Economy

"The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.

This is the Rot Economy, which is a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth. But it’s worth noting that this transformation isn’t constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fuelled, publicly-traded incarnation."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/44213990

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/44213989

Trump said that while “150 countries” were seeking to make deals with the U.S., it was “not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29774361

Yields on US government bonds rose in response to the news, with the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield up 0.03 percentage points after the announcement to 4.48 per cent. The rise in yield represents a fall in price.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29756205

U.S. consumer sentiment fell slightly in May for the fifth straight month as Americans increasingly worry that President Donald Trump’s trade war will worsen inflation.

In August 2023, during an especially brutal Texas heat wave, I opened my electricity bill and was stunned by the total. As someone who studies climate change, I couldn’t help but connect the dots: global warming had made the heat wave worse, and that extra heat was driving up how much I had to spend on electricity.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29384772

But U.K. imports will continue to carry a 10% tariff, up from a pre-Trump average of 1.3%. The president referred to that as the "lowest end" import tax.

With 10% import taxes looking like the new minimum — and other countries with more contentious trade relationships likely to continue seeing significantly higher tariffs — there will be serious sand in the gears of global commerce for the foreseeable future.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/43542747

A wave of dollar selling in Asia is an ominous sign for the greenback as the world's export powerhouse starts to question a decades-long trend of investing its big trade surpluses in U.S. assets.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28401344

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28401341

The U.S. government began investigating China’s dominance in the shipbuilding industry, where it manufactures as much as 75%-80% of fleets, during the Biden administration.

Steep levies on Chinese-made ships arriving at U.S. ports have been proposed, up to as much as $1.5 million, as part of a plan to bring more ship manufacturing back to the U.S., a policy which has bipartisan support.