Articles & Videos

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high, raising fears of another burst of extreme heat this summer. On June 21, temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time in 2023 and 2024, the […]

Principal looks to tap demand from Islamic investors in the Gulf and Asia for US private credit.

Donald Trump flew west on his new Air Force One, a $400 million gift from Qatar, dogged by questions about obscene profiteering in office, and his own enduring rage over a bestselling book.

Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered a slump last year and that investors in Trump’s crypto ventures who were not members of the Trump family lost $2.3 billion, according to a June 9 investigation by Tom Bergin of Reuters. It’s almost as if Trump’s ability to draw income from business ventures did not depend on those ventures being successful!A cynic might observe that Trump’s special treatment is no different from that of American chief executives in the private sector who are similarly insulated from failure. But Trump’s payday puts theirs in the shade. The only CEO whose compensation exceeded Trump’s last year was Elon Musk, who (for now) is a category of one. Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla last year was more than 15 times larger than the combined pay packages of the other 391 chief executives surveyed in late June by The Wall Street Journal. If we set Musk aside, the highest-paid chief executive in the Journal’s ranking was Shankh Mitra, chief executive of Welltower, “a real estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare.” Let’s leave for another day the ethics of harvesting a vast personal fortune from the physical and mental decline of one’s fellow human beings. My point here is that Mitra’s obscene pay package last year of $821 million was less than half of Trump’s $2.2 billion. Plus, I bet Mitra had to put in at least some actual work.I observed a year ago that Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is someone who makes his money through the possession of assets rather than the exertion of labor. Rentiers are capitalism’s nepo babies. Prior to Trump, the main rentier occupations were real estate and finance. Trump himself was a classic rentier capitalist, a rich kid who joined the family real estate business, exaggerated his success to a credulous tabloid press, and inherited $413 million from his more successful father. Trump moved the family business from dowdy apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens to luxury apartments and hotels in Manhattan and beyond, but many of these went bankrupt. In 2018, The Economist concluded Trump would have made more money had he been a more conventional rentier and invested daddy’s money in index funds. The rentier presidency is a much more lucrative proposition than rentier capitalism, and one with which index funds can’t possibly compete. Crucially, there is no index fund that lets you acquire a stake without investing money or labor. During the 2024 presidential campaign the Trump family acquired a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial and was granted 75 percent on net revenues from token sales. (The Trump family stake in the company, the less valuable part of this deal, has since fallen to 38 percent.) Trump did not pay for these privileges, yet last year he earned more than $594 million from them. Neither is there any evidence, according to Reuters’ Bergin, that Trump ever paid for his stakes in the crypto firms ALT5 Sigma, American Bitcoin, or Celebration Coins. This last alone netted Trump more than $636 million last year. The business press often notes these days that Trump has become less a real estate investor than a crypto investor. But to call Trump a crypto investor is a misnomer because investors, um, invest. Trump doesn’t invest. He receives. Nor should we call Trump a media investor, because Trump didn’t pay one cent to acquire his majority stake in Trump Media & Technology Group. This company owns Truth Social, on which Trump posts his late-night rants, and “has engaged,” Michael Hiltzik observed last March in The Los Angeles Times, “in a number of baroque financial transactions.” It works out well for Trump that he didn’t put money into Trump Media & Technology Group because it lost $715 million last year on revenue of $3.7 million. Yet Trump’s stake in this money-losing venture somehow remains, according to his latest filing, worth more than $50 million. Nice work if you can get it.The business model for a rentier presidency might puzzle the untutored, given the extensive losses involved. Why would anyone invest with the president of the United States? Some of them are just suckers, still bedazzled by the phony business-genius image he created during 14 TV seasons of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” But others derive value in other ways. The United Arab Emirates bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for about $500 million, then dropped another $2 billion on a World Liberty Financial stablecoin, and in return got an export ban lifted on AI computer chips. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao found various ways to boost World Liberty Financial, including giving the firm some software free of charge, and snagged a presidential pardon. Other examples of Trump auctioning off government policy are too numerous to mention, but Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, provided a pretty good overview in a recent floor speech (video and transcript). Often what’s paid to Trump is protection money against some non-specific future harm. That explains ABC’s $16 million settlement of a baseless defamation suit Trump brought against George Stephanopoulos, and CBS’s $16 million settlement of a baseless election-interference suit Trump brought over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. These were shakedowns for Trump’s presidential library. The ABC and CBS windfalls landed there, according to the financial disclosure, along with a $24.5 million settlement with Meta over Trump’s post-January 6 suspension from Facebook and Instagram, and a $22 million settlement with Google over Trump’s post-January 6 suspension from You Tube. People often speculate that Trump ran for president in 2024 in order to stay out of jail. That’s certainly possible. But I’m more inclined to think he did it to stay out of bankruptcy court. It’s hard to remember, but as recently as March 2024 bankruptcy looked like a real possibility for the ex-president, at least to me. At that time Trump was worth a mere $2.6 billion, according to Forbes, and his net-worth trajectory over the previous decade was downward. What a difference a presidential election makes. By March 2026 Forbes put Trump’s net worth at $6.5 billion. In 2024, according to last year’s financial disclosure, Trump earned more than $622 million. In 2025, according to this year’s financial disclosure, Trump earned more than $2.2 billion. How does a full-time politician increase his wealth by $4 billion over two years and his income by $1.6 billion over one? To ask the question is to answer it. And on top of everything else, he gets free housing.

