Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune:

[An ICE agent] shot and killed a woman in south Minneapolis during a morning confrontation between community members and federal officers […] Several residents of the area who witnessed the scene said agents were ordering the woman out of the vehicle. A video showed agents around the vehicle as the driver reversed and then pulled forward. One agent appeared to fire multiple rounds into the car.

The bio from a now-private Instagram account belonging to Good describes her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” In 2020, when she went by Renée Nicole Macklin, she won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which begins:

i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of
cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the
dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs
inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

[READ THE FULL POEM HERE]

This is murder in broad daylight by the Trump administration, obvious and brutal. And though each senseless act of violence committed by the state upon its citizens echoes the thousands that have gone before, we cannot become numb to the particular (and intensifying) depravities of this administration.

So if the violence of the deportations, and the crackdowns, and the cuts, and the raids, and the air strikes, haven’t been enough for you, let something so simple and evil as the daytime execution of a poet move you to action.

UPDATE: Head here to donate in support of Renee’s wife and son.

The post » Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem. appeared first on Our Story Insight.

There might not be a more natural, if also more fraught, complementary profession to artistry than criticism. Who, after all, would have a better perspective on the necessary background and unique challenges of making art than some-one who does it themselves? But—considering everything from personal bias (if you don’t do it the way I do it, it can’t be worth doing) to the prospect of blowing up personal relationships (and maybe future commissions)—it can be deluded or even dangerous to offer your opinion for public consumption.

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If we blur the line between philosophical aesthetic theory and popular critique, artists have been moonlighting as critics since the earliest days that the former category congealed. Plenty of Greek and Roman philosophy treats what we’d now call aesthetic theory as a crucial component of our conception of the world, although its overall project doesn’t really line up with our conception of what constitutes art. Those philosophers are better considered the forebears of the more august tradition of criticizing stuff without doing it first. (Which I wholeheartedly support, I must say, at least when you’re willing to think deeply about it.)

The earliest artist-critics we know about tend to come from outside Western traditions. The author of the Nāṭyaśāstra, which gave us the Indian concept of rasa—the emotional essence of a piece, the je ne sais quoi that moves us—is unknown, and might have been multiple people across many years, but that text was written in a distinctly poetic form that suggests it was the work of a practitioner.

There is and has been considerable tension about the extent to which criticism is a serious consideration of art and its effect on the soul—the extent to which it is an art in and of itself—and its place as a sort of de facto Consumer’s Guide.

Xie He was a sixth-century Chinese painter and writer whose only surviving work is The Record of the Classification of Old Painters, which includes his framework for understanding painting, the Six Principles. More than a millennium before Western aesthetic theory caught up, this engaged with the debate about craft versus art: “Even if the artist is skillful, he will not be able to elevate himself above an ordinary craftsman. Their art will be called painting, but in fact it will not be a true art. The Spirit Resonance is a gift of heavens, a natural talent one is born with. It pours straight out of one’s soul.”

The Arabic prince and poet Abdallah ibn al-Mu’tazz wrote a consideration of poetry, Kitab al-Badi, in the ninth century, some time before his one day reign as leader of the Abbasid Caliphate. (He was strangled to death, though it was a political matter, not the vengeance of an angry poet.) Both of those works, though, were more pure exercises of the mind than ways to make ends meet: Xie would have been painting only as a function of his post as civil servant in the Confucianist tradition, and al-Mu’tazz’s only worldly concern was political enemies.

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Our more modern and cravenly capitalistic criticism has its strongest roots in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Richardson the Elder apprenticed under John Riley, the court painter of English king William of Orange, and made a fine living as a portrait painter of various nobles and notables throughout the first half of the 1700s. He struck gold, though, with several books on how to appreciate painting written in the 1710s and ‘20s, most notably An Essay on the Theory of Painting and An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism (the latter is one of the first recorded uses of the word “criticism”).

Though somewhat prosaic, even compared to Xie’s work—Richardson detailed his own eighteen-point scale in seven separate categories to determine the “worth” of a painting—it proved hugely popular with the burgeoning middle and merchant classes, who had enough money to buy paintings, just like the nobles they were trying to emulate, but not necessarily enough to hire experts and advisers.

