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- InsightsTrade & Investment
Imports fell once in five years and that fall is the least reliable number in the series
Imports of goods and services dropped from 3.97 to 3.86 trillion dollars in 2023, the only decline in the run. Producer prices fell that same year, which means the one movement most often read as evidence of reshoring is the one that can least bear the reading.
- PerspectivesEconomic Security
Tell a ministry where to look, not where to go
Advice that names a destination expires the day the evidence moves. The six files behind any recommendation about the American economy carry six different as-of dates, and a ministry that was handed the conclusion cannot tell which one broke.
- PerspectivesEconomic Security
Openness and security are being reconciled by narrowing one channel at both ends rather than by closing the economy
Two-way U.S. goods trade with mainland China ran at 58 billion dollars a month in 2022 and 35 billion in 2025, a fall of 39.7 percent, while total imports and exports of goods and services both rose across the same three years. The channel narrowed at both ends, and no series cited here records whether a screen decided any of it.
- InsightsEconomic Security
Two thirds of the M2 increase since 2020 arrived in a single year
The money stock is 4.26 trillion dollars larger than in 2020. Of that, 2.84 trillion came between 2020 and 2021, and the four years since have added half as much again, including the only contraction in the window.
- PerspectivesEconomic Security
Commodity dependence is an exposure in the budget, and the conversion that ends it runs slower than the price cycle
Texas raises more severance tax than any other state, 8.00 billion dollars, and that is 8.9 percent of what Texas collects; the same tax is 47.2 percent of North Dakota's. The exposure therefore sits in the size of the rest of the base, and the spending that would widen one moves slowly: factory construction rose for four years, then fell.
- InsightsEconomic Security
The policy rate has given back less than a fifth of its climb
On annual averages the federal funds rate rose 5.06 percentage points from its 2021 low to its 2024 peak, then fell 0.93. Everything priced against the policy rate is still being priced against most of the increase.
- PerspectivesEconomic Security
A supply chain is governed on private books, and the public statistics reach only its edges
American business held an average of 2,663 billion dollars of inventory across 2025, 35.1 percent above 2020, and that buffer is the working instrument of resilience. The series records its size and nothing else: not who holds it, not against which supplier, not where the next tier sits.
- InsightsEconomic Security
Nearly two thirds of the five-year export gain arrived in a single year
Exports of goods and services rose 0.47 trillion dollars in 2022 and then 0.03, 0.15 and 0.10. A series that never falls looks like steady growth until you write it as steps, at which point it looks like one event followed by three quiet years.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
Each instrument of economic statecraft has its own published series and the doctrine meant to rank them has none
Construction spending on manufacturing plant ran at 75 billion dollars a year in 2020 and 215 in 2025, while manufacturing output on a 2017 base of 100 ended the window at 97.3. Every instrument of statecraft has a published series, and the ranking that says which instrument yields when two collide has none.
- ExplainerEconomic Security
What refining capacity is, and why it is the bottleneck
Refining is the step between a raw material and a usable one. By the end you will know why it is harder to replace than a mine, why it clusters in a few places, and what a country that cannot refine actually lacks.
- CommentaryIndustrial Policy
Semiconductor subsidy should be judged on demand met at home, not on fabs opened
Construction spending on manufacturing plant fell from an annual rate of 244 billion dollars in 2024 to 215 billion in 2025, while U.S. semiconductor production rose from 144 to 165 on a 2017 base, its largest step in five observations. The two yardsticks now available disagree about the same year, and the one that should settle the question appears in none of this data.
- CommentaryWorkforce & Skills
The binding constraint on American port throughput sits inland, not at the berth
The occupational file puts the three heaviest concentrations of transport and material-moving work in Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana, none of which fronts an ocean, and puts California, Florida and New York below the national share. No series held here counts a container, a berth or a crane, so the inland reading is an inference from where the work is counted.
- InsightsEconomic Security
The consumer price index has not fallen in a single year since 2020
Prices rose more slowly after 2022, and the index kept rising anyway. It stands at 322 against 258.9 five years earlier, a level about 24 percent higher.
- CommentaryStrategic Technology
An export control can close a sale and it cannot close a dependency
Goods imports from China averaged 45 billion dollars a month in 2022 and 26 billion a month in 2025, and goods exports to mainland China fell to 9 billion a month, the lowest of six readings. Over the same years the balance in goods and services widened from minus 75 billion a month to minus 78, the widest of its own six.
- CommentaryTrade & Investment
Trade policy built for containers is missing a trillion dollars of exports
Services exports run at $1.2 trillion on the Bureau of Economic Analysis measure. Tariff schedules, rules of origin and customs lines cannot see them, which means neither the protection nor the retaliation lands where a growing part of the exposure sits.
- InsightsEconomic Security
Real output per person rose again in 2025, by less than in any earlier year of the window
Output per person has risen at every reading, from 61,127 chained 2017 dollars in 2020 to 69,749 in 2025, but the step into 2025 is 1,068 dollars and it is the smallest of the five. The total the figure is drawn from slowed in the same year, adding 0.49 trillion dollars against 0.64 in each of the two years before it, so the flatter step is not a story about population alone.
- ExplainerEconomic Security
What a government means when it says de-risking
De-risking is the attempt to remove one supplier's leverage over an economy without ending the trade. By the end you should know which instruments governments use, why dependence is so hard to measure, and why rising domestic output does not settle the question.
- InsightsTrade & Investment
Goods imports from China fell 11 billion dollars a month in 2025, taking the series below its 2020 level
The monthly average rose from 36 billion dollars in 2020 to 45 in 2022, then fell to 26 in 2025, the lowest of the six readings. Exports in the other direction also ended at their lowest reading, so the narrower bilateral difference comes from buying less rather than selling more.
- CommentaryEconomic Security
Before the next plant, explain the idle line
American manufacturing used 75.3 percent of its capacity in 2025, against 77.6 percent in 2022. A programme that pays to add capacity without accounting for the capacity already standing is not an industrial policy. It is a construction policy.
- ExplainerEconomic Security
What makes a mineral critical in American law
Critical is a legal designation, not a geological one. By the end you will know who draws the list, what appearing on it does and does not do, and why the minerals the United States taxes most heavily cannot appear on it at all.