If you thought the US-Iran war was effectively over, if you thought USMCA was safe, if you thought no more trade surprises, well think again:
Figure 1: panel a: Economic policy uncertainty; panel b: trade policy uncertainty; panel c: Geopolitical risk – actions; panel d: VIX, all standardized 1/1/2014-1/19/2025. Units are “standard deviations” from mean. Source: policyuncertainty.com for panel a, Iacoviello [1] [2] for panels b and c; CBOE via FRED for panel d.
Not really off topic – Data for Progress, a polling outfit with a progressive tilt, has released a report on 2026 swing voters:
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/7/9/midterms-swing-voter-report-1
The majority of those defined as swing voters supported the felon-in-chief in 2024 but no longer do. They now prefer Democrats over Republicans by a 12% margin*, with a whopping 46% undecided – ’cause they’re swing voters. The common view among election math heads is that, due to “structural advantages” (gerrymandering) Democrats need a 4% margin to win a majority in the House this year. A 12% margin would amount to a blue wave in the House, probably a majority in the Senate.
How best to win swing votes? Swing voters are populists; here are their top policies:
Higher taxes on the wealthy (28%)
Medicare for all (24%)
Ban AI in setting prices and wages based on personal data (Why just AI?) (21%)
Prevent utility companies from unreasonable price hikes (20%)
Raise the minimum wage to $15 (19%)
Stop selling weapons to Israel (17%)
Increase border security (17%)
Biggest objections to Democrats? Leadership is old, out of touch and not doing enough to lower prices. Democrats are the minority in both chambers of Congress, so have no power to lower prices, but then swing voters report “lower levels of political news consumption”, so they may not even know that.
*The report actually cites two different figures for this margin, the other being 7%. Not sure why.
Think last week’s weather was fun? Another heat dome is developing, with predictions of temperatures up to 110f in a few locations:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-forecasts/heat-dome-to-broil-western-us-ahead-of-north-american-monsoon/1908829
These domes are coincidental with the arrival of El Niño conditions. So here’s another interesting bit of news. A bit of research published in Nature predicts increasingly rapid and severe oscillation between El Niño and La Niña on the way to persistent El Niño conditions by the end of this century:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50156-9
Aside from the fun for us humans of oscillation between worsening weather extremes, I’m curious about species survival – species wild and domesticated – in such extreme and variable conditions. How will food crops and livestock do in such conditions? Forests and grasslands? Soil microfauna? Remember when climate-change cheerleaders told us warming would mean more crop yields? I don’t think those cheerleaders knew much about farming.
We screwed up.