There is and has been considerable tension about the extent to which criticism is a serious consideration of art and its effect on the soul—the extent to which it is an art in and of itself—and its place as a sort of de facto Consumer’s Guide. In the early days, it was a pretty pure creature of commerce. In England and France, with the rise of pamphlets and papers that spoke expressly to a middle class audience, criticism became a decent way to earn a living for anyone who knew a bit about painting and could string a few words together.

As with modern criticism, it didn’t hurt if you also knew how to play to your audience: the earliest surviving critique of the Parisian Salon, the annual exhibition of French Royal Academy painters, is an anonymous pamphlet that includes a fairly lengthy denigration of the nobles who attended and praises the general public for being far more savvy about good art. Not that nobles weren’t also interested in help with their taste: in his later life, the French polymath Diderot sustained himself partly on reviews of the Salon in the 1760s and ’70s for La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. The fact that reviews in general and the Correspondance in particular were banned in France and so sent abroad also helped raise his international profile, eventually leading to sustained support from Catherine the Great.

But it was newspapers and periodicals that gradually became the main outlet for artistic criticism, and once the practice became established enough that writers ceased using pseudonyms (to limit blowback from negative reviews) and stopped accepting “gifts” from subjects, criticism of various forms of art became a reliable way to make a name and a crust.

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He blew through it quite quickly, and the rest of his life was a cycle of waiting for semi-lucrative writing work to come his way, moving to avoid creditors, and begging his mother for money.

William Hazlitt spent his twenties as a portrait painter, and though he grew frustrated with his self-diagnosed lack of talent and unwillingness to paint more flattering portraits of the rich people who were paying him, his studies helped him immensely when he was hired as a reporter. He transitioned quickly to critical reviews of painting, then literary works, indulging in both throughout his eventual career as one of the more celebrated essayists in the English language. (I worked for a time for an outlet that bears his name, although I hadn’t heard of him before they hired me. Apologies to William and all involved in my hiring.)

Perhaps the person who had the most lasting impact on both criticism and his preferred art form, though, was Charles Baudelaire. Presumably no one who gets adjectivized needs too much of an introduction, but luckily for our purposes, in addition to being hailed as an age-defining genius of criticism and poetry, he was absolute shit with money, which seemed to contribute to his critical output almost as much as his burning desire to explain why everyone else was wrong about the world.

Born in 1821, Baudelaire came from a fairly well-off family. His father died when he was only six, and his stepfather eventually became an ambassador, which set his mother up for life. Some part of Baudelaire’s lifelong free-spending and indolence seems to be a direct rebellion against the man, if not outright Freudian jealousy—Charles was an unabashed mama’s boy. He was encouraged to go into law or diplomacy like the step-old-man but decided to be a writer upon getting the 1800s equivalent of a trust fund when he was twenty-one.

He blew through it quite quickly, and the rest of his life was a cycle of waiting for semi-lucrative writing work to come his way, moving to avoid creditors, and begging his mother for money. She didn’t love that: “Oh, what grief,” his mother once wrote. “If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather … he would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we should have been happier.” Might put your own mother asking how that screenplay is coming into a little more perspective.

Baudelaire’s first works to attract serious attention were reviews of the 1845 and 1846 Salons, which besides being both vivacious and occasionally vicious, preceded (and arguably inspired) the Impressionists’ critiques of the Academy by about thirty years—not that he would live to see them born out. In these reviews he established his method of responding viscerally to the work, rendering literal description of the paintings secondary to the feelings and thoughts the work evoked in him.

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Though these tendencies would flourish in his later criticism—especially 1863’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” a consideration of his friend Constantin Guys which was published in Le Figaro and in which he invented the term “modernity”—the template he provided for modern criticism was established basically from the hop.

He published criticism more or less continuously from then on—when he was in the mood to write at all—but a decade later his reputation as a critic was overshadowed by the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal (ironically, the same year his stepfather died), parts of which he had been working on since his money first came in. An unsparing but vividly beautiful look at sex, mortality, melancholy, and the bleak harshness of then-modern Parisian life, the poetry book thrilled artists almost as much as it offended the general public. Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted and fined for offending public morality, and several poems were outright banned, removed from later editions. This didn’t hurt his reputation as a bold new voice, but it definitely didn’t help his ability to not hold on to money.

