Economics

Americans are feeling a hangover from their tariff-fueled buying frenzy early in the spring.

Retail sales fell by 0.9% in May from the prior month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, down sharply from April’s downwardly revised 0.1% decline. That was the steepest monthly decline since January and worse than the 0.7% decrease economists projected in a poll by data firm FactSet.

The figures are adjusted for seasonal swings but not inflation.

In a corner of Kentucky just outside of Louisville, family-owned shoe company Keen is opening a new factory this month.

The move fits neatly into the "America First" economic vision championed by the Trump administration - an emblem of hope for a manufacturing renaissance long promised but rarely realised. Yet beneath the surface, Keen's new factory tells a far more complicated story about what manufacturing in America really looks like today.

With just 24 employees on site, the factory relies heavily on automation -sophisticated robots that fuse soles and trim materials - underscoring a transformation in how goods are made today.

Manufacturing is no longer the labour-intensive engine of prosperity it once was, but a capital-heavy, high-tech enterprise.

Out of all 50 states, Massachusetts finished at the top with an overall score of 70.84, beating second-place Utah (69.18) by more than a point. As well as ranking first in terms of innovation potential, Massachusetts placed sixth in economic activity and 17th in economic health.

Washington placed third at 68.97, thanks largely to its innovation potential, leading position in the new technology space and high tech-sector employment.

California, which recently overtook Japan to become the world's fourth largest economy in terms of GDP, ranked fourth at 67.43.

At the bottom of the rankings were Hawaii (33.09), West Virginia (32.34) and Iowa (31.61) in 51st place (results included the District of Columbia in 12th place).

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Remote work, steep mortgage rates and new types of rental properties are fueling demand far from urban downtowns.

Renting is taking off in the suburbs as homeownership remains out of reach for many would-be buyers.

Between 2018 and 2023, rentership surged by at least 5 percentage points in 11 out of 20 suburbs surrounding the largest U.S. metro areas, according to a recent analysis by Point2Homes, a rental market research company.

During the same period, 15 suburbs went from being predominantly composed of homeowners to majority-renter communities. The trend spans fast-growing Sun Belt metros like Dallas, Houston and Miami as well as Northeastern cities like Boston and Philadelphia.

In five of those top 20 metro areas — Dallas, Minneapolis, Boston, Tampa and Baltimore — the suburbs are gaining renters faster than the urban centers they surround, Point2Homes found. The share of residents who rent surged in the Dallas suburbs by 17.6% from 2018 to 2023, while that rate rose just 7.9% in the city itself — with the nearby suburbs of Frisco, McKinney and Grand Prairie each gaining over 5,000 renter households apiece during that period.

“While everyone is focused on the impact of tariffs, the real story for the U.S. economy is the collapse in immigration: down more than 90% compared to the run rate of previous years, equivalent to a slowing in labour force growth of more than 2 million people,” George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note on Friday. “This represents a far more sustained negative supply shock for the economy than tariffs.”

While Trump has pointed to weaker payroll growth as reasons for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, his immigration crackdown gives the central bank, which is already wary of the inflationary effect of his tariffs, another reason to wait and see.

That’s because a workforce that is growing more slowly doesn’t need as much hiring to absorb the additional labor supply. In fact, even as average payroll gains have cooled to 124,000 a month this year from 250,000 in 2024, the jobless rate has hovered around 4.2% since last summer.

KEY POINTS

Warner Bros. Discovery plans to split into two public companies by next year.

WBD will separate into a streaming and studios company, which will include its movie properties and streaming service HBO Max, and a global networks company, which will include CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery.

CEO David Zaslav will lead the streaming and studios company. Current CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels will become CEO of the global networks business.

Premiums for consumers buying aluminium on the physical market in the United States hit a record 60 cents a lb or $1,323 a metric ton on Thursday after Donald Trump imposed higher tariffs on U.S. imports of the metal.

The tariffs doubled to 50% on Wednesday.

The U.S. Midwest duty-paid premium has gained nearly 190% since Trump was elected in November for his second term as president.

The US gambling industry has become a “highway without speed limits”, according to a top state regulator, as the nationwide gambling boom continues at pace.

