Tag: Trump Presidency

Trading surge hits markets minutes before Trump’s Iran announcement
S&P 500 futures and crude oil contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) at approximately 6:50 a.m. ET Monday—mere minutes before President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States and Iran had held “very good and productive conversations” toward resolving hostilities in the Middle East.
The timing has raised eyebrows across trading desks and prompted quiet scrutiny from market participants, even as the White House forcefully denies any impropriety.
According to Bloomberg data reviewed by multiple outlets, roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures contracts traded in a single minute around 6:50 a.m., representing a notional value of approximately $580 million.
At virtually the same instant, S&P 500 e-mini futures recorded an isolated burst of activity that stood out against an otherwise subdued pre-market session. Both oil and equity futures then moved dramatically once Trump’s post appeared at 7:05 a.m.

WTI crude plunged nearly 12% to around $83–$88 per barrel by the close, while Brent fell below $100 for the first time since early March. S&P 500 futures, by contrast, jumped more than 2.5% in the minutes following the announcement, reflecting investor relief that planned U.S. strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure had been postponed for five days.

The volume anomalies occurred during thin early-morning liquidity, when even modest order flow can create noticeable spikes. Still, veteran traders described the coordinated moves—aggressive selling or shorting of oil while buying equity futures—as unusually prescient.
“It’s hard to prove causality… but you have to wonder who would have been relatively aggressive at selling futures at that point, 15 minutes before Trump’s post,” one senior market strategist at a major U.S. broker told the Financial Times. Another hedge-fund portfolio manager with 25 years of experience called the pattern “really abnormal” for a quiet Monday morning with no scheduled data releases or Fed speakers.

The SEC and CME Group declined to comment. White House spokesperson Kush Desai rejected any suggestion of insider activity, stating: “The only focus of President Trump and Trump administration officials is doing what’s best for the American people… any implication that officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.”
Markets React to De-Escalation — For Now
Trump’s Truth Social post described “productive conversations” with Iran and ordered the postponement of strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days, subject to continued talks. Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, quickly denied that any negotiations were underway, calling the claim “fake news” designed to manipulate oil and financial markets.