Art and criticism are not quite as spiritually opposed as some artists in particular like to imagine: they are at base attempts to pin down something ineffable.

Baudelaire died a decade after Fleurs du Mal’s release. He was witness to some of the impact it would have—Victor Hugo came to his public defence—and his reputation grew posthumously to the point that Rimbaud, Proust, and Eliot all credited him as the finest poet of his era. His increasing notoriety did not help his finances or his work ethic, though he had a brief period of security and relative productivity when his mother allowed him to move back in with her in 1859. Besides criticism, prose poetry, and translation, he wrote a consideration of being an opium and hashish user, and he decided to live that life more fully, mixed in with heavy drinking and a light wallet, when he moved to Brussels in 1864.

Less than two years later, he suffered a debilitating stroke, and he spent the last year of his life semi-paralyzed and unable to speak. Upon his death, his mother settled his rather voluminous debts and eventually came to peace with his place in literature.

However scattered his life, Baudelaire’s professional work has a gem-like unity. There is profound sympathy between his criticism and his poetry—including an almost fanatical obsession with drawing out the beauty of this thing in front of him, life or art, regardless of prevailing opinion—but his ability to push both of those forms in new directions seems almost impossible, with the vantage of hindsight. Art and criticism are not quite as spiritually opposed as some artists in particular like to imagine: they are at base attempts to pin down something ineffable, and as Baudelaire himself shows, a sharp and careful eye, a historical knowledge, and a gift for descriptive detail, in whatever medium, serve both very well.

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With that said, the base impulse of art is to capture this spirit without necessarily explaining it, to reveal the energy that vibrates through the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; criticism is more concerned with pinning down the butterfly and figuring out how it works. Both can help you feel the full extent of what a butterfly means, but arriving at the same place doesn’t mean taking the same road.

Consider this passage from “The Painter of Modern Life,” wherein Baudelaire explains what he means by modernity, and why Guys seems to embody it:

He strives, for his own part, to extract from the fashionable whatever it may contain of the poetical within the historical, to draw the eternal from the transitory…. It is easier to decide, at the outset, that everything about the modes of dress of an epoch is ugly, rather than applying oneself to extracting from it the mysterious beauty it might perhaps contain, however minimal or slight that might be. Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art of which the other is the eternal and immutable.

The passage is precise, clear, and energetic. It’s convincing partly because it’s so invigorating, and there’s no doubting what it is we can or should do with the information here. It’s an argument, probably not totally rational, but on the spectrum. Baudelaire’s criticism has been accused, not unfairly, of being inconsistent, and at times it seems more like he is writing about what he wants to see—dreaming of Impressionism, maybe—than what is in front of him. Summing up the consensus, academic Sara Pappas says he “does not simply privilege the new in his art critical writings; he creates a kind of absolute originality through his writings that is not actually present in the art of the period in the way that he theorizes.”

But I think this inconsistency is not just part of the originality that made him so important; it’s part of what separates criticism, especially after Baudelaire, from a more academic aesthetic theory. Baudelaire is not really evaluating things along a framework; he’s responding to what he sees and feels in the moment; any consistency is down to the bounds of his temperament, his ideas of the world. It’s a part of the ‘spirit resonance’ that Xie He talked about, the vitality of the work. Any grander idea or narrative is emergent, not restrained to a purely rational or logical conception. His criticism is as consistent and considered as his moods and feelings—just pinned down and (often beautifully) articulated. Baudelaire’s poetry has the same tendency, without the pins.

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Baudelaire had no shortage of impediments to writing, but I have to wonder if some of his slow and scattered process wasn’t due to balancing these competing impulses (or running away from them entirely when he couldn’t find any balance). As an organizing principle, the context required of good criticism is almost antithetical to good art: if the latter is about capturing the specificity of a vision or feeling, the former is about fitting those feelings in, finding their place, and weighing them against each other.

The inherent danger of spending too much time on anything other than art is that it will dull whatever sensitivity or instinct allows you to make something in the first place.

It can be utterly paralyzing to commit to your vision if you are confronted with its wider context. Comparison becomes the thief of joy: Why should you make anything when this thing and that thing and this other thing are all expressing the same feeling? What is the point of words that seem lesser than the genius who inspired you to write them? And if your work cannot find its wider place, if it does seem unique in viewpoint or execution, does that mean that you’re so far beyond the realm of sense or worth that no one else will ever get any value from it?

