What is the Insurrection Act? Why is the US Fed chair criminal probe causing alarm? Which 75 countries are on Trump's travel ban list? The US economy seems strong after a year of Trump, but is it really? Over the past year, United States President Donald Trump has unleashed a slew of policies that have upended businesses, supply chains and jobs.

President Trump's favourite word is tariffs. He reminded the world of that in his pre-Christmas address to the nation. With the world still unwrapping the tariffs gift from the first year of his second term in office, he said they were bringing jobs, higher wages and economic growth to the US. What is less debatable is that they've refashioned the global economy, and will continue to do so into 2026. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that although the tariff shock is smaller than originally announced, it is a key reason why it now expects the rate of global economic growth to slow to 3.1% in 2026.

How dangerous is the US standoff with Venezuela? Is the US economy strong heading into 2026? As the United States economy heads into 2026, the report card emerging on its performance is complicated. By many measures, the world's largest economy appears to be in a strong position. After a tumultuous year marked by President Donald Trump's return to the White House and his swing towards tariffs and protectionism, recent growth has outpaced the expectations of most analysts.

Stocks from the United States to Japan have risen sharply amid hopes that an end to the longest US government shutdown in history is imminent. US lawmakers on Sunday moved to end a five-week impasse over government funding, a boost for investors unnerved by signs of growing weakness in the US economy and the sky-high evaluations of firms involved in artificial intelligence. The funding package still needs to win final approval in the Senate and then pass the US House of Representatives, after which it would go to US President Donald Trump for his signature - a process expected to take days. Stock markets in the Asia Pacific made large gains on Monday, while futures in the US also rose in advance of stock exchanges reopening. South Korea's benchmark KOSPI led the gains, rising about 3 percent as of 4pm local time (07:00 GMT).

Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon are investing tens of billions in data centers. AI infrastructure is now a key driver of US economic growth. The amount of capital pouring into AI data center projects is staggering. Last week, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon reported their 2025 capital expenditures would total roughly $370 billion, and they expect that number to keep rising in 2026. The biggest spender last quarter was Microsoft, which put nearly $35 billion into data centers and other investments, equivalent to 45 percent of its revenue. Rarely, if ever, has a single technology absorbed this much money this quickly.

Apple has promised to fix a bug in its iPhone automatic dictation tool after some users reported it had suggested to them "Trump" when they said the word "racist". The glitch was first highlighted in a viral post on TikTok, when the speech-to-text tool sometimes briefly flashed up the word "Trump" when they said "racist", and was later repeated by others on social media. "We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation and we are rolling out a fix," an Apple spokesperson said. The company blamed the bug on its tool displaying words that have "phonetic overlap" before the "intended word" is identified, which in this case included words with the "r" consonant. However, the glitch caused outrage among some conservative commentators in the US, who have long accused big tech companies of political bias against those on the right.

Between the disruption to foreign manufacturing and its planned German silicon facility, much of the recent focus has been on Apple's overseas supply chain. But, amid a push to re-start the US economy, Apple is now highlighting its domestic contributions. The iPhone-maker announced today that it will open a new campus and engineering hub in North Carolina, as part of a five-year plan to pour $430 billion into the US economy. Apple will spend $1 billion on the new site located in the Research Triangle area, home to a trifecta of higher-education institutions including North Carolina State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina. The project will see Apple employ 3,000 people in machine learning, artificial intelligence and software engineering posts.

Owing to the global lockdowns that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, fuel demand plummeted and the price of oil futures went negative in April 2020. Robust fuel demand projections are crucial to economic and energy planning and policy discussions. Here we incorporate pandemic projections and people’s resulting travel and trip activities and fuel usage in a machine-learning-based model to project the US medium-term gasoline demand and study the impact of government intervention. We found that under the reference infection scenario, the US gasoline demand grows slowly after a quick rebound in May, and is unlikely to fully recover prior to October 2020. Under the reference and pessimistic scenario, continual lockdown (no reopening) could worsen the motor gasoline demand temporarily, but it helps the demand recover to a normal level quicker. Under the optimistic infection scenario, gasoline demand will recover close to the non-pandemic level by October 2020. The COVID 19 pandemic and consequent lockdown has had a substantial impact on mobility and therefore fuel demand and it is not clear when demand will recover. Ou et al. use a machine learning model that integrates health recovery scenarios to project the near-term future of gasoline demand.

The COVID-19 virus has inflicted significant pain on the US economy as airlines have cancelled thousands of flights, restaurants and retailers have shut down, and sporting events and concerts have gone silent. In response, congressional lawmakers joined together and threw an immediate lifeline of $2 trillion to small businesses, hospitals, and individuals to tackle the crisis. While Americans remain holed up in their homes, the US government and Congress are considering additional stimulus efforts to get the economy back on its feet. Additional assistance for families, businesses, and healthcare workers should and will, of course, be front and center, but one area of new stimulus should not be overlooked -- artificial intelligence. AI technology has already proven its ability to assist in the COVID-19 response by utilizing supercomputers to accelerate the research of treatments to COVID-19, as well as enabling grocery stores to better predict food and supply chain shortages.

The US labor market looks markedly different today than it did two decades ago. It has been reshaped by dramatic events like the Great Recession but also by a quieter ongoing evolution in the mix and location of jobs. In the decade ahead, the next wave of automation technologies may accelerate the pace of change. Millions of jobs could be phased out even as new ones are created. More broadly, the day-to-day nature of work could change for nearly everyone as intelligent machines become fixtures in the American workplace. Until recently, most research on the potential effects of automation, including our own, has focused on the national-level effects. Our previous work ran multiple scenarios regarding the pace and extent of adoption. In the midpoint case, our modeling shows some jobs being phased out but sufficient numbers being added at the same time to produce net positive job growth for the United States as a whole through 2030.