Oil prices, which had climbed aggressively in recent sessions on fears of supply disruption through the Strait of Hormuz, reversed sharply. WTI settled down roughly 10–12% at $83–$88 per barrel, while Brent dropped 11–13% to just under $100. European natural gas (TTF) also fell sharply.
The moves provided temporary relief to risk assets but highlighted how fragile sentiment remains. Morgan Stanley analysts warned that a sustained rise to $120 per barrel oil could shave 20–30 basis points off Asian GDP growth and force rate hikes in several emerging economies later this year.
A Pattern of Well-Timed Trades?
This is not the first instance of unusually prescient trading ahead of major Trump administration announcements in recent months. Hedge funds and energy consultants have privately noted several large block trades that appeared well-timed relative to official statements on Iran and Venezuela.
While such patterns are difficult to prove as improper without concrete evidence, they have generated “a level of frustration” among institutional investors, according to one portfolio manager.
Algorithmic and macro strategies can produce rapid cross-asset flows, especially in thin pre-market hours, but the scale and precision of Monday’s moves—selling oil and buying equities just before a de-escalation announcement—left many questioning whether non-public information circulated.
Political and Market Context
The episode unfolds against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical tension and domestic political pressure on the Trump administration’s aggressive posture toward Iran. While Trump framed the postponement as a sign of progress, critics argue the administration’s brinkmanship has already inflicted economic pain through elevated energy prices and market volatility.
For now, the market appears to be pricing in cautious optimism that a wider conflict can be avoided. Yet with Iran denying talks and both sides continuing information operations, the “fog of war” remains thick.
Investors would be wise to treat headline-driven moves with skepticism—especially when large, well-timed trades precede them.
March 23, 2026
March 27 could be make-or-break day for U.S. travelers amid Government shutdown
The ongoing partial government shutdown has sparked long wait times at many airports around the country — and it could get much worse in a week, as Transportation Security Administration workers look set to miss another paycheck on March 27.
At the same time, the threat of even more delays at airport security checkpoints just might push Democratic and Republican lawmakers into making a funding deal that ends the shutdown, which began Feb. 14 and is hitting only the Department of Homeland Security. The TSA is a part of that agency.
U.S. lawmakers have March 27 circled on their calendars for another reason as well: It’s the last date that both chambers of Congress are slated to be in session in Washington before starting a two-week break.
It’s possible top lawmakers won’t let Congress leave town without a funding deal. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, suggested exactly that on Thursday. “I can’t see us taking a break here in the next week if DHS isn’t funded,” Thune told reporters.
The problems with airport security come as spring-break season has been hitting or is nearing for universities and school systems across the country, and as many families plan to travel for Easter or Passover.
Key Democratic and Republican senators huddled with DHS border czar Tom Homan on Thursday, but the meeting didn’t produce a deal. Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state told reporters that she was glad that the White House took part in the meeting, but said her party and the GOP were still “a long ways apart.”
Prediction markets aren’t forecasting that the DHS shutdown will end around March 27. Polymarket recently was giving a 72% chance that it would be over after March 31. (Polymarket has a business partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of MarketWatch.)
Transportation chief sees airports closing
TSA agents who run security checkpoints at airports have been skipping work because they’re missing out on paychecks while still being required to report for duty. That has led to longer-than-expected security lines at a number of busy airports, such as those in Atlanta and Houston, albeit not at all airports.
TSA workers got a partial paycheck on their Feb. 27 payday, then they missed their first full paycheck on March 13. They could miss another full paycheck on March 27.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned in a CNBC interview on Thursday that the next missed paycheck could lead to many more TSA agents not coming to work.
“They’re about to miss another payment. This is going to look like child’s play, what’s happening right now,” Duffy said. “You’re going to see small airports, I believe, shut down. You’re going to see extensive lines.”
About 10% of TSA employees have called out of work, Duffy said Thursday, which is five times the normal callout rate. “It’s getting worse day by day,” he said, adding that TSA agents’ starting salaries are about $45,000 to $55,000 a year.
As a result of staffing shortages, passengers have faced TSA wait times stretching for nearly three hours at certain airports. At points during the shutdown, New Orleans’ main airport encouraged travelers to get to the airport three hours before their flight, while passengers in Houston were advised to arrive as many as five hours early.
On Friday morning, LaGuardia Airport in New York urged travelers to get to the airport early due to long security wait times. The airport has “deployed additional customer-care staff into terminals to help manage queues, assist passengers and keep people moving as efficiently as possible,” the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates New York City-area airports, told MarketWatch.
National deployment officers from the TSA were deployed to Houston’s Hobby Airport on March 10, and they continue to assist with staffing shortages as of Friday afternoon, an airport spokesperson confirmed.
The TSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Travel Association and many industry partners, including airlines and hotel operators, sent a letter to the top four U.S. lawmakers on Thursday calling for pay for TSA agents. “Forcing these dedicated officers to work without pay — yet again— is not only unfair, it’s reckless. The security of travelers and the country is at stake,” the letter said.
What caused this partial shutdown
The latest partial government shutdown has hit because Democrats and Republicans in Washington remain at odds over potential reforms to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement practices. Only the Department of Homeland Security is getting left high and dry, but that’s still significant given its arms include the TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard.
A closure that ran from Jan. 31 through Feb. 3 ended thanks to a bipartisan spending package that provided funding only through Feb. 13 for DHS — which manages Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE — while negotiations continued over the reforms.
ICE and Customs and Border Protection are expected to weather the partial shutdown without much trouble. That’s because they scored big increases in funding in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the giant Republican tax and spending law.
Heightened calls for reforms to ICE and CBP practices come after the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal agents in January.
Investors usually don’t have to worry that much about partial government shutdowns, as U.S. stocks typically aren’t hurt by them. Equities have been dropping this month, but that’s largely been blamed on soaring oil prices due to the conflict with Iran. The S&P 500 ended up gaining 2.4% and hitting new records during last fall’s record-breaking government shutdown, which lasted 43 days.
March 22, 2026
Iran threatens to target Middle East energy and water infrastructure amid U.S. escalation warning
Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.
As Iranian missiles struck two southern Israeli cities overnight, injuring dozens of people, and Tehran deployed long-range missiles for the first time, the developments signalled a dangerous potential escalation of the war, now in its fourth week, with both sides threatening facilities relied on by millions of people.

The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said on Sunday that vital infrastructure in the region – including energy and desalination facilities – would be considered a legitimate target and would be “irreversibly destroyed” if his country’s own infrastructure was attacked.
Amnesty International said this month there was a substantial risk that attacks on systems providing essential services such as electricity, heating and running water would violate international law and “in some cases could amount to war crimes” because of the potential for “vast, predictable, and devastating civilian harm”.
The Iranian military’s operational command headquarters, Khatam al-Anbiya, said Iran would strike “all energy, information technology and desalination infrastructure” belonging to the US and Israel in the region.
The statement also said that if Trump’s threat was carried out, the strait of Hormuz would be “completely closed, and will not be reopened until our destroyed power plants are rebuilt”.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said “threats and terror” were “only strengthening Iranian unity”, while the “illusion of erasing Iran from the map” showed “desperation against the will of a history-making nation”.