If Baudelaire ever felt those things, he got over them eventually (“I know that this book,” he wrote to his mother in the midst of the public backlash, in what is a spectacular act of either confidence or conciliatory bluster, “with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of Hugo, Gautier and even Byron”).

But that it took a world historical genius to overcome them is an indication of the danger of this particular gig as a sideline. The inherent danger of spending too much time on anything other than art is that it will dull whatever sensitivity or instinct allows you to make something in the first place. Maybe doubly so when your other job is examining that instinct so closely you might just need to kill it to understand it.

I don’t mean to be dramatic. Maybe I just mean to justify my own slow and laborious, though less debauched, process. Certainly plenty of people after Baudelaire have also navigated this conundrum, with (for the most part) less opium use and Freudian begging. One of the purest expressions of the Baudelairean tendency emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s in the magazine ARTnews, which hired a gaggle of poets from what would become known as the New York School to review the modern art scene.

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Poets like Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery—who for the most part never made even a middle-class living publishing poetry, even in this apparently glorious age for writing-to-pay-the-bills—found a perfect subject in the abstract expressionism and pop art that came into vogue: a talent for succinct evocation, or just the inherent music of words, helped a lot when they were tasked with responding to colour fields or a repurposed bed with paint on it.

Like Baudelaire’s, these reviews tended to be, if not always light on descriptive detail, less concerned with telling you what a thing looked like and more with capturing the impression it left. In a review of a Robert Rauschenberg show, the not-yet-Pulitzer-winner John Ashbery said of one of the collages that it “does not have the ‘Step along, please’ feeling of a Schwitters collage … You also have the artist’s permission to get nothing out of looking at his paintings other than the marginal pleasure of being alive.”

That would fit right in with some of Ashbery’s purposefully poetic work, which also tends to eschew grandiose language or description for perfectly punctuated plain profundity. “The marginal pleasure of being alive” carries enough weight to justify a book, let alone a magazine. (Ashbery kept up his reviews and editing in outlets like New York, Newsweek, and the Partisan Review even after Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer in 1975, most certainly out of necessity.)

__________________________________

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From How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists by David Berry. Used with the permission of the publisher, Coach House Books. Copyright © 2025 by David Berry

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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Barnes & Noble Picks Its Book of the Year

This year’s Barnes & Noble’s book of the year had been popping up a little even before it was one of the retailer’s finalists. And Mona’s Eyes by Thomas Schlesser feels a little like a throwback. It’s a novel about a a girl who is losing her vision and her grandfather’s quest to show her works of art, one a week for a year, across Paris’ museums. The cover is a close-up of a painting that appeared on another crossover breakout, and the theme of sucking the marrow out of life on the precipice of loss is not without precedent among books that have become sensations. And its publisher, Europe Editions, had a global bestseller that had a similar bittersweet, affirming message. Intrusive thought: did attention for this book have anything to do with people getting excited about the Louvre because of this?

You Can Stay in the Goodnight, Moon Room.

Is this the stuff of dreams or nightmares? Probably depends on how many times you have read Goodnight, Moon in the middle of the night to try to get a squirming toddler to go to sleep. The room is available for booking through February, 2026, but I have to admit I had a hard time finding a night that was available. In addition to the vibrant green walls and uncannily accurate furnishing, you will get a book-faithful bowl of mush. And if you read Goodnight, Moon in the Goodnight, Moon room, you might just rip a hole in the space-time continuum.

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Time’s 100 Best Books of the Year

Time puts together a nice browsing experience for its Best Books of the Year List. Good breadth that seems to pretty much cover the waterfront of books that have been in the conversation this year. If I were Czar of Books though I would institute the following: if you have a list of more than 50 books, you have to name a top 10. Curate your curation, folks.

The Year is Not Over Yet, Though.

Believe it or not, there are still books that have not been released this year, and while they were considered for the big year end lists, they haven’t made it in front of all of us yet. There might be something here that jumps your reading queue still.

The post Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year Feels Like a Throwback. In Good Way. I Think. appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Sorry progressives, it ain’t happening.

