By Ellen Brown A Jan. 17 article on Quartz Markets by Catherine Baab reports that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America returned nearly all of their 2025 profits to shareholders. Goldman Sachs returned $16.78 billion on $17.18 billion in earnings, meaning 97.7% of its earnings went to shareholders. Wells Fargo, […]
President Donald Trump’s economic adviser was supposed to step down from the central bank at week’s end. That’s not going to happen.
Japanese and US authorities could intervene after a sharp slide in the yen.
US consumer confidence plummeted this month to its lowest level since 2014, as Americans grew more anxious about high prices and a cooling job market.
High debt levels raise questions about the ability to weather future crises, and risks causing market turbulence
Ambassador David Perdue suggested business ties between the world’s two biggest economies are on more solid ground after their trade war truce last fall.
President Donald Trump decided to abandon regulations protecting elderly residents, after nursing home executives poured millions into a pro-Trump super PAC, The New York Times reported Tuesday. In early December, the Department of Health and Human Services repealed a federal provision requiring nursing homes to increase staffing levels in order to reduce the rates of resident neglect. In a statement, HHS claimed that new staffing rules “disproportionately burdened facilities.”That decision can be traced back to millions of dollars directed toward one of Trump’s favorite super PACs, a donation that won a group of nursing home executives a meeting with the president. After Trump’s gargantuan budget bill won nursing home companies a 10-year moratorium on the Biden-era staffing requirement, a group of industry executives wanted to try to get the rule permanently revoked—and knew exactly how to get the president’s attention. Beginning in August 2025, nursing home executives donated a total of roughly $4.8 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC run by the president’s allies, according to campaign finance disclosures. Later that month, a group of the largest donors joined industry lobbyists at Trump’s golf club outside of Washington, D.C., in order to plead their case to the president himself. The group of executives “urged the president to formally repeal the harmful minimum staffing mandate, which would have surely forced providers throughout the country to close their doors to new residents—or possibly close their doors altogether,” according to Bill Weisberg, the founder and chief executive of Saber Healthcare Group, who recounted the meeting in a message to the Times.Less than a month later, federal prosecutors stopped defending the rule from legal challenges mounted by nursing home companies, and in December, they scrapped the rule entirely. A White House spokesperson dismissed the claims of corruption, saying that repealing the rule was a “commonsense, anti-red tape policy decision.”Some of the biggest donors to MAGA Inc. in August 2025 included Pruitt Health Corporation, which operates more than 100 eldercare facilities across the southeast United States. Pruitt paid a whopping $750,000 to the super PAC.Several other companies and executives donated $100,000, including Reliance Health Care Inc., which operates more than two dozen locations across Arkansas and Missouri; Northshore Health, which operates more than 70 facilities across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and North Dakota; and Teddy Price, the administrator of Central Management, which operates 21 nursing facilities across Louisiana.There is perhaps reason to believe that even more corruption took place through MAGA Inc., which raked in an unprecedented $198.9 million between Trump’s election and June 2025—far too early to be tied to any upcoming election cycle. The super PAC was previously run by Taylor Budowich, who went on to join Trump’s White House communications team.