A significant overreaction

A few weeks ago, Wall Street was panicking. Now, the US looks to be in soft-landing territory with inflation falling below a crucial threshold as the country nears the end of its battle back from the pandemic’s economic aftermath. While the US economy is cooling by design, consumers are still spending and more upbeat, further cementing the unmatched status of America’s resilience following the 2020 recession. After close to two years of historically low unemployment and more recently rising wages, the Federal Reserve’s oft-criticized caution continues to bear fruit as the central bank is poised to start lowering interest rates. But the process is still a balancing act. With pandemic savings largely gone and wage growth cooling, many Americans are increasingly resorting to credit cards and other loans—raising questions about the sustainability of consumer spending, especially as more people are falling behind on payments.

Economic bellwether Walmart’s latest earnings report also showed a more discerning consumer. Americans are also pulling back on travel while deferring big home renovations. And the housing market—specifically rents—remains a thorn in the Fed’s side as it tries to bring inflation back to its 2% target. But by and large, the landscape is looking pretty good for Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Only two weeks after a modest rise in unemployment triggered a Wall Street mini-panic, new data this week suggested it (as many said from the start) was a significant overreaction, Jonathan Levin writes in Bloomberg Opinion. “The early stages of a recession are commonly described as environments in which weak consumer spending begets layoffs, which beget even weaker household expenditures and so forth,” Levin says. “Fortunately, the evidence suggests that neither consumption nor the labor market is currently weakening at a particularly alarming pace.”

US Vice President Kamala Harris, whose weeks-old presidential campaign has spurred both memes and questions about how her policies might diverge from those of the current administration, moved to fill in the blanks Friday. While her opponent has mused about suspending the Constitution, mass deportations and political prosecutions, the former US senator and California attorney general has proposed federal subsidies for parents, homebuyers and Americans with low incomes as part of her “opportunity economy.” She’s also calling for a ban on grocery price gouging as part of a broader set of proposals intended to reduce consumer costs. Harris also adopted one of Donald Trump’s more traditional-sounding proposals: ending taxes on tips for service industry workers. For his part, the Republican has suggested the economy isn’t the biggest issue of the campaign. He’s also defending his personal attacks on Harris, 59, many of which have been seen as racist and misogynistic, saying “I don’t have a lot of respect for her.”

Meanwhile, the 78-year-old Trump is to be sentenced next month in New York for his effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential campaign by paying a former porn star to keep silent about their alleged extramarital affair, and using accounting fraud to hide it all. He could face several years in prison. Meanwhile, Trump’s prosecution for allegedly trying to block the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election is heating back up. And Special Counsel Jack Smith is appealing a Trump-appointed judge’s dismissal of Trump’s prosecution for mishandling US defense secrets. A separate Georgia racketeering prosecution of Trump related to the 2020 election remains on hold.

Foreign investors pulled a record amount of money from China last quarter, almost $15 billion, arguably reflecting deep pessimism about the world’s second-largest economy. Should the decline continue for the rest of the year, it would be the first annual net outflow since at least 1990, when comparable data begins. In the world of distressed debt, so-called “creditor-on-creditor violence,” where lenders scrap over how much money they can get back from ailing companies, has never been as rampant.

Ukraine is pushing deeper into Russian territory, the first invasion there since World War II, and is forcing Vladimir Putin to contend with the embarrassment and logistics of some 120,000 residents fleeing their homes in the Kursk region. Ukraine had been planning an operation that would shock the leadership in Moscow, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is warning of “next important key steps” amid a flood of troops and clouds of attack drones. The lightning intervention shows a war stuck in a prolonged stalemate can still produce surprises, even if Ukraine’s allies are reserving judgement on whether it will produce a turning point. “It may be a move that ultimately is more about the negotiating table than the battlefield, and in that sense it is a smart play indeed,” James Stavridis writes in Bloomberg Opinion.

An outbreak of a new strain of mpox that’s become a global health emergency is especially daunting to track and contain because the virus is mutating. The surge of cases is centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 15,000 people infected and 500 having died. While mpox vaccines are available, few have made their way to Africa—the only continent where the disease is endemic. At about $100 per dose, Africa will need about $4 billion to fight mpox, said Jean Kaseya, director general of the Addis Ababa-based Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fraud is running rampant in Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, with scammers convincing migrants desperate for a new beginning to pay for a low-wage job. But then there’s another scam, a $38 million Ponzi scheme perpetrated by a Texas “money doctor.” In this episode of Bloomberg Investigates, we explore how a former securities broker preyed on the life savings of religious retirees. More often though, fraud is a function of technology and identity theft. Worse, as artificial intelligence spreads, keeping hold of our identity will be even harder. Tools for Humanity wants to create a global identity system for humans using iris imaging. The thinking is that AI is improving so quickly that we soon will—or may already—need a way to separate humans from machines.

In the eight months since Argentine President Javier Milei took office, the country has endured a surge in prices, plummeting consumer spending and expanding unemployment. All of that comes as Argentines are subjected to the most brutal austerity shock in recent history. In this Bloomberg Originals mini-documentary, we explore why—even in the face of such measures—Milei, a right-wing populist, remains largely popular.

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