Yes, there’s lots of chirping from lefty columnists, purple-haired TikTok influencers, late-night hosts who are still employed, and assorted wokesters after American Eagle had the audacity to feature the attractive blond, blue-eyed actress expressing her sartorial flair in a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color . . . my jeans are blue,” the “Euphoria” star says.

The ad ends with a voice-over: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

Blond women? Blue-eyed? Good genes (I mean jeans)? Oh, the horror! That’s if you are listening to the leftist commentariat that still hasn’t piped down weeks after the spot first appeared. The lefties are freaking because they think the jeans company is looking to bring back the bad old days, pre-George Floyd of course, when white blond oppressors ruled over American culture.

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It’s all very Hitler-like to the progressive numbskull class, but not to just about every other segment of American society. Most Americans of all colors and genders either don’t care, or they know good genes and jeans when they see it.

I know this based on lots of reporting on the mind virus known wokeness — the progressive orthodoxy that embraces everything from cultural Marxism, DEI and, of course, the oppressor-oppressed theology.

We are a diverse country, and that’s good. The wokesters take it to a level that excludes rather than includes. Good-looking white people, particularly if their hair is that evil shade known as blond, are nowhere near the intersectional matrix they demand for hiring or image making in their version of America.

That’s why Sydney Sweeney, known more for her cleavage than her politics, has become a touchstone in our culture wars, and here’s why the attacks won’t work: Wokeness was once big in the business world, but notice my use of the past tense.

Corporate America listened to these kooks for many reasons, including their own progressive management leanings, with disastrous results. They learned the hard way that most Americans of all races hate being proselytized with political dogma, particularly of the left-wing variety that pushes the limits of identity and gender politics beyond cultural norms.

I chronicled this spectacle with a healthy dose of schadenfreude in my book “Go Woke Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America.” Just a few short years ago, DEI was the norm; so was radical environmentalism pushed by asset managers through something called ESG investing. It was difficult finding a straight man or woman — God forbid a blond — who survived the Madison Avenue woke censor machine.

Budweiser thought its customers were ready for a commercial featuring a half-naked trans woman in a bubble bath. Disney decided it could sell more kids programming featuring same-sex kissing scenes. Money managers like BlackRock thought they could increase returns by advocating environmentalism and de facto racial quotas on their portfolio companies.

All of the above resulted in some of the biggest brand-destroying disasters in modern business history.

Marketing is a lot like politics. It’s a business of addition, not subtraction. You build customers just like you attract voters, through messaging that unites rather than divides — or customers flee. There are exceptions, of course. Niche brands like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream attempt and succeed at targeting the tree-hugger demo.

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Try this stuff on a mass audience and you will get the beatdown of the century. The predictable customer revolt impacted the businesses of Budweiser, Disney and BlackRock in such a measurable way that shareholders revolted, too, forcing some of the most progressive CEOs in the world to course-correct.

That’s why the Sydney Sweeney uproar will go nowhere with the people who matter most: Most American consumers, and American Eagle shareholders. Unless you’re stretching it like Silly Putty, there’s nothing inherently political about a pretty blond (dare I say “All American”-looking) woman in jeans and pointing out the health of her genes to sell stuff. Zero. Zilch. Otherwise, Pamela Anderson would have been a poster child for Aryan Nations instead of the “Baywatch” babe most American men and many women adored, and still do.

Shares of American Eagle are up since the Sydney Sweeney ad ran, despite the backlash. NYU Marketing Professor Eitan Muller points out the obvious, telling Fox Business’s Teuta Dedvukaj that the commercial “attracts attention, drives Google searches, and boosts the brand. Yes, she does have great genes — and it rings authentic. That’s what you want from an ad.”

My bet: You will be seeing a lot more of Sydney Sweeney. Most men will be rejoicing, many women will buy the company’s jeans. Management will be rewarded with higher sales and a stock price that matches. The attacks will ultimately fail for the same reason Mulvaney’s tenure as a spokeswoman for Bud Light was so short-lived. Recall: The nation’s Number 1-selling beer dropped to Number 3 and never recovered.

Sydney Sweeney has both good jeans and genes and there’s nothing the wokesters can do to change that reality.

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July 8, 2025, 2:25pm

Amongst all of the terrible and regressive decisions and shadow docket orders the Supreme Court spewed forth this term, there was a rare, small win for libraries and schools.

