US President Donald Trump thinks that the main problem in the US economy is the persistent deficit in foreign trade. His preferred tool is tariffs. He is using tariffs and the threat of more tariffs to impose commercial deals on friends and foes to bring down imports and increase exports. Has it worked?

Russia is struggling to control a stubbornly high inflation. The Russian Central Bank blames the shortage of manpower, which in their view is producing ‘wage-push-inflation’, so they want unemployment to go up by stopping economic growth. But there are other ways to control inflation that would be more beneficial to common people in Russia.

After a period of relative calm, mainstream media have lately, once again, been flooded with articles predicting the imminent collapse of Russia’s economy. The sanctions, together with the financial burden of the war in Ukraine, should finally be working, so Russia is now under severe strain, and we will in 2025 see the collapse. Is there any truth in this?

Crisis in a capitalist economy is often the result of a bubble bursting. The last time a bubble burst was in 2008, in what was called the Global Financial Crisis, when the whole financial system was on the brink of implosion. Despite slow economic growth since, new bubbles have been building up, particularly in the housing and stock markets. When will they burst?

Inflation is suddenly back in the developed countries, a phenomenon many thought was something that belonged to the past. A year ago, most central bank governors assured that this was an expected and transitory phenomenon as the developed economies returned to growth after the Covid induced depression in 2020. Now it looks not to be that transitory. So has inflation come to stay?