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Politics
US President Donald Trump alongside Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, back when the latter was the nominee for his current position, in Washington, D.C., USA, on November 2, 2017.
The United States’ judicial branch is set to reexamine an old decision that could have huge new consequences for the credibility and stability of the world’s largest economy.
The Supreme Court has requested briefs in a case that concerns the so-called “Humphrey’s Executor” precedent, a 90-year-old ruling that stops presidents from firing the leaders of quasi-governmental institutions without cause.
The Trump administration, which wants more power to sack appointees,says the precedent wrongly limits executive authority, and should be reversed.
What this is really about. Though the case concerns members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Supreme Court’s decision could allow the president to fire a much more important figure: Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. That’s because the Federal Reserve, like the NLRB and MSPB, is also a quasi-governmental organization, meaning that it works for the public interest but is independent of the executive branch.
With Donald Trump’s trade war already putting US financial and bond markets on edge, the last thing the central bank wants is a loss of independence, which would compromise markets’ confidence that the regulator is acting based on its economic mandates rather than Trump’s political whims.
Carveout possible. The top US court is reportedly skeptical of the Humphrey’s Executor precedent, but there is a world where it overturns this 1935 ruling while explicitly safeguarding the Federal Reserve’s independence.
There’ll be a new sheriff. Whatever happens, Powell’s term ends in May 2026, giving Trump the chance to nominate a successor. We’ll be keeping an eye on whether Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has emerged as a leading voice in the White House, starts interviewing potential candidates sooner than that...U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) speaks to the media during a visit to El Salvador to advocate for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man deported without due process by the Trump administration and sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), in San Salvador, El Salvador, on April 16, 2025.
1: On Wednesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) flew to El Salvador to advocate for the release of Kilmar Abgrego Garcia, a Maryland resident wrongfully deported to a brutal high-security prison there. Van Hollen, who met with the Salvadoran vice president, is the only US lawmaker to make the trip. The Supreme Court ruled last week that the Trump administration should “facilitate” Garcia’s return to the United States, but US President Donald Trump has shown no willingness to do so. (Does that mean the United States is facing a constitutional crisis? Here’s what Ian Bremmer has to say).
4: Four Russian journalists were convicted of extremism and jailed in a closed-door trial in Moscow for associating with the Anti-Corruption Fund — a group founded by the late opposition leader and political activist Alexei Navalny. The individuals pleaded not guilty, arguing they were merely doing their jobs as independent journalists.
-0.2: Before Washington unveiled sweeping tariffs that rocked the global economy, the World Trade Organization forecasted global goods trade to grow by 2.7% in 2025. The updated forecast shows a decrease of 0.2%, a swing of 2.9 percentage points. WTO director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala also warned that trade between the US and China could plunge by 81-91%, due to the superpowers’ trade war.
5th: California, the fifth-largest economy in the world, sued the Trump administration over the “emergency” rule that allowed the executive branch to impose tariffs — a power constitutionally reserved for Congress, the Golden State alleges.
7: The European Union has designated seven countries—Kosovo, Colombia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Bangladesh, and India — as“safe” places for migrants to return, a decision that will result in the denial of asylum applications for citizens from those countries. The move comes amid growing anti-immigrant pressure from far-right parties across the continent.
15: Peru’s former president Ollanta Humala and his wife Nadine Heredia have been found guilty of money laundering and each sentenced to 15 years in prison. The couple was convicted of accepting nearly $3 million in illegal campaign funds from construction giant Odebrecht and hundreds of thousands of dollars from the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez. Humala was taken into custody, whereas Heredia sought asylum at the Brazilian embassy in Lima and was granted safe passage to Brazil.UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer meets with US President Donald Trump alongside US Vice President JD Vance and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy in the Oval Office at the White House on February 27, 2025, in Washington, D.C., USA.
The US trade deal that London has been chasing for years is closer to reality now, after US Vice President JD Vance told UnHerd on Monday that there is a “good chance” that an agreement is possible.
UK Business and Trade Minister Sarah Jones alsosaid the negotiations are in a “good position,” but refused to divulge any timeline.
One major reported focus of the talks is the UK cutting its “tech tax” on the revenues of major digital firms in return for lower tariffs, although the sides are reportedly negotiating terms that go beyond this.
Back to being “special.” The United Kingdom escaped Trump’s “liberation day” with only the Administration’s general 10% tariff, albeit only because the UK doesn’t have a trade surplus with the US. A free trade deal would leave few or no tariffs on its US-bound exports.
A win for a Remainer and the Brexiteers. A trade pact would mark a big victory for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer — his predecessors have failed to land a deal ever since Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016. The idea was to replace the UK’s continental trade partners with the US, the world’s largest consumer market. Pro-Brexit politicians like Nigel Farage had long promised that Brexit would result in just such a US trade accord.
The irony: it’s finally within sight, thanks, no less, to Starmer, a prominent Remainer.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take to kick off your week, and what an extraordinary geopolitical environment we all find ourselves in right now.