The story got a little buried, but the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold the Universal Service Fund, a bundle of FCC-overseen subsidies including the E-Rate program, which provides billions for broadband access to schools and libraries. The Fund was challenged by conservatives as an unconstitutional overreach by giving control of the fund to the FCC, but the Court ruled that Congress was within its bounds. It seems obvious that Congress should be allowed to assign control of programs to agencies, but these days, who knows. I’m just glad to see that SCOTUS is letting the government improve peoples’ lives and granting power to something other than the Executive.

E-Rate has been very successful since it was implemented in 1996. Over half of all American public libraries apply for this subsidy every year, and over 100,000 schools had participated by 2005. The discounts for broadband can be as high as 90%, so the fact that it’s survived is a big win, especially for underserved communities.

Pro-library groups like the American Library Association are celebrating the decision. The ALA has long advocated for the program, and its President Cindy Hohl described E-Rate as “a lifeline for public libraries and millions of Americans, especially in rural and underserved communities.”

Around 20% of American households don’t have broadband internet at home, so the access that libraries provide is essential, especially as so much of work, social, and civic life has moved online, for better and for worse.

It’s a rare win for libraries, especially from this ultra-conservative Supreme court. I wonder if the lack of a culture war angle to this case kept it from being a target for the Court’s majority. It’s a small comfort, but I’m glad that allowing schools and libraries to maintain a high level of service for their communities fits into the Court’s vision for America.

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Bessent said it was up to the Fed to decide interest rates, although he added that if the central bank did not cut interest rates soon, any potential rate cut in September could be higher.

With the unemployment rate low and inflation above their 2% target, Fed officials have been reluctant to cut interest rates from the current 4.25% to 4.5% range until it is clear that the Trump administration’s tariff plans won’t drive up prices.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said if the central bank did not cut interest rates soon, any potential rate cut in September could be higher. REUTERS

President Trump has railed against Powell, a fellow Republican whom he appointed during his first time in office, and again urged him to resign. The president cannot fire Powell over a policy dispute.

Trump administration officials argue that a tax bill that passed in Congress will boost private sector investment and strengthen the US economy, insisting that while tariff increases could result in a one-time bump in prices, they should not drive up inflation over the longer term.

“If they want to make a mistake here and not cut, that’s fine,” Bessent told CNBC, insisting that tariffs imposed by Trump since taking office in January had not fueled inflation “thus far.”

“What we’ve seen so far is that tariffs haven’t hurt. The dog that didn’t bark was that tariffs are going to hurt the economy, they’re going to hurt markets,” Bessent said, citing a rapid market recovery after a 15% decline in April. The selloff came after Trump announced higher than expected tariffs against most US trading partners on April 2.

Based on previous Fed models, he said, the central bank would have already cut interest rates that are “very high real rates.”

Holding off raised the chance that the Fed would need to cut interest rates by more later, said Bessent, who has been named a contender for the Fed chair role.

President Trump has railed against Powell, a fellow Republican whom he appointed during his first time in office, and again urged him to resign. AP

Two jobs?

Asked if one could head both Treasury and the Fed at the same time, Bessent said that hadn’t been done since the 1930s, but did not explicitly rule out such a solution. Bessent said he was happy in his current job.

The Federal Reserve Act explicitly says “The members of the Board shall devote their entire time to the business of the Board,” which appears to rule out the possibility of Bessent doing two jobs at once.

Trump recently named Secretary of State Marco Rubio to serve as his national security adviser, making him the first person to hold both roles since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday holds a handwritten note by Trump to Powell. JIM LO SCALZO/EPA/Shutterstock

Bessent said the administration will work on nominating a Fed chair to succeed Powell in the fall.

“We’ve been busy. The president’s been doing peace deals, trade deals, tax deals, and we are landing the plane on all of those. So we’re going to have more bandwidth after Labor Day,” he said.

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The BlackRock boss needs to get 23 countries to sign off on a new partnership headed by his giant investment firm to take control of dozens of ports worldwide from Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison. The Panama government, however, is accusing Hutchison of breach of contract and wants hundreds of millions of dollars it claims it hasn’t been paid for leasing rights.

