Infindi

President Donald Trump has brazenly engaged in what appears to be insider trading. A bombshell story published in Bloomberg on May 14, 2026, revealed that Trump made thousands of stock trades in the first quarter of this year with companies connected to the government. This isn’t fake news. Bloomberg analyzed publicly available information from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics regarding Trump’s financial disclosures—information that Trump was forced to divulge because of a government regulation called the STOCK Act.

Bloomberg summarized its findings, stating that “President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.”

Insider trading is blatantly illegal. Among the flood of Trump’s highly questionable, unethical, immoral, and criminal dealings, this one may be the most egregious.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/29/as-americans-struggle-trumps-wealth-soars/

U.S. consumer prices climbed sharply again last month as the 10-week war with Iran delivered higher gasoline prices and more pain for Americans.

The Labor Department's consumer price index rose 3.8% from April 2025, the biggest jump in three years, and up from a 3.3% year-over-year gain in March. On a month-to-month basis, April prices rose 0.6% from March as gasoline prices rose 5.4%, according to the data released Tuesday. The month-over-month gain was down from 0.9% increase in overall prices from February to March, when the initial shock of the war hit the U.S. economy.

Labor Department figures showed that gasoline prices are up more than 28% compared with a year ago. However, the AAA motor club listed the average regular gallon of gasoline above $4.50 on Tuesday, about 44% more than it cost last year at this time.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/iran-war-hits-home-as-gasoline-prices-fuel-significant-u-s-inflation-jump

Roughly seven weeks into the war with Iran, investors have shrugged off the sky-high price of oil, sending the S&P 500 this week to a fresh record high.

That exuberance on Wall Street has offered a sharp contrast with the hardships facing many Americans, who are feeling the financial blowback of a conflict that President Trump once promised would be brief but seems to have no end in sight.

With high gas prices cutting deeply into many families’ budgets, the U.S. economy is under increasing strain, raising the odds that inflation will worsen, unemployment will rise and growth will slow this year.

Under Mr. Trump’s original timeline, America’s entanglement in the Middle East was supposed to have been completed by now, paving the way for a swift reduction in energy costs that have roiled consumers and businesses around the world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/us/politics/trump-economy-iran-war.html

The Iran war is adding fresh pressure to a slowing U.S. labor market, with at least one major employer already freezing hiring plans.

Consumer goods giant Unilever, which owns brands such as Dove and Vaseline, told CBS News on Tuesday that it's hitting the brakes on hiring amid an unstable economic backdrop. In a memo obtained by Reuters, a Unilever executive pointed to "macroeconomic and geopolitical realities, especially in the Middle East conflict" as the reason for the company's three-month hiring freeze.

Even before the Iran war began, the U.S. hiring rate had slowed, with the February Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey hitting its lowest level since 2020.

Employers across the U.S. shed 92,000 jobs in February, a sharp and unexpected setback in a labor market marked by anemic job growth during the past year as businesses grappled with tariffs and economic uncertainty.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-war-jobs-impact-unilever-hiring-freeze/