Economics

Tesla’s vehicle sales have been on the skids globally for months. The big question has been: Can the long-awaited, redesigned Model Y crossover help turn things around?

In January, on the heels of its first annual decline in deliveries in over a decade, Tesla unveiled a refreshed version of its bread-and-butter small SUV. Six months later, however, the automaker’s sales are still sliding. It’s clearer than ever that the updated model’s snazzy light bar and smoother suspension won’t be enough to get the troubled company growing again.

America’s plan to “re-industrialize” technology manufacturing is “exactly the right thing,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s leading AI chipmaker.

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Huang, who heads the Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia, said the United States should invest in manufacturing and is currently “missing that entire band in our industries.”

“That passion, the skill, the craft of making things; the ability to make things is valuable for economic growth — it’s value for a stable society with people who can create a wonderful life and a wonderful career without having to get a PhD in physics,” Huang said.

Seattle-based coffee chain offers payment to those who opt to quit instead as it seeks to ‘re-establish in-office culture’

Starbucks has ordered its corporate staff to work from the office at least four days a week from late September and is offering cash payments to those who choose to quit instead.

Brian Niccol, the chief executive of the Seattle-headquartered coffee chain, said many of its employees would be required to work in the office for a minimum of four days a week, up from three, from Monday to Thursday. This will apply to its Seattle and Toronto support centres and regional offices in North America.

If Trump gets his way and removes Jerome Powell as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the market reaction would be swift and brutal, Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos argues.

It could collapse the currency and bond markets, he says in a note seen by Fortune. Polymarket puts the chances of a Powell ouster at 19%.

“We consider the removal of Chair Powell as one of the largest underpriced event risks,” Saravelos says.

Donald Trump's White House had grandly promised "90 deals in 90 days" after partially pausing the process of levying what the US president called "reciprocal" tariffs.

In reality, there won't even be nine deals done by the time we reach Trump's first cut-off date on 9 July.

The revealing thing here, the poker "tell" if you like, is the extension of the deadline from Wednesday until 1 August, with a possibility of further extensions - or delays - to come.

Just two weeks after President Donald Trump sent a handwritten letter to Powell demanding lower interest rates, Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), accused Powell of breaking the law by failing to comply with government oversight regulations and lying to Congress about details of an approximately $2.5 billion planned renovation of the Fed’s headquarters.

While some central banks, such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of Mexico, have lowered their benchmark lending rate a few times this year, the Fed has not. One big reason for that is the major policy shifts since Trump took office. Officials have said they want to see how those changes affect the economy first before considering further rate cuts.

Powell for his part has avoided responding to Trump’s harsh criticism, noting that the Fed is only focused on successfully taming inflation and preserving the labor market’s health.

The latest criticism about the rising costs of the Fed’s headquarters may signal the administration is laying the groundwork to justify firing Powell, said Ed Mills, a policy analyst at Raymond James.

Trump and his allies have said the Fed’s decision to keep rates steady is politically motivated, but Powell has signaled Trump’s tariff policy – and its potential to stoke inflation – have played a role.

Experts suspect ‘front loading’ of activity may mask deeper impact of tariffs on the US economy

As Trump published a slew of tariff letters to individual countries throughout the week, less hopeful observers sensed a reinvigorated Trump, who seemed to be channelling the spirit of “liberation day”, when he held up that gameshow-style card, promising punitive levies on countries that had “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” the US.

These letters – all released on Truth Social and featuring Trump’s thick signature in Sharpie pen – included swingeing tariff rates of 50% on Brazil, 30% on Sri Lanka and 35% on Canada.

As in April, some pointed to issues well beyond the sphere of trade – the fate of Brazil’s ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, for example, and alleged fentanyl trafficking from Canada.

“If we compare where we are now with where we were in April, many of the tariffs that he is describing and the letters that he’s sent out are very similar to what he described then,” said Prof Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “I think what this shows is that the bluster in April about, ‘we’re going to negotiate all these trade deals’, was way overhyped.”

As the Trump administration ramps up its crackdown on immigration, undocumented workers in the construction industry claim raids and arrests have emboldened some contractors to cut pay and increase hours.

Rogelio, a tile setter, works for various contractors in the the Tucson, Arizona, region. He is undocumented, and did not provide his full name.

When Donald Trump returned to office in January, Rogelio said his employers cut their rates by 30% to 40%. Other laborers told him they had endured similar treatment.

“They decreased the pay by piece because they know most of the tile setters don’t have social security numbers, so they take advantage of that. We are in their hands,” Rogelio told the Guardian. “It’s more work, less pay. We have no choice right now.