Fink also needs approval from China, which if you haven’t noticed, is immersed in a nasty little trade war with the US. That means no deal might get approved involving any US company, whether it’s TikTok being sold to a consortium of US investors or Blackrock’s deal with Hutchison.

BlackRock boss Larry Fink needs to get 23 countries to sign off on a new partnership headed by his giant investment firm to take control of dozens of ports worldwide. Jack Forbes / NY Post Design

So why is Fink forging ahead? First, Larry plays a long game and this isn’t his first big deal. There’s a 145-day grace period from the time the deal was announced back on March 4. That’s when Fink’s bankers plan on “papering” the transaction, meaning they get those two-dozen or so countries that need to approve the port deal to do so, and then he will turn his attention to China.

Fink is no stranger to doing deals on the Mainland; he knows his way around the Chinese Communist Party’s bureaucracy, which is a requisite for doing business there. Recall, BlackRock was the first money management firm to set up a Chinese asset management subsidiary a few years back in an attempt to sell its funds to the country’s emerging upper class and wealthy elite.

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Still, this deal is different given the fraught nature of the US-China tariff war. President Trump paused tariffs on every country but China, then doubled down on the latter. Beijing responded by threatening US exports with the same. Despite some happy talk from the administration about early stage negotiations, the Chinese are now balking at finding a middle ground.

But Fink is betting the trade war might not matter all that much because Hutchison is a Hong Kong-based company, not one domiciled on the Mainland. Yes, the CCP has been exerting more influence on Hong Kong despite its status as a “special administrative region” with a degree of independence.

It has stopped short of a full takeover because the autonomy has allowed the city to flourish as a business center. The Hong Kong stock market, for instance, is one of the world’s largest.

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By negating the Hutchison deal, China would be setting a precedent, alerting every company that does business in Hong Kong it would face similar CCP scrutiny.

“Does China really want to tell the world that Hong Kong is no longer Hong Kong,”‘ said one person with direct knowledge of the deal. “I don’t think so.”

That’s why Fink is still betting that American flags (and the Blackrock logo) will ultimately find their way to the Panama Canal.

The post Why Larry Fink’s devilishly complicated Panama Canal deal may come good appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Even when India was staring down the barrel of a 27 percent tariff on most of its exports to the United States, business executives and government officials saw an upside. India’s biggest economic rival, China, and its smaller competitors like Vietnam were facing even worse.

India has been pushing hard in recent years to become a manufacturing alternative to China, and it looked as if it had suddenly gained an advantage.

Then India and its smaller rivals got 90-day reprieves, and President Trump doubled down on China, boosting its tariff to 145 percent.

The sky-high tax on Chinese imports to America presented “a significant opportunity for India’s trade and industry,” said Praveen Khandelwal, a member of Parliament from the ruling party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a top figure in the country’s business lobby.

India, with its enormous work force, has been trying to elbow into China’s manufacturing business for a long time, yet its factories are not ready. For the past 10 years Mr. Modi has pursued a goal he named “Make in India.”

The government has paid incentives to companies producing goods in strategic sectors, budgeting over $26 billion, and tried to attract foreign investments in the name of reducing India’s dependence on Chinese imports. One of its goals was to create 100 million new manufacturing jobs by 2022.

There have been successes. The most eye-catching one is that Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer, has started making iPhones for Apple in India, moving some work from China.

Yet the role of manufacturing in India over a decade has shrunk, relative to services and agriculture, from 15 percent of the economy to less than 13.

Manufacturing and the jobs it can bring are thought to be crucial to India’s rise as a global power. China, with an economy five times the size of India’s, is the biggest of the Asian countries to have sped toward prosperity by making and selling stuff the rest of the world wants to buy. But manufacturing accounts for a 25 percent share of most East Asian economies — twice as much as in India.

Public infrastructure has come a long way under Mr. Modi’s direction. But 10 years has not been enough time to train the country’s growing work force to match businesses’ needs. And the route remains bumpy when it comes to connecting India’s pockets of economic strength to one another.

Barely an hour from New Delhi on a new eight-lane elevated highway, the Rai Industrial Estate in Haryana occupies land that grew wheat and mustard crops earlier this century. Some of the factories on the dusty grid inside have been grinding out auto parts and processed foods for 20 years. Others are just starting, hoping for an imminent breakthrough.

