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Joe Biden comes out fighting against Donald Trump

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When President Joe Biden approaches a lectern, the challenge he confronts is not high expectations. It is instead high anxiety within his own party about his capacity, at 81, to lead, and even to make a compelling case for his presidency. On March 7th he took a step towards dispelling such doubts with a forceful state-of-the-union address in which he extolled his achievements, demanded action from congressional Republicans to secure the border and make taxation fairer, and repeatedly attacked Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, whom he referred to never by name but as “my predecessor”.

It was a campaign-style speech out of keeping with the tradition of the annual address to both chambers of Congress. Mr Biden not only attacked his opponent but goaded Republicans in the chamber and scolded the justices of the Supreme Court, who sat before him, for their decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Coming from this president, an institutionalist who reveres such traditions, that in itself was a signal that he recognises Mr Trump has shifted American politics onto new terrain, and that Mr Biden intends to take the fight to him there.

Mr Biden directly tackled concerns about his age as he drew to a close after more than an hour. He noted that when he was first elected to the Senate in 1972 he was sometimes barred from Senate lifts because he was thought to be too young to be serving. Now, he continued, “I’ve been told I’m too old.” He smiled the confident smile familiar from his many campaigns, though less seen lately, then said the important question was not the age of the candidates but of their ideas. “Hate, anger, revenge and retribution are the oldest of ideas,” Mr Biden said, referring to qualities Mr Trump has embraced. “But you can’t lead America with old ideas.”

A survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal late last month found that 73% of Americans thought Mr Biden was too old to run for re-election, while 52% felt that way about Mr Trump, who is 77. (For Mr Biden that number was the same last August, but for Mr Trump it has ticked up by five points.) Though both candidates are unpopular, Mr Biden is leading the unpopularity contest. He trails Mr Trump narrowly in national polls, according to The Economist’s poll tracker, but Mr Trump has opened leads in key swing states and, more dangerously, has the confidence of more Americans when it comes to issues they consider critical, such as handling the economy and securing the border.

Mr Biden squinted at the teleprompter as he read his speech, and he swallowed some syllables and occasionally whole words. But he showed himself to be in command of his material and the chamber by baiting Republicans into jeering, then, like a boy relishing a playground scuffle, grinning and punching back. “Yeah, yeah,” he sneered, as Republicans booed his description of the bipartisan Senate border-security bill that the House speaker, Mike Johnson, has refused to bring to a vote. “Look at the facts. I know you know how to read.”

As Mr Biden rattled off the enforcement provisions of the bill, James Lankford, the conservative Republican senator who helped negotiate it for months only to see his party desert it, nodded his head and appeared to mouth, “That’s true.” Mr Biden accused Mr Trump of blocking the bill to help his electoral prospects, then challenged him: “Join me in telling Congress to pass it. We can do it together.”

Mr Biden opened his speech by saying his ambition was to “wake up the Congress” and alert the American people to threats facing the country. In a hopeful sign for aid to Ukraine that is now stalled in Congress, Mr Johnson, seated over Mr Biden’s left shoulder, nodded somberly as the president warned of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin: “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop with Ukraine, I assure you he will not.” Mr Biden invoked Ronald Reagan’s demand that the leader of the Soviet Union tear down the Berlin Wall, adroitly drawing applause from Republicans even as he pivoted to his first, sudden strike at Mr Trump: “Now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, do whatever the hell you want!”

Mr Biden connected the threat to democracy in Europe to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th 2021, and said “my predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth” about the day. “Here’s the simple truth,” Mr Biden continued. “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

Mr Biden later turned to what he called the “gut-wrenching” violence in the Middle East. He insisted that Israel had the right to pursue Hamas, but also that it had a “fundamental responsibility” to protect civilian lives, and he gave a harrowing account of the suffering of Gazans. He said America would erect a temporary pier on Gaza’s shore and begin supplying aid by sea, and that Israel had also committed to opening a crossing into the Gaza Strip from the north.

These efforts might not mollify Democratic progressives angry at Mr Biden for his support of Israel. But Democrats in the chamber were thrilled with the pugilistic, populist tenor and substance of his speech. For the most part he avoided high-flown oratory in favour of simpler formulations as he demanded that Congress act to lower drug prices and housing costs. “Folks at home,” he shouted at one point, “does anyone really think the tax code is fair?” “No!” shouted the Democrats in the chamber, and Mr Biden promised to “keep fighting like hell to make it fair”.

Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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