July 16 2025
US economy; New 401k rules; MAGA revolt; Development v conservation; AI protein analysis
June Prices Meet Forecasts; Fed Target in Sight as Trump's Tariffs Add $47B to Treasury
White House to Push for Private Equity in Retirement Plans
Cracks Emerge in Trump's Right Flank as Some Criticize Epstein, Other Stances
After Mayor's Mysterious Death, Development Battle Splits Rural Tennessee Republicans
AI-Powered Analysis of Proteins Offers New Hope for Neurological Diseases
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1. June Prices Meet Forecasts; Fed Target in Sight as Trump's Tariffs Add $47B to Treasury
A. U.S. consumer prices for June landed almost exactly where forecasters expected, confirming that inflation’s most stubborn pressure still comes from housing—though rents and other shelter costs are finally easing. Outside the shelter category, prices are growing at roughly the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent comfort zone, suggesting most everyday goods and services have returned to pre-pandemic behavior. The report also showed a modest pop in tariff-sensitive items such as furniture, clothing and toys, as this spring’s trade duties filtered onto store shelves. With shelter inflation continuing to cool and other categories already tame, 2025 still looks on track for a smooth descent toward the Fed’s target, even if a little tariff noise lingers along the way.
citizen journal
B. America’s trading partners have largely failed to retaliate against Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing a president taunted for “always chickening out” to raise nearly $50bn in extra customs revenues at little cost. Four months since Trump fired the opening salvo of his trade war, only China and Canada have dared to hit back at Washington imposing a minimum 10 per cent global tariff, 50 per cent levies on steel and aluminium, and 25 per cent on autos. At the same time US revenues from customs duties hit a record high of $64bn in the second quarter — $47bn more than over the same period last year, according to data published by the US Treasury on Friday.
FT
2. White House to Push for Private Equity in Retirement Plans
President Trump is expected to sign an executive order in the coming days designed to help make private-market investments more available to U.S. retirement plans, according to people familiar with the matter. The order would instruct the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide guidance to employers and plan administrators on including investments like private assets in 401(k) plans, the people said. The details of the order aren’t yet final and are still subject to review, the people said. An order could help pave the way for big managers of private assets such as Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to access the vast sums of retirement savings held by workers who don’t have a traditional pension. Institutional investors such as pension funds have largely maxed out on private markets, leading firms to look to individual investors for new sources of growth.
WSJ
3. Cracks Emerge in Trump's Right Flank as Some Criticize Epstein, Other Stances
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Georgia Republican who first discovered politics by way of the QAnon conspiracy theory, has always been one of President Trump’s most ardent acolytes in Congress. But these days, she is finding plenty to criticize about her “favorite president,” particularly his turnabout on revealing a complete accounting of the Jeffrey Epstein case. “It’s a full reversal on what was all said beforehand, and people are just not willing to accept it,” Ms. Greene said in an interview, after the Justice Department said no further disclosures would be “appropriate or warranted” when it came to the disgraced financier who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. It was the latest flash of frustration within Mr. Trump’s hard-right faction on Capitol Hill. After a six-month honeymoon in which a fractious Republican Party has remained mostly united by unblinking allegiance to the president, there are now signs of a potential fraying of Mr. Trump’s political coalition. In the past few weeks, Ms. Greene and other right-wing Republicans have criticized the administration’s bellicose stance on Iran, the president’s reversal on supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia and the Justice Department’s pivot on the Epstein matter. They have suggested that on each issue, Mr. Trump has betrayed the voters who elected him.
NYT
4. After Mayor's Mysterious Death, Development Battle Splits Rural Tennessee Republicans
MANCHESTER, Tenn.—Smack dab between the swelling urban centers of Nashville, Chattanooga, and Huntsville, Ala., rural Coffee County was poised to become Tennessee’s next boomtown, with subdivisions rapidly replacing farmland. But when the county’s pro-growth mayor, Judd Matheny, died under unusual circumstances last year, it unleashed a development battle with a Southern Gothic twist that has split this deeply red area over the fundamental question of what it means to be conservative. County officials are pushing hard to limit development across the area’s vast farmlands. In March, the county imposed a three-month moratorium on all large subdivision projects in areas zoned for agriculture. After that ended, officials passed an ordinance ruling that property owners in agricultural areas could only sell land in a minimum of 5-acre-lot increments, effectively halting large subdivisions in those areas. On one side: the county’s multigenerational farmers and those seeking to preserve a community where rolled bales of hay still dot open fields. On the other side: developers, builders and real-estate brokers who believe the area is primed for tremendous growth. Rival camps have hired lawyers and clash on social media through dueling Facebook pages, “Coffee County for Responsible Growth” and “Protect Coffee County Land Rights.” Planning commission meetings, typically mundane affairs where leaders wear jeans and work boots, now draw heated crowds and viewers on streaming. Editor note: sounds a lot like the plot of “Yellowstone”
WSJ
5. AI-Powered Analysis of Proteins Offers New Hope for Neurological Diseases
An international probe into the human body’s proteins has revealed new clues about ageing and how to track and treat destructive neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Research on the largest-ever protein library is helping bring humanity “closer than ever to the day when a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease stops being a death sentence”, said billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who part-funded the work. The findings published in several Nature Medicine papers on Tuesday are part of an escalating effort to combine big biological datasets with artificial intelligence-enhanced analysis to find early predictors that can help detect and combat notoriously hard-to-treat conditions. Researchers used the data to identify a signature protein — or biomarker — associated with carriers of a genetic variant known to raise the risk of Alzheimer’s. They also examined how levels of proteins that correlate with cognitive function changed with age, and uncovered patterns in protein level changes for various neurodegenerative conditions. “The most immediately exciting part is that the patterns of protein abnormality that predict neurodegenerative diseases reveal new insights into the biology of how these conditions develop,” said Charles Marshall, a professor of clinical neurology at Queen Mary University of London.
FT
July 16, 1945: The first atomic bomb test is successfully exploded
The development of atomic weapons beginning in the 1940s represents one of history's most consequential technological advances. While nuclear weapons remain deeply controversial due to their devastating potential, proponents of nuclear deterrence argue that the threat of nuclear retaliation has prevented major power wars that historically occurred with regularity. Statistical analysis supports this claim: the period from 1945 to present has seen no direct military conflicts between nuclear-armed great powers, contrasting sharply with previous centuries where such conflicts were frequent—Europe alone experienced major power wars roughly every 20-30 years between 1500-1945, including the devastating World Wars that killed over 70 million people. Nuclear weapons appear to have contributed to remarkable border stability, with most post-1945 international boundaries remaining largely unchanged compared to the constant territorial reshuffling that characterized earlier eras. However, this stability comes with the persistent risk of catastrophic destruction, creating a system that may have reduced conventional warfare while introducing existential threats to human civilization.
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Sources
- https://www.ft.com/content/82e32f7c-47e2-4e96-bb53-a58377e18aa9
- https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/trump-executive-order-to-help-open-up-401-k-s-to-private-markets-c90c6788?mod=hp_lead_pos5
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/us/politics/republicans-congress-trump-epstein.html
- https://www.wsj.com/us-news/after-a-mayors-mysterious-death-a-land-dispute-divides-republicans-in-tennessee-c40d5709?mod=hp_lead_pos7
- https://www.ft.com/content/f9fa691c-4502-4324-9c4b-b3252abfc40e
Contact: greg@loql.ai