Jordan Maynard, chair of the Massachusetts gaming commission, urged lawmakers in Washington to consider nationwide rules on advertising by betting firms. Operators have spent years lobbying against a federal crackdown.

Nationwide exclusion lists, blocking gamblers who encounter problems like addiction from placing a bet anywhere in the country, are also “ripe for a federal conversation”, Maynard said in an interview with the Guardian.

Many feel frustrated by a tough job market and worried about debt, experts said.

Gen Z seems to have a case of economic malaise.

Nearly half (49%) of its adult members — the oldest of whom are in their late 20s — say planning for the future feels “pointless,” according to a recent Credit Karma poll.

A freewheeling attitude toward summer spending has taken root among young adults who feel financial “despair” and “hopelessness,” said Courtney Alev, a consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma.

They think, “What’s the point when it comes to saving for the future?” Alev said.

May’s jobs report was dragged down by loss of 22,000 federal workers’ jobs as Doge cut positions

The US economy added 139,000 jobs in May, a slowdown compared with recent months as American businesses cope with uncertainty around Donald Trump’s continuing trade war.

After signs of a strong labor market in April – which was largely seen as resiliency against teetering trade policy from the White House – May saw a drop in new jobs added to the labor market, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate remained steady at 4.2%, unchanged from last month.

May’s jobs report was dragged down by the loss of 22,000 federal workers’ jobs as the Trump administration used the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to cut government positions. Since January, 59,000 Federal jobs have been cut.

Goods brought into the US plunged by 20% in April, recording their largest ever monthly drop in the face of a wave of tariffs unleashed by Donald Trump.

The retreat reflects the abrupt hit to trade, after firms had rushed products into the country earlier this year to try to get ahead of new taxes on imports Trump had promised.

US purchases from major trade partners such as Canada and China fell to their lowest levels since 2021 and 2020 respectively, the Commerce Department said.

The stock slide comes as the multibillionaire criticizes the GOP spending bill and seeks to refocus on his own companies after leading deep federal workforce cuts.

Tesla's shares have fallen 16% since CEO Elon Musk began bashing Donald Trump's massive spending bill last week, and the stock remains about 33% lower since Inauguration Day.

The slide since May 27 follows Musk's departure from the Trump administration the next day. It comes as the two men's relationship began publicly unraveling Thursday.

Musk, the world's richest person and until recently Trump's cost-cutter-in-chief, said he was leaving as the head of his Department of Government Efficiency project to refocus on his businesses. Those companies — Tesla, the satellite company SpaceX, the social media platform X and the brain tech startup Neuralink — have faced growing criticism as Musk oversaw deep cuts to the federal workforce. Tesla sales around the world have fallen sharply this year.

To calculate the inflation rate, hundreds of government workers called enumerators fan out across cities each month to check how much businesses are charging for products such as blue jeans and services such as accounting, often by visiting bricks-and-mortar stores. Statisticians roll those figures together into the consumer-price index, a data stream that shows how the cost of living is changing for typical Americans.

If the government’s enumerators can’t track down a specific price in a given city, they try to make an educated guess based on a close substitute: say, cargo pants instead of slacks. But in April, with fewer workers on hand to check prices, statisticians had to base their guesses on less comparable products or other regions of the country—a process called different-cell imputation—much more often than usual, according to the BLS

American steelmakers will most likely be able to charge higher prices as demand for domestic sources of metal increases. But the broader economy is likely to suffer.

One of America’s most storied industries is getting a massive boost from Donald Trump’s latest tariffs push — at the potential cost of a broader slowdown elsewhere in the U.S. economy.

Trump signed an executive order increasing the already substantial 25% duties on steel imports he first set in March to 50%. He signaled last week that the tariff rate hike was coming. It went into effect at midnight Wednesday.

A study found that while Trump’s 2018 steel tariffs created 1,000 new direct jobs, it cost downstream industries that rely on steel to make their products as many as 75,000 jobs because they became less competitive thanks to higher costs.

While some limited capacity could come back online in the near term, the on-again, off-again nature of the tariffs limit any immediate job gains, said Josh Spoores, head of Steel Americas Analysis at the CRU Group consultancy.