Guardian graphic. Source: Global Water Intelligence, desaldata.com
The US president said on Saturday that he was giving Iran 48 hours – until shortly before midnight GMT on Monday – to open the strait of Hormuz, a vital pathway for the world’s oil flows, or the US would “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants “starting with the biggest one first”.
The US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, defended Trump’s threat on Sunday, insisting that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controlled much of the country’s infrastructure and used it to power its war effort.
He said Trump would start by destroying one of Iran’s largest power plants, but did not identify it. “There are gas-fired thermal power plants and other type of plants,” and “the president is not messing around”, he said.
A No 10 spokesperson said Keir Starmer spoke to Trump on Sunday evening about the need to reopen the strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s representative to the International Maritime Organisation, Ali Mousavi, said on Sunday that the strait was open to all shipping except vessels linked to “Iran’s enemies”, with passage possible by coordinating security arrangements with Tehran.
Iranian attacks have in effect closed the narrow strait, which carries about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies, causing the world’s worst oil crisis since the 1970s and sending European gas prices surging by as much as 35% last week.
Only a relatively small number of vessels, estimated at about 5% of the prewar volume, from countries that Tehran considers friendly – including China, India and Pakistan – have been allowed to pass.

A Tehran billboard featuring a portrait of the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (AFP/Getty Images)
More than 2,000 people have been killed in Iran since 28 February, when the US and Israel began their attacks, and Tehran in turn has struck targets in Israel and the Gulf states. Lebanon was drawn in after Iran-backed Hezbollah attacked Israel.
Air raid sirens sounded across Israel from the early hours of Sunday morning, warning of incoming missiles from Iran after scores of people were injured overnight in two separate attacks on the southern towns of Arad and Dimona.
The Israeli army said on Sunday morning that it would strike Tehran in retaliation. The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said during a visit to Arad that senior IRGC commanders would be pursued.
“We’re going after the regime. We’re going after the IRGC, this criminal gang,” he said. “We’re going after them personally, their leaders, their installations, their economic assets.”
The Iranian health ministry spokesperson, Hossein Kermanpour, said patients had been evacuated from the Imam Ali hospital in the south-west city of Andimeshk on Sunday after an airstrike a day earlier.

Bomb damage in Arad, Israel. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Israel’s military said it had not been able to intercept the missiles that hit Dimona and Arad, the nearest large towns to the country’s nuclear centre in the Negev desert, which houses what is widely believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal.
Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons, insisting that the site is for research. The strikes marked the first time that Iranian missiles had penetrated Israel’s air defence systems in the area.

The strikes wounded about 200 people, including a 12-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, both reported to be in a serious condition. The Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 reported early indications of possible deaths but there was no official confirmation.

Iran said the attacks had been launched in response to a strike on its main nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz on Saturday. Israel denied responsibility for the attack and the Pentagon declined to comment.
In Tel Aviv, 15 more people were injured on Sunday morning in a separate incident involving a cluster bomb. The attacks are adding to mounting pressure on Israel’s air defence systems as Iranian strikes increasingly test their limits.
The World Health Organization said that the war was at a “perilous stage” and called for restraint. “Attacks targeting nuclear sites create an escalating threat to public health and environmental safety,” the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said.
Tehran also fired long-range missiles for the first time on Saturday, the Israeli military chief, Eyal Zamir, said. Two ballistic missiles with a range of 2,500 miles (4,000km) were fired at the US-British Indian Ocean military base at Diego Garcia, he said.

Guardian graphic
The British cabinet minister Steve Reed said one missile had fallen short and the other had been intercepted. There was no assessment backing claims that Iran was planning to strike Europe, he said.
The Israel Defense Forces had said Iran had missiles that could reach London, Paris or Berlin, but Reed said he was not aware of any assessment at all that Iran was even trying to target Europe, “let alone that they could if they tried”.
He said in a separate interview that Trump had been “speaking for himself” when he threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants.
Analysts said Trump’s threat had placed “a 48-hour ticking timebomb of elevated uncertainty” over energy and financial markets, with a “black Monday” of plunging stock markets and surging energy prices looming unless it was rowed back.

