the economy, democracy and even civilization itself. We are now seeing the latest example. Warsh Derangement Syndrome, named after the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh – and for investors it is likely to prove the most expensive yet.

In a sign of the unease about Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine that exists behind closed doors in Moscow, one of Russia’s most senior bankers was fired yesterday after a series of critical comments he made earlier in the year about the fragility of Russia’s economy. Warning that Russia was “falling behind” globally both technologically and economically, Andrey Klepach stated the country would fail to win the economic “war of attrition” against Ukraine. “The Ukrainian economy, despite everything, is surviving,” he said. Klepach, chief economist at Russia’s second-largest, state-owned bank VEB, gave a speech in May, during which he linked the pressure on the country’s economy with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The management consulting giant Accenture has laid off 11,000 people. The reason? It turns out that a smart chatbot can churn out meaningless waffle about “boiling the ocean” just as well as a recently hired MBA. Oracle has cut more than 20,000 jobs, as it discovered that Claude or ChatGPT could code as effectively as the quiet guy with glasses, while the legal giant Baker McKenzie is laying off as many as 1,000 people after figuring out that a machine could churn out a letter about “the aforementioned party of interest” as effectively as any of their junior lawyers. America is getting both sides of a process of ‘creative destruction’ Almost every day, another round of white collar professionals falls victim to the AI-driven jobs apocalypse.

Even for an economy as large as the United States, $70 billion still counts as a significant sum of money. After the first round of President Trump’s tariffs were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, customs officials have already issued that amount in refund checks. Here’s the problem, however: none of it appears to have been passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. In reality corporate America is pocketing the money – but it is also playing with fire by inviting retaliation from President Trump. Almost no major policy has ever been quite so chaotically implemented as the tariffs imposed by President Trump on the oddly named Liberation Day in April last year.

The most interesting piece of economic policy from the Trump White House is not a tariff, nor is it an AI export restriction. It’s a brokerage account for babies. Under the new Trump Accounts program, eligible American children born between 2025 and 2028 will receive $1,000 from the Treasury, to be invested in a broad index of American companies. Parents, employers, and other benefactors can contribute up to $5,000 more annually. Before these children can walk or speak, they will own their slice of corporate America.  At first glance, this seems uncharacteristically left wing – as if a fever dream from Andrew Yang’s presidential platform had escaped and somehow convinced the Trump administration of its merits.

It won’t be anything on the scale of 1973, when President Nixon imposed year round daylight saving time to reduce electricity consumption as well as a 50mph highway speed limit. Nor are we likely to see the thermostat restrictions, or the standby plans for rationing, that were introduced by President Carter in 1979.  The "oil shocks" of the 1970s were not just from a different era, they were of a different magnitude as well.  Trump may well step in with some form of oil export controls Yet that does not mean that the American economy is immune to another crisis, nor that we won’t see a dramatic response from the White House - because, in reality, the US could easily run out of oil later this year.

For a country that pumps roughly nine million barrels of oil a day – the third highest of any country in the world – Russia has managed to achieve something genuinely remarkable: it cannot keep its own gas stations stocked. More than half of its regions are now reporting shortages, the consequence of a Ukrainian drone campaign that has struck with increasing frequency and precision at the refinery infrastructure on which the country's civilian economy depends. The sometimes hours-long lines that have appeared – even in Moscow, for what may be the first time in the war – carry a symbolic weight that no amount of official reassurance from the Kremlin has managed to dispel. How this has come about is obvious enough.

Vladimir Putin likes good statistics. At a government meeting on April 15, even as he acknowledged that growth was slowing, he pointed proudly to Russia's unemployment rate: 2.1 percent, a record low. Proof, he suggested, that the economy remains fundamentally sound despite everything the West has thrown at it. The Russian President would do better to worry. A record low unemployment rate is not, in normal circumstances, cause for alarm. In Russia's case it signals something closer to a slow-motion emergency. For the first time in its post-Soviet history, Russia has run out of workers.

The head of Swedish military intelligence has dropped what he clearly regards as a bombshell. Thomas Nilsson told the Financial Times this week that Russia's economy is far weaker than it appears, that the Kremlin systematically manipulates its statistics to fool Ukraine's Western allies, and that the central bank is understating inflation, which he believes is closer to 15 percent than the official 5.86 percent. For good measure, he endorsed the German intelligence service BND's earlier estimate that Russia's budget deficit is understated by $30 billion. One need not be a Kremlin agent to find this less than convincing. That Russia's economy is struggling is not in dispute.