US trade deficit fell to $61.6B in April, the lowest since Sept. 2023. Imports fell 16%, with consumer goods down 32%, driven by a $26B drop in pharmaceutical products. Exports rose 3% to a record $289.4B, possibly due to countries buying before retaliatory measures.
Private-equity firms are sitting on a record 29,000 companies worth $3.6 trillion, half of which they have owned for five years or more.
Private-equity funds have been holding on to past investments longer, drying up cash flow back to investors in those funds. This hinders the deployment of funds for new deals.
Publicly held federal debt stands at about $29 trillion, nearly double the level when Trump signed his original tax cut in 2017.
Among metropolitan areas especially reliant on higher education, three-quarters of them suffered weaker economic growth between 2011 and 2023 than the U.S. as a whole. In the prior decade, most of these same metro areas grew faster than the nation did.
The 401(k) giant Empower will start allowing private credit, equity and real estate in some of the accounts it administers later this year. The firm is expected to announce Wednesday that it has joined with seven firms to offer these investments.
Coinbase Global has agreed to acquire Deribit, the world’s biggest trading platform for bitcoin and ether options, for roughly $2.9 billion.
The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) revealed the hiring rate ended March at 3.4%. When excluding the pandemic, the hiring rate is hovering near its lowest levels of the past decade.
A household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars. In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average $450,000 per household, per year.