Copper prices hit a record high in the US after Donald Trump announced he would impose a 50% tariff on the industrial metal, in the latest escalation of his trade war.

Trump said before a cabinet meeting on Tuesday: “Today we’re doing copper,” proposing a 50% tariff rate for imports. He also threatened to impose a 200% border tax on pharmaceuticals but in a year or a year and a half’s time.

The comments added to the confusion around the president’s ever-changing tariffs after he sent letters on Monday setting rates of up to 40% for more than a dozen countries but coming into effect from 1 August rather than a previously reported 9 July date.

Donald Trump vowed to further escalate his trade wars on Tuesday, threatening US tariffs of up to 200% on foreign drugs and 50% on copper, amid widespread confusion around his shifting plans.

Hours after saying his latest deadline for a new wave of steep duties was “not 100% firm”, the US president declared that “no extensions will be granted” beyond 1 August.

“There has been no change to this date, and there will be no change,” Trump wrote on social media, a day after signing an executive order that changed the date from 9 July.

While Trump did not explicitly name China in his tariff announcement, he did issue an overall warning of higher tariffs on transshipped goods, which typically originate in China.

Chinese state media warned the Trump administration Tuesday against striking deals that sideline China, after the president announced that Asian countries would face higher tariffs starting Aug. 1, unless other arrangements are agreed on before then.

“If such situations arise, China will not accept them and will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” the People’s Daily, a state-run newspaper, said in a commentary.

Donald Trump said there would be 25% import tariffs on U.S. allies South Korea and Japan, 36% on Thailand and Cambodia, 35% on Bangladesh, 32% on Indonesia, 40% on Myanmar and Laos, and 25% on Malaysia.

KEY POINTS

Elon Musk said he would form a new political party called the “America Party.”

Tesla shares fell Monday after Musk’s announcement.

Tesla shareholders have wanted Musk to stay away from politics, especially after his stint at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which many have said damaged the automaker’s brand.

Brussels and Berlin have launched a new initiative aimed at bypassing the long-standing paralysis of the World Trade Organization (WTO). But how viable is such a solution?

A proposal, introduced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has sparked considerable attention.

Speaking at the end of a summit of EU leaders in Brussels on June 27, they floated the idea of the EU taking the lead in forming an alternative to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the world trade body that has been in place since 1995.

Merz said the idea was in its early stages but could include mechanisms to resolve disputes, as the WTO was meant to do.

"You all know that the WTO doesn't work anymore," he said, adding that a "new kind of trade organization" could gradually replace "what we no longer have with the WTO."

As Donald Trump cheered the passage of his self-styled, and officially named, Big Beautiful Budget Bill through Congress this week, long-sown seeds of doubt about the scale and sustainability of US borrowing from the rest of the world sprouted anew.

Trump's tax-cutting budget bill is expected to add at least $3 trillion (£2.2 trillion) to the US's already eye-watering $37tn (£27tn) debt pile. There is no shortage of critics of the plan, not least Trump's former ally Elon Musk, who has called it a "disgusting abomination".

The growing debt pile leaves some to wonder whether there is a limit to how much the rest of the world will lend Uncle Sam.

Donald Trump threatened to impose 17% tariffs on food and farm produce exports from Europe during talks in Washington this week, it has emerged.

Such tariffs would hit everything from Belgian chocolate to Kerrygold butter from Ireland and olive oil from Italy, Spain and France, all big sellers in the US.

First reported in the Financial Times, sources confirmed that the EU trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, was given the warning on Thursday when he met the US treasure secretary, Scott Bessent, trade representative Jamieson Greer and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.

As AI reshapes the labor market, the real threat may not be unemployment — it could be something subtler and more corrosive: the collapse in what skills are worth.

That's according to MIT economist David Autor, who made the comments in an interview released Wednesday on the "Possible" podcast, hosted by LinkedIn cofounder Reed Hoffman.

Autor warned that rapid automation could usher in what he calls a "Mad Max" scenario — a world where jobs still exist, but the skills that once generated wages become cheap and commoditized.

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal forecast that 110,000 new payrolls were added in June. That would be the fewest since February.

The U.S. economy continues to send mixed signals. On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report job figures for June that may help clear up the picture.

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal forecast that 110,000 new payrolls were added in June. That would be the fewest since February, and it would be the fourth monthly decline in the past six months. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, was expected to have climbed to 4.3%, the highest since October 2021.

Consumers and businesses are still grappling with the uncertainty caused by Donald Trump’s policies, something further reflected in volatile data.

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