Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.
Your browser does not support the <audio> element.
This is not a column about Taylor Swift. It is possibly something more ridiculous, a column about all the columns about Taylor Swift. And yet attention must be paid, because so much attention is being paid. That is the ineluctable logic of the media-politics complex, a philosophical school of which Donald Trump is the American Aristotle. Ms Swift is no slouch, either.
Any news organisation would be deceiving readers about the reality of American life by ignoring the national convulsion over the relationship between Ms Swift and Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, an American-football team competing in the Super Bowl on February 11th. And yet any news organisation must also reckon with the complexity that this reality has its basis in unreality, not in fact-free lies about a stolen election but in fact-free speculation about whether the romance is a real love affair, or a cross-branding triumph by two marketing savants, or, darker yet, a “psychological operation” hatched by the Pentagon to re-elect President Joe Biden. (The Pentagon has denied this.)
Having described that basic background, your news organisation approaches a fork in the road. Down one route lies further credulous or cynical conspiracy theorising. This is the route chosen by some stars of Fox News. Down the other, news organisations can poke at those who traffic in conspiracies while not ruling out the cross-branding theory, and speculating about if and with what effect Ms Swift might endorse Mr Biden, as she did in 2020.
As these news organisations intensify and prolong the attention to the artist and the athlete, they are doing their jobs: they are covering what has come to be defined as news. They are also harvesting the fruits of the fascination with Ms Swift, a subject all Americans appear to think about even more frequently than the males do the Roman empire. (Small wonder, by the way, that Super Bowls are gassily enumerated in Latin. This one is LVIII.)
There is a third branching from this particular fork, down which the self-loathing columnist, racked (yet also tickled) at the prospect of writing about Ms Swift and Mr Kelce, might venture in search of a high-minded rationale. Inevitably, that columnist will collide with Daniel J. Boorstin. Boorstin, a historian, set out to understand what had led Americans “to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life”.
In “The Image”, a book he published in 1961, Boorstin concluded that “we expect too much from the world.” When we pick up the newspaper, we anticipate learning of momentous events. Yet the real world does not supply spectacular novelty very often. This imbalance was not obvious when the first newspaper published in America, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, appeared in Boston in 1690, promising news just once a month. But then came advances in technology—the rotary press in the 19th century, followed by radio and television in the 20th—and the definition of “news” began to inflate to fill all that space and, with it, all that yearning for something new, something interesting.
Boorstin argued that the imbalance between demand and supply was corrected by the invention of the “pseudo-event”. This was a happening or statement that did not arise spontaneously, out of the natural flow of events in the world, but was created, often by a canny public-relations agent. This kind of news now so defines the daily representation of reality beyond our direct experience that it is hard to imagine apprehending the world without it.
To Boorstin, the pseudo-event was a potentially dangerous means of distortion, a way to shape perception by exploiting the thirst for novelty. Joseph McCarthy, the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, was “a natural genius” at generating pseudo-events, turning journalists into “reluctantly grateful” consumers and purveyors of his product: “Many hated him; all helped him.” Sound familiar? Boorstin was writing in what now seems a leisurely age, before the internet stretched the canvas for news to infinity while wrecking the economics of the industry, rewarding ceaseless nattering while discouraging costly reporting. These developments amplified the power of pseudo-events, as Mr Trump, always his own best publicist, has shown.
Does Mr Trump mean it when he says that if elected president again he might impose tariffs of more than 60% on imports from China? It is possible that even he does not know the answer. It may matter someday, but it does not matter now, not for the ephemeral needs of news and politics. What matters is whatever next hyperbole will briefly sate those same ephemeral needs. Provided it keeps spinning, the process is accretive: the more attention Mr Trump gets, the more attention he will get.
Anti hero
One result of all the artificial novelty, according to Boorstin, was the debasement of achievement. People could become famous without doing anything heroic. The celebrity, Boorstin wrote, “is the human pseudo-event. He has been fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness.”
Ms Swift’s music is a mighty achievement, one that has made her not merely a celebrity but a hero to her hundreds of millions of fans, whatever pseudo-events she has confected along the way. She has courted publicity by appearing at Mr Kelce’s games, rather than privately cheering over nachos and chicken wings at home. Yet even Fox News interviewed a “body-language expert” who concluded that the feelings between the two were real.
It remains possible that the romance is staged to be vivid and dramatic; that it has, in Boorstin’s terms, only an ambiguous relation to the underlying reality. But maybe all this coverage is a perfect, self-satirising crystallisation of this media era: a pseudo-pseudo-event, not devised by a publicist but created by media speculation itself—not something shallow being exaggerated into significance, in other words, but something profound being turned into something silly. One can hope. ■
Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important electoral stories, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.
Andersen Ross Photography Inc | Digitalvision | Getty Images
Wall Street is warning that the U.S. Department of Education’s crack down on student loan repayments may take billions of dollars out of consumers’ pockets and hit low income Americans particularly hard.
The department has restarted collections on defaulted student loans under President Donald Trump this month. For first time in around five years, borrowers who haven’t kept up with their bills could see their wages taken or face other punishments.
Using a range of interest rates and lengths of repayment plans, JPMorgan estimated that disposable personal income could be collectively cut by between $3.1 billion and $8.5 billion every month due to collections, according to Murat Tasci, senior U.S. economist at the bank and a Cleveland Federal Reserve alum.
