Source: Macroeconomic Policy Nexus
by David Beckworth

“President Trump will soon announce his pick for the next Federal Reserve Chair. Whoever takes the helm will inherit a full plate of challenges from Jerome Powell: interest-rate decisions, balance-sheet runoff, payment-system reform, regulatory overhaul, growing political pressures, and more. One thing the new chair will not inherit, however, is a Federal Reserve still incurring operating losses. Yes, as our friend Bill Nelson first reported, the Fed is now generating net interest income for the first time since August 2022. … The primary reason for the recent losses is that the Fed’s interest expenses exceeded its interest income.” (12/08/25)

https://macroeconomicpolicynexus.substack.com/p/the-feds-losses-atlantas-lesson-and

Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas JS Davies

“Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America. The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting US foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and ‘America First’ priorities.” (12/08/25)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/marco-rubio-venezuela

Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker

“The Guardian had a fascinating piece on how the Dollar store chains (both Dollar General and Family Dollar) seem to have a practice of advertising lower prices on their shelves than what they ring up at the register when the person checks out. The evidence they present in the piece indicates that these mispricing cases may account for more than 20 percent of all sales. … This piece is striking for three reasons. First, insofar as this sort of cheating is common, it indicates that inflation could be greater than is generally recognized. Second, it brings home the problem of ‘affordability’ in a way that many of us probably did not anticipate. … Finally, it shows how the Trump-Musk habit of laughing at consumer fraud has very real pocketbook effects.” (12/08/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/08/dollar-stores-where-trumpian-sleaze-meets-affordability/

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Kritsian Niemietz

“Gary Stevenson thinks that he has discovered the root cause of Britain’s malaise: wealth inequality. In his version of events, the super-rich are monopolising all the assets, including property and they are using the returns on those assets to buy even more assets — a self-reinforcing downward spiral. A small, super-wealthy elite is getting wealthier and wealthier, while the rest of the country is sinking into abject poverty. Gary has assembled a mass following on the basis of this thesis, so it is clearly persuasive to a lot of people. It is also completely wrong, for a number of reasons. ” (12/08/25)

https://fee.org/articles/wealth-inequality-is-not-a-problem-in-britain/

Source: spiked
by Brendan O’Neill

“Musk’s irate philippics against the Brussels machine might be driven by self-serving impulses. His conversion to what we might call the Brexit spirit followed the EU’s slapping of a €120million fine on X for breaching the transparency rules in its authoritarian Digital Services Act. In response, Musk taunted EU officials on X and openly called for the EU’s dismantling. ‘The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people’, he tweeted. So it was the EU’s meddling with his bank balance, rather than its meddling with the European people’s sovereign rights, that pushed him over the edge into Euroscepticism. He’s still right, though.” (12/08/25)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/12/08/elon-musk-is-right-about-the-eu/

Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone

“The blue whales have stopped singing / because the krill are vanishing / because the oceans are warming / because we are ruled by long-toothed liars / whose insides are full of dead leaves. / The great whales have gone silent / and my bird has gone blind / and there are chatbots in the basement / and corpses in the corn. / Under the overpass it is dry and still. / You would never know that everything is dying. / You should come and visit me. / Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights / with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen, / all the stillborn scar tissue extractions / from the wreckage of a banished womb, / the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings / and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people, / where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle / with the cries of the last baby orangutan / ever born in the wild …” (12/08/25)

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/12/08/the-blue-whales-have-stopped-singing/