Vikram Bathla, who in 2019 founded LiKraft, which manufactures lithium-ion batteries for vehicles, said access to technology was the most frustrating obstacle to his business. He depends heavily on imports, which need to be bought in bulk and take time to ship, and finds it difficult to hire the people he needs to do highly technical work.

“We can buy the equipment, and we do” — and most of it comes from China. “What we don’t have,” he said, “is the skilled workers to use it.” For five years, he said, he has been trying to catch up with competitors that started 15 years before him.

Mr. Bathla, tall, mild-mannered and English-speaking, paces among LiKraft’s 300 workers, most of them migrants from poorer Indian states, quietly bent over brightly lit benches, assembling batteries. They start with cells imported from China, some of them turquoise cylinders labeled “Made in Inner Mongolia.”

Other workers operate larger machines, also imported from China, to weld cells and electronic components into batteries. The finished products will be marked “Made in India.” But the supply chain is foreign.

It is not just a high-tech phenomenon. Another factory, half a mile away in the same industrial park, depends on foreign inputs, too.

AutoKame designs, cuts and sews car-seat covers for the Indian market. Its high-precision fabric cutters, with whirring, robotic arms, are imported from Germany and Italy. The synthetic fiber also has to be imported.

Expensive raw materials are only the tip of the iceberg, said Anil Bhardwaj, the secretary general of a trade organization for manufacturing businesses. Also contributing to the problem, he said, are the high cost of land, a shortage of the right kinds of engineers and a lack of good financing from banks. Many difficulties that he and other owners face are about inconsistent government policy and red tape, problems that have dogged Indian industry for many decades.

Mr. Bhardwaj also cited a less obvious need faced by manufacturers: a well-functioning justice system. India’s courts are slow and their rulings arbitrary, he said, putting small businesses like his colleagues’ at the mercy of larger firms that can afford better lawyers and political influence.

“That’s why people really fear the big companies in India,” he said.

Smaller companies can’t afford to confront them, or the politicians and regulators who accommodate them. India’s court system is so disastrously backed up — with more than 50 million cases pending — that any entanglement can turn deadly for a smaller player. So they avoid growing, and miss out on efficiencies of scale.

He and other experts acknowledge significant improvements in recent years. For instance, power, which was in short supply 10 years ago, has become plentiful in places like Haryana’s industrial parks, though it is not as reliable as the small factories there would like. Many government processes have been streamlined during Mr. Modi’s time in office.

And states have managed to replicate some parts of the production system that made China’s factories the world’s envy. A cluster of Apple suppliers in the state of Tamil Nadu is by some estimates producing 20 percent of the world’s iPhones. Until the past few years, nearly all were made in China.

Records from Tamil Nadu’s main airport show that in the weeks before Mr. Trump announced his 27 percent tariff, outbound shipments of electronics doubled, to more than 2,000 tons a month, as Apple and other companies stocked up. A decision on Friday by Mr. Trump to exclude smartphones and other electronics could tamp down the rush to ship iPhones to America.

Still, long-term changes are afoot. A person who works closely with Apple’s suppliers, who was not authorized to discuss their plans publicly, said the suppliers were hoping to ramp up production so India could make 30 percent of the world’s iPhones.

Mr. Khandelwal, the politician, said India was ready to seize the overnight advantage created by the 145 percent tariff against China across many industries, including electronics, auto parts, textiles and chemicals.

Smaller factory owners are eager for the same things. But they see big old Indian obstacles in their way, the very kind that have resisted reform for decades.

The post Trump’s Trade War With China Could Be Good for India. But Is It Ready? appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Despite reading more than a hundred books a year, most of the time, I read pretty casually. Usually, I can put down a book and not think about it again until I pick it back up. It’s not that I’m reading bad books, but it’s rare that I get fully immersed in a story or have a big emotional reaction—maybe reading this much has set the bar higher.

Every once in a while, though, I’ll encounter a book that reminds me what reading can do. For example, when I read the first few pages of The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg and I had to put it down and literally take a lap in my living room before I could calm down enough to keep reading it.

Or when I read The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri and realized it was making me angry that everyone wasn’t talking about this book at all times.

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The post Have You Ever Read a Book So Good It Makes You Mad? appeared first on Our Story Insight.