If that all surfaced in one quarter, collections on defaulted and seriously delinquent loans alone would slash between 0.7% and 1.8% from disposable personal income year-over-year, he said.
This policy change may strain consumers who are already stressed out by Trump’s tariff plan and high prices from years of runaway inflation. These factors can help explain why closely followed consumer sentiment data compiled by the University of Michigan has been hitting some of its lowest levels in its seven-decade history in the past two months.
“You have a number of these pressure points rising,” said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial. “Perhaps in aggregate, it’s enough to quash some of these spending numbers.”
Bank of America said this push to collect could particularly weigh on groups that are on more precarious financial footing. “We believe resumption of student loan payments will have knock-on effects on broader consumer finances, most especially for the subprime consumer segment,” Bank of America analyst Mihir Bhatia wrote to clients.
Economic impact
Student loans account for just 9% of all outstanding consumer debt, according to Bank of America. But when excluding mortgages, that share shoots up to 30%.
Total outstanding student loan debt sat at $1.6 trillion at the end of March, an increase of half a trillion dollars in the last decade.
The New York Fed estimates that nearly one of every four borrowers required to make payments are currently behind. When the federal government began reporting loans as delinquent in the first quarter of this year, the share of debt holders in this boat jumped up to 8% from around 0.5% in the prior three-month period.
To be sure, delinquency is not the same thing as default. Delinquency refers to any loan with a past-due payment, while defaulting is more specific and tied to not making a delayed payment with a period of time set by the provider. The latter is considered more serious and carries consequences such as wage garnishment. If seriously delinquent borrowers also defaulted, JPMorgan projected that almost 25% of all student loans would be in the latter category.
JPMorgan’s Tasci pointed out that not all borrowers have wages or Social Security earnings to take, which can mitigate the firm’s total estimates. Some borrowers may resume payments with collections beginning, though Tasci noted that would likely also eat into discretionary spending.
Trump’s promise to reduce taxes on overtime and tips, if successful, could also help erase some effects of wage garnishment on poorer Americans.
Still, the expected hit to discretionary income is worrisome as Wall Street wonders if the economy can skirt a recession. Much hope has been placed on the ability of consumers to keep spending even if higher tariffs push product prices higher or if the labor market weakens.
LPL’s Roach sees this as less of an issue. He said the postpandemic economy has largely been propped up by high-income earners, who have done the bulk of the spending. This means the tide-change for student loan holders may not hurt the macroeconomic picture too much, he said.
“It’s hard to say if there’s a consensus view on this yet,” Roach said. “But I would say the student loan story is not as important as perhaps some of the other stories, just because those who hold student loans are not necessarily the drivers of the overall economy.”
A woman walks in an aisle of a Walmart supermarket in Houston, Texas, on May 15, 2025.
Ronaldo Schemidt | Afp | Getty Images
U.S. consumers are becoming increasingly worried that tariffs will lead to higher inflation, according to a University of Michigan survey released Friday.
The index of consumer sentiment dropped to 50.8, down from 52.2 in April, in the preliminary reading for May. That is the second-lowest reading on record, behind June 2022.
The outlook for price changes also moved in the wrong direction. Year-ahead inflation expectations rose to 7.3% from 6.5% last month, while long-term inflation expectations ticked up to 4.6% from 4.4%.
However, the majority of the survey was completed before the U.S. and China announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs between the two countries. The trade situation appears to be a key factor weighing on consumer sentiment.
“Tariffs were spontaneously mentioned by nearly three-quarters of consumers, up from almost 60% in April; uncertainty over trade policy continues to dominate consumers’ thinking about the economy,” Surveys of Consumers director Joanne Hsu said in the release.
Inflation expectations are closely watched by investors and policymakers. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has said the central bank wants to make sure long-term inflation expectations do not rise because of tariffs before resuming rate cuts.
A final consumer sentiment index for the month is slated to be released on May 30, and will likely be closely watched to see if the tariff pause led to an improvement in sentiment.
This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks during the 2025 National Retirement Summit in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.
Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Wall Street titan Jamie Dimon said Thursday that a recession is still a serious possibility for the United States, even after the recent rollback of tariffs on China.
“If there’s a recession, I don’t know how big it will be or how long it will last. Hopefully we’ll avoid it, but I wouldn’t take it off the table at this point,” the JPMorgan Chase CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
Specifically, Dimon said he would defer to his bank’s economists, who put recession odds at close to a toss-up. Michael Feroli, the firm’s chief U.S. economist, said in a note to clients on Tuesday that the recession outlook is “still elevated, but now below 50%.”
Dimon’s comments come less than a week after the U.S. and China announced that they were sharply reducing tariffs on one another for 90 days. The U.S. has also implemented a 90-day pause for many tariffs on other nations.
Thursday’s comments mark a change for Dimon, who said last month before the China truce that a recession was likely.
He also said there is still “uncertainty” on the tariff front but the pauses are a positive for the economy and market.
“I think the right thing to do is to back off some of that stuff and engage in conversation,” Dimon said.
However, even with the tariff pauses, the import taxes on goods entering the United States are now sharply higher than they were last year and could cause economic damage, according to Dimon.
“Even at this level, you see people holding back on investment and thinking through what they want to do,” Dimon said.
Personal Finance1 week ago
Personal Finance1 week ago
Personal Finance1 week ago
Economics1 week ago
Economics1 week ago
Economics1 week ago
Economics1 week ago