Special Reports

Labor Day: Hiring is strong enough to worry the Fed

The August employment report, landing just before Labor Day, showed an American jobs market in fine health.

Anniversary: Four years, 500 pieces

This column turns four this month, with exactly 500 essays published since its launch in September 2022.

Back to school: Borrowing costs top 5%

The yield on the benchmark 30-year Treasury rose to 5.251 per cent on 10 August, just as families were shopping for the new school year.

Independence Day: Energy independence, tested

American crude output is running close to record highs, and total US petroleum stocks, including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, still fell by 79 million barrels over the spring.

Memorial Day: Summer driving at $100 oil

Brent crude sat between $105 and $108 over Memorial Day weekend, and the average price of petrol at American pumps topped $4.60 a gallon.

Tax Day: Refunds from the IRS — and from Customs

On Tax Day 2026 millions of American households sent their annual returns to the Internal Revenue Service.

Lunar New Year: China keeps the yuan steady

The Lunar New Year holiday emptied mainland China's financial centres, and the People's Bank of China kept the onshore yuan on a tight leash.

Valentine's Day: Betting on the Supreme Court

More than $130 billion in collected duties depends on the Supreme Court's ruling on the emergency tariffs, and on Valentine's Day trading desks were thinking about that rather than romance.

Super Bowl: Shoppers wait for the tariff verdict

Americans settled in to watch Super Bowl LX with something besides football on their minds.

New Year: 2026 hinges on one court case

Executives and fund managers back at their desks for 2026 find their forecasts hanging on one outside event.

New Year's Eve: How the dollar lost its shine

The Dollar Index ended the year down 9 per cent, the greenback's worst twelve months since the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Boxing Day: Holiday shopping with missing data

Shops opened for the Boxing Day sales at the end of a holiday season run almost entirely without official data.

Christmas: The boom that arrived late

Wall Street got an early present this holiday season: a delayed government report showing third-quarter gross domestic product growing at 4.3 per cent.

Cyber Monday: Record spending, more buy now, pay later

Americans spent more than $13 billion online on Cyber Monday, a record according to Adobe Analytics.

Black Friday: Buy now, get a refund later?

Thanksgiving: Beef, tariffs and the holiday table

Thanksgiving tables offered a live test of how fast prices respond when a tariff is removed.

Singles' Day: A truce, but will China shop?

China's annual Singles' Day shopping festival ended on an unusually subdued note, a sign of malaise in the world's second-largest consumer economy.

Halloween: The scariest balance sheets in AI

Nvidia's market capitalization passed $5 trillion on 29 October, making it the world's most valuable company.

Diwali: The rupee hits a record low

The Indian rupee fell to a record low of 88.8 to the US dollar as millions celebrated Diwali.

Anniversary: Three years, what we got right

This column was launched in September 2022, and three full years on it has checked its main macroeconomic calls against what actually happened.

Labor Day: Hiring has stalled

The American labour market reached Labor Day in an uncomfortable state, with hiring largely frozen but few large layoffs.

Back to school: Tariffs hit the shopping list

Back-to-school shopping has given American families a practical lesson in trade economics.

Prime Day: Four days of discounts, and tariffs

Amazon stretched Prime Day to four days this year and filled it with millions of promotions.

Independence Day: The real cost of the "big beautiful bill"

While the country celebrated Independence Day, the non-partisan budget scorekeepers delivered a grim verdict on the new fiscal law.

Memorial Day: Downgraded, and still spending

America marked Memorial Day with a fresh downgrade to Aa1 from Moody's and with Congress pushing ahead on another fiscal package worth several trillion dollars that would widen federal deficits further.

Tax Day: The biggest tax rise in decades isn't in the tax code

The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the administration's tariffs have raised the effective national tax rate by about 22 per cent.

Valentine's Day: America and Europe's trade breakup

Washington picked Valentine's Day to publish its Reciprocal Trade Memorandum, a cold message to its main trading partners across the Atlantic.

Super Bowl: $8m ads, gloomy shoppers

Fox charged a record $8 million per 30-second slot for Super Bowl LIX, a sign that companies will still pay handsomely for a live audience of that size.

Lunar New Year: DeepSeek and China's tech comeback

New Year: 2025 comes down to one word — tariffs

For most American finance chiefs, planning for 2025 comes down to one number they cannot hedge: the tariff rate.

New Year's Eve: The dollar's big year

The US Dollar Index (DXY) ends 2024 up more than seven per cent, beating major developed and emerging-market currencies alike.

Boxing Day: Why money markets get jumpy at year-end

The Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) has started jumping about again as the year ends.

Christmas: A lump of coal from the Fed

Markets hoping for more festive generosity from the Federal Reserve found a lump of coal in their stockings.

Cyber Monday: The hidden debt of buy now, pay later

Online spending on Cyber Monday hit a record $13.3 billion. The number retail finance analysts noticed was smaller: close to $1 billion of it was paid for with 'Buy Now, Pay Later' (BNPL) plans, the most ever for deferred consumer credit.

Black Friday: Shoppers race to beat the tariffs

Thanksgiving: Why eggs cost more this year

The average cost of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for ten fell five per cent to $58.08 this year, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation's annual survey.

Singles' Day: China fixes its local debt, not its shoppers

Beijing unveiled a RMB 10 trillion ($1.4 trillion) debt-swap programme on the eve of Singles' Day, meant to help local governments refinance hidden off-balance-sheet debt over five years.

Diwali: India's record IPO rush

Hyundai Motor India raised ₹27,870 crore ($3.3 billion) this Diwali season, the largest IPO in the country's corporate history.

Halloween: The Fed cut, and yields went up

The ten-year US Treasury yield touched 4.28 per cent on Halloween, six weeks to the day after the Federal Reserve began easing with a 50-basis-point cut.

Anniversary: Two years of calls, checked

This column began in September 2022, as inflation soared and central banks raised rates in a panic.

Labor Day: Is the job market cracking?

The unemployment rate reached 4.3 per cent in July, nearly a full percentage point above its low for the cycle.

Prime Day: The ad business behind the discounts

Amazon's tenth annual Prime Day brought in an estimated $14.2 billion in online sales, a record.

Independence Day: Is the dollar losing its crown?

The dollar's share of allocated global foreign exchange reserves has slipped to roughly fifty-eight per cent, its lowest in nearly three decades, according to the International Monetary Fund's COFER data.

Memorial Day: Petrol prices and the summer inflation bump

American petrol prices averaged roughly $3.59 a gallon going into Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of the summer driving season, and motorists have no hedge.

Tax Day: What April tells us about the deficit

April's tax receipts give the bond market its clearest read of the year on federal revenue, which is why Tax Day matters more to Treasury desks than to accountants.

Valentine's Day: The chocolate crisis

Cocoa futures have broken records, passing $5,000 per metric ton after crop disease and extreme weather hit the main growing regions of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.

Super Bowl: Does football predict the bond market?

The Super Bowl Indicator holds that a win for an NFC team heralds a bull market in shares and an AFC win a bear market.

Lunar New Year: China's stock market can't escape falling prices

Chinese consumer prices fell 0.8 per cent in January from a year earlier, the steepest drop in fifteen years, and the country's stock markets enter the Year of the Dragon with little to celebrate.

New Year: Markets want six rate cuts. They'll be disappointed

Forward markets start 2024 pricing in six quarter-point rate cuts, the first as early as March.

New Year's Eve: A dead year for deals

Global mergers and acquisitions volume fell to roughly $3 trillion in 2023, the lowest in a decade, and advisory fees fell with it.