The big macro lens is that the United States, my country, has become the principal driver of geopolitical uncertainty on the global stage. The most powerful country in the world, the biggest economy in the world, the home of the global reserve currency. And yet, at the same time, by far the most dysfunctional and kleptocratic and unfree political system of the advanced industrial democracies, so the G7 plus, compared to Japan or Germany or France or the UK or Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea. That's what we're looking at right now. And of course, that's a really challenging thing for pretty much everybody to navigate.
It is playing out the most dramatically in global trade with massive tariffs coming from the United States. And it's unclear who is going to get hit the worst, but it is clear that everyone is going to take a hit. This isn't a good environment for anybody. You want to talk about winners? There's not really any winners when you're undoing globalization. It's painful for pretty much everyone inside the United States. It's painful for multinational corporations, it's painful for consumers, it's painful for friends and adversaries of the United States all over the world. Whether it's China, it's Europe, Japan, Global South, you name it, everyone is taking a hit, everyone's economy will do worse, global growth will do worse. We will all feel it in the pocketbook, in the portfolio. Uncertainty, a massive amount of uncertainty being driven and driven continuously by the most powerful country in the world is hard for everybody to navigate and creates more cost.
Now, the markets are clearly glad that there has been rollback from the United States, from Trump, in particular the over 10% tariffs on most countries coming off for some 90 days, the electronics and iPhone exception, at least for now, on China, et cetera. But it's certainly unclear how long those exemptions are going to last and what happens after that. And even where we are right now, with 10% additional tariffs on everybody and significant essentially trade embargo on most goods between the United States and China, the two most powerful countries in the world, that already brings us squarely back to the 1930s in terms of the global tariff environment, and also at a time that things are moving much faster, that efficiencies are much greater, that global interconnectedness and supply chains so much more important.
So that's a real problem. That is not going to get managed anytime soon because no one is going to suddenly believe, oh, okay, I now have a deal with the United States, and that isn't going to be upset in a week or in a month or in a year. So the amount of hedging that you have to do economically is going to be structural and great. Now, countries around the world do want to cut deals with the United States because it's very costly not to do so, and I think that Secretary Treasury Bessent, and as well as President Trump, absolutely right about that. And we see that in particular you've got the Japanese delegation coming this week, plenty of things they want to do to ensure that the US and Japan have a more functional trading relationship going forward. Countries around the world are going to be looking to make deals relatively quickly, especially smaller, poorer countries.
But also, an even more structural change is that everyone is going to try to hedge. For decades now, we've been talking and increasingly about the dangers of having too much exposure to China. And increasingly, in the last five plus years, this idea of de-risking your investments, your exposures, away from China. That's now shifting to conversations about de-risking the United States, which is extremely hard to do, and nonetheless, increasingly urgent. And so, we see this happening all over the world right now. The EU and Latin America are looking to speed up and make much more likely their trade deal, EU-Mercosur, than it would've been before the United States slapped all of these tariffs because it creates alternatives for increased trade.
We see India now moving to fast track their trade relations and improve them with the United Kingdom, with Australia, with the EU, with many other countries as well. We see China, Xi Jinping, making a snap trip to Southeast Asia and wanting to ensure that they can expand their trade and ease the regulatory and the constraints around that. Xi Jinping first in Vietnam and signing 45 new agreements for economic cooperation with them. And they'll do a lot more. They'll try to do that with the Europeans, with the Global South. More broadly, Canada, trying to engage much more closely with the Europeans, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
How is the United States winning here? And the answer is I don't see it, and I don't see it not only because I think it's going to be very hard to convince countries that they need to stop hedging away from the US and just work on getting a better deal with the United States, but also because the US isn't only picking this fight. The US is picking all sorts of fights simultaneously. The US is at the same time hitting other countries on trade, it's also trying to make itself less attractive for tourists to come to the United States, make them worry more that they are going to be treated as they might in an emerging market when they come over. Their smartphones are going to be combed through and they might get detained, they might even get arrested. A lot of people are worried about that. You go on Reddit threads, all of my friends outside the United States coming to the US, they're increasingly concerned about that.
You've got fights with the United States on issues of democracy and the export of algorithms and disinformation that undermines democracies around the world. You see the US picking fights with other countries on territoriality, whether it's with Greenland and Denmark or it's Panama or it's Canada. You see the Americans looking to work with the Russians over the heads of their closest allies in the G7. So they're not just picking one fight, they're picking lots of simultaneous fights, and they're also picking fights domestically at home. The United States trying to undo checks and balances on the executive, on the president that undermines rule of law and makes the US a less attractive place long-term to do business, to live, to educate, you name it.
So for all of those reasons, this to me, and I hope I'm wrong, looks like the most extraordinary act of geopolitical self-harm that I've witnessed. It's Brexit, but on a global scale. And my friends, all I can tell you is buckle up and we'll be watching this going forward. That's it, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
US President Donald Trump attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 10, 2025.
Wednesday’s tariff respite is firmly in the rearview mirror, as China announced on Friday it was raising its duty on US imports to an astronomical 125%, taking effect Saturday. The announcement came less than 24 hours after the White House clarified that the new levy on Chinese imports would be 145%.