Restricting legal immigration has been an all-consuming priority for President Donald Trump in both of his administrations. During his first term in office, Trump unsuccessfully attempted to rescind legal protections for migrants from several countries fleeing from violence, environmental disasters, and other extreme conditions. With the Supreme Court decision this week allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitians and Syrians, the future of the program as a whole is at risk.Removing TPS for approximately 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians is fundamentally a humanitarian issue, potentially forcing thousands to return to unsafe and even life-threatening circumstances in their home countries. But it will also have a dramatic economic effect within the United States, as the loss of workers and consumers will resonate in communities of all sizes throughout the country.“They’re workers, they’re taxpayers, they’re consumers, they’re community members. And removing them not only impacts the workforce but their families, and their employers, and the local economy,” said Steven Hubbard, senior data scientist at the American Immigration Council.Around 1.3 million people from 17 countries are protected through TPS, according to the latest data available from the Department of Homeland Security, as of March 31 last year. These designations are only in place for a finite period of time and must be extended by the government to continue. In 2025, the Trump administration terminated TPS for 10 countries, and four more countries have designations set to expire this year. The Supreme Court decision makes it much more likely that litigation challenging Trump’s efforts to end TPS for other countries will be successful. “Employers will have to let those people go if they want to stay on the right side of the law, and in theory that group of people is expected to leave the country,” said Tara Watson, director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institute. “I don’t think most of them will, unless they are apprehended by [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but it’s going to have a pretty big impact just because of the magnitude of the change.”The impact of the Supreme Court’s decision could be felt almost immediately. Employers will have to fire Haitian and Syrian laborers who are only authorized to work through TPS. The loss of these protections could have a profound effect on the health care industry, and specifically in elder and home care, which employs a large number of Haitian workers. The health care industry is facing an ongoing labor shortage, meaning that it may be difficult to replace the jobs lost because of the termination of this program. TPS individuals also participate in construction, agriculture, hospitality, and retail industries in large numbers, and have a higher rate of workforce participation than U.S.-born individuals.“Many have been living and working in the United States for years, and even probably for decades,” said Hubbard. If employers lose workers who may have years of experience in a particular field, it could be difficult to find replacements, he added.A report by the American Immigration Council found that TPS individuals paid $10.3 billion in state and local taxes in 2021. Through their taxed income, they help bolster programs from which they themselves cannot benefit, including Social Security, Medicare, and safety net supports for low-income households. Since 2001, TPS individuals have contributed $20 billion to Social Security, according to the criminal justice and immigration advocacy organization FWD.us. The primary Social Security fund is facing insolvency by the end of 2032, according to an updated estimate from the fund’s trustees based in part on a projected decrease in immigration.“They aren’t consuming as much in public benefits as people sometimes think, and are contributing fiscally to the economy,” Watson said about TPS holders. “Taking away this pipeline of resources for [Social Security] seems like a mistake at this particular moment.”Then there are the knock-on effects for local economies. The surge in immigration enforcement operations in several cities in 2025 resulted in more job losses than they would have seen otherwise, according to the Brookings Institute. This included jobs in the arts and entertainment industries, which have fewer immigrant workers than other sectors. This could be an indication of how the loss of TPS holders could also affect even seemingly tangential industries.Moreover, according to estimates from FWD.us, TPS holders contribute $29 billion annually to the American economy overall. In 2021, TPS holders had $8 billion in spending power, which can be used for necessities such as groceries and rent. The economic impact was especially great in Florida, California, Texas, and New York, where the bulk of TPS holders are concentrated; in the first three states, this population had more than $1.1 billion in spending power. The influx of TPS individuals in smaller cities, such as Springfield, Ohio, has bolstered local economies.“If you think about communities—they require a tax base, they require people having income, because once they have income they spend it locally,” Hubbard said. “When that’s taken away, that can have negative consequences for many communities.”TPS individuals have few and complicated pathways for staying in the U.S. legally, and the Supreme Court has rubber-stamped many of Trump’s efforts to limit methods for migrants to receive asylum or permanent residence. Many of them also live in households with U.S. citizen residents; according to FWD.us, TPS holders live with U.S.-born children. The consequences for this younger generation could be severe, particularly if their households are losing a wage earner.“Their parents went from having regular formal sector jobs to not having those jobs and being at risk of deportation, so that’s going to affect a lot of children,” said Watson.

News that the president made more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency while in office has emboldened Senate Democrats.

¿Cómo pueden los movimientos enfrentarse al capitalismo digital, que ha alcanzado un grado de avance tecnológico sin precedentes? Rezgar Akrawi , July 1, 2026

The future of the Strait of Hormuz is hanging over the indirect talks in Qatar this week.

The shipments mark a shift in the countries’ energy dynamic.