Business

Yesterday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the US economy contracted by 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2022, the first quarterly drop in GDP since the pandemic hit in 2020. That’s an alarming-seeming but ultimately misleading number; most of it is accounted for by changes in international trade (imports, which reduce GDP numbers, rose as businesses knew war in Ukraine was coming) and the shrinking of inventories held by businesses as consumers bought them up. “Final sales to domestic purchasers,”…

Two events occurred Monday night — one historic, the other rather insignificant — which placed an unflattering spotlight on the Supreme Court of the United States. The historic event was that Politico published an unprecedented leak of a draft majority opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, which would overrule Roe v. Wade and permit state lawmakers to ban abortion in its entirety in the US. Alito’s draft opinion is not the Court’s final word on this case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but the leaked opinion…