With US President Donald Trump’s collision course with the rest of the world on hold — the EU delayed its planned retaliatory levies Thursday — his fully-fledged trade war with China now has the spotlight to itself. Whereas he dropped tariffs on other countries on Wednesday, the commander-in-chief raised them on Beijing three times within one week, with the White House clarifying on Thursday that the rate is now 145%. After a brief delay, China has now responded in kind.
And just like that. These extraordinary levies are already affecting businesses. US firms have started canceling orders and some Chinese companies are putting staff on temporary leave. Trans-pacific shipping bookings have plunged. The March inflation figures released Thursday suggested that US price growth was easing, but the data was taken before the new China tariffs were implemented. With the levies accelerating skyward, it’s only a matter of time before US prices follow suit.
Markets suffer again. The laws of gravity applied to the markets Thursday — before China announced its latest retaliation — with stocks reversing again as the reality of Trump’s new world trade order set in for investors. The S&P 500 dropped 3.5%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,000 points, and the dollar lost ground against the major Asian currencies. On top of all this, Democrats are now questioning whether the president and his allies engaged in insider trading this week. Wednesday’s comeback looks like a fever dream.
The dust won’t settle. Trump acknowledged Thursday that there would be “transition problems” with the markets, while retaining his unfailing optimism that stock would turn around. The former “Apprentice” star added that he was open to extending the 90-day tariff pause on countries that aren’t China, but with Beijing further escalating the trade war, investors will remain unsettled.
A pair of wolf cubs explore their surroundings in Dallas, Texas, on April 7, 2025.
5: Five years ago, President Donald Trump suggested firing missiles into Mexico as a way to curtail drug cartels, according to former US Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir. While that never happened, the commander-in-chief is exploring something similar, but this time with drones. Plans are still in their early stages, but American forces have already started reconnaissance flights – with Mexico’s approval – in a bid to acquire more information about the cartels.
35: Last week’s special elections in Florida appear to have House Democrats all giddy, as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the House Democratic Caucus, released a list of 35 Republican-held seats that it plans to target in next year’s midterms. Some are realistic, others less so: Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) is on the list, despite winning reelection last year by 26 points.
98: At least 98 people have died and scores more were injured in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, after the roof of the Jet Set nightclub collapsed early Tuesday. The authorities reported that rescuers made 134 trips to the hospital, sometimes carrying two to three patients at a time due to the overwhelming number of casualties. One video captured the extent of the damage.
40: Environmental think-tank Ember found that electricity generated from low-carbon sources – solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear – exceeded 40% in 2024, the first time it has crossed this threshold since the 1940s. The fast rise of solar underscored this milestone, but the report also had some sobering news for environmentalists: Carbon dioxide emissions reached an all-time high last year.
35,000: The Trump administration’s expansive new tariffs are a sour fruit to swallow for South Africa’s citrus industry, as the new 31% duty on imports from the Rainbow Nation could spoil some 35,000 jobs, according to the Citrus Growers' Association of Southern Africa. Pretoria exports $100 million worth of citrus to the United States each year.
>10,000: Over 10,000 years since dire wolves went extinct, Biotech firm Colossal claims to have effectively brought them back from the dead. Using preserved DNA, Colossal scientists rewrote the code of a common gray wolf and used domestic dogs to birth three dire-like wolves, called Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. The species became a feature of public consciousness after they starred in the hit show “Game of Thrones.” Experts are skeptical about how closely these three pups resemble the dire wolf; one paleogeneticist suggested that these lupine creatures are grey wolves with dire wolf-like characteristics.
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on April 7, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
On Monday, President Donald Trump said that the US has been engaged in “direct” talks with Iran over its nuclear program and said that a meeting with “very high-level” officials is set for this Saturday. That would be a sharp break from previous US-Iran talks, which have occurred mostly through intermediaries.
But Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied the “direct” aspect of these talks,confirming that the US and Iranian negotiators will meet in Oman on Saturday, but that they would remain in separate rooms as Omani diplomats carry messages back and forth.
Whatever the format, Trump made it clear that he expects progress. “If the talks aren’t successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger,” he warned. “And I hate to say it, great danger, because they can’t have a nuclear weapon. You know, it’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all there is.”
While a breakthrough this weekend is unlikely, the talks suggest that both sides see an advantage in finding out whether a deal with the other side is possible.
There are other hopeful signs of a deal. In response to warnings from US officials of looming air attacks by American forces, the leaders of four of the largest Iran-backed militia groups operating in Iraq told Reuters on Monday that they were prepared to surrender their weapons to Iraqi government authorities. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has reportedly met with militia commanders and urged them to disarm, according to Iraqi state officials who requested anonymity.
The militia commanders also said that the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, their prime supplier of weapons and money, had agreed to let local group leaders inside Iraq decide how best to respond to Trump’s threats.
Though these militia moves are more likely a tactical retreat than a true surrender, any move to disarm would give the Trump administration a notable foreign-policy victory without an attack. The so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a group of about 10 heavily-armed Shia militias with a total of 50,000 fighters and access to heavy weapons, including long-range missiles, has attacked both Israeli and US military targets in the past.