Guardian graphic
At least six overnight attacks targeted a US diplomatic and logistics centre at Baghdad airport, Iraqi officials said, while Saudi Arabia said three missiles had been detected over Riyadh. The UAE said it had responded to Iranian missile and drone attacks.
In southern Lebanon, Israel said its military had raided Hezbollah sites on Sunday and killed 10 of the group’s fighters. It said it was expanding its ground campaign in Lebanon, warning of a lengthy operation. Hezbollah said it had attacked several border areas in northern Israel. One person was killed in an Israeli kibbutz, emergency services said.
At least 10 Palestinians were injured on Sunday night in attacks in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers who rampaged through nearby villages after holding a funeral for a settler killed in a car crash a night earlier.
Videos obtained by the Associated Press appeared to show cars and homes set ablaze as army flares lit up the sky near the village east of Nablus and next to the Israeli settlement of Elon Moreh.
Three Turkish nationals, including a soldier, and three Qatari service personnel were killed when a helicopter crashed in Qatar’s territorial waters, the country’s defence ministry said on Sunday.
According to an academic analysis seen by Reuters, an interceptor missile that injured dozens of civilians in Bahrain 10 days into the war was probably fired by a US-operated Patriot air defence battery.
Manama and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack for the explosion on 9 March, which Bahrain has said injured 32 people including children, some of them seriously.
March 22, 2026
China positions itself as ‘Harbour of Stability’ to global CEOs amid U.S.–Iran tensions
China sought to woo global chief executives including Apple’s Tim Cook, UBS’s Sergio Ermotti and HSBC’s Georges Elhedery in Beijing on Sunday, touting the country’s safety and reliability in stark contrast to a US bogged down in war with Iran.
Premier Li Qiang told more than 70 chief executives gathered in the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse for the government’s annual Davos-style forum that the world’s second-largest economy offered an unmatched supply chain and a predictable commercial environment.
The country was committed to being a “cornerstone of certainty” and a “harbour of stability” in the face of rising trade protectionism and upheaval in the rules-based international order, said Li.
“China will unswervingly promote high-level opening up to the outside, import more high-quality foreign goods and work with all parties to promote the optimised and balanced development of trade, jointly expanding the global economic and trade pie,” he told the audience.
The conference, the China Development Forum, is held every year in late March after the meeting of the country’s rubber-stamp parliament. It acts as the leadership’s vehicle for pressing its talking points on global CEOs.
This year, Beijing is selling its latest five-year economic plan to 2030 as an opportunity for foreign investment.

“Li didn’t name America . . . but the message is clear that China is now safer, more reliable and stable, and more focused on economic development rather than conflicts,” said George Chen, a partner at the Asia Group consultancy who was present at the meeting.

The conference comes amid widening concern over China’s huge trade surplus, which hit a record $1.2tn last year. In Europe, there are worries that low-cost Chinese imports are eliminating jobs.

The five-year plan largely doubles down on China’s manufacturing-oriented high-tech industrial policy, raising fears of an even greater shock to western factories.

People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng defended the country’s exports in a speech on Sunday about global economic “rebalancing”.

Pan rejected the claim that China’s competitiveness was a result of government subsidies, attributing it to economic reforms, the size of its domestic market and the strength of its supply chains and research.

Without naming the US, he described some countries’ persistent trade deficits as being the result of “an international monetary system dominated by a single sovereign currency”.

Jeanine Pirro takes aim at the ruling by James Boasberg on Friday. (Reuters)
Other business leaders on the invitee list this year include Siemens’ Roland Busch, Volkswagen’s Oliver Blume, SK Hynix’s Kwak Noh-jung, Nestlé’s Philipp Navratil, Mercedes-Benz’s Ola Källenius, KKR’s Joseph Bae, Cargill’s Brian Sikes, Standard Chartered’s Bill Winters and Boston Consulting Group’s Christoph Schweizer.

US executives were well represented this year, accounting for 45 per cent of invitees, according to an analysis by Han Shen Lin of the Asia Group. Europeans made up 36 per cent with the remainder from Asia, Australia and elsewhere.

Financial services dominated, accounting for about 22 per cent of invitees, while those from the energy sector were only about 4 per cent.

Apple chief executive Cook delivered a speech after Li on opportunities in education and other areas in China.
Unlike in the previous two forums, President Xi Jinping is not expected to meet top executives this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Asia Group’s Chen said Li’s speech was the most confident he had seen in recent years, though the premier refrained from directly criticising US President Donald Trump.

Trump, who recently postponed a meeting expected on April 1 with Xi in Beijing, is still widely expected to be planning a visit this year.

On Saturday evening, vice-premier He Lifeng, the economic tsar running trade negotiations with the US, held a dinner with a group of mostly European executives to tout the country’s five-year plan.

The executives mostly praised China and talked up their own companies, said one of the people present at the dinner, but there was some discussion of Chinese overcapacity and the risks for European industry.
March 21, 2026
Oil price surge from Iran war threatens US growth and fuels inflation, economists warn
Soaring oil prices threaten to hit US growth, worsen inflation and keep the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates, top economists have warned ahead of the central bank’s first rate decision since the Iran war began.
US oil prices have jumped almost 50 per cent since the US and Israel struck Iran at the end of last month to about $95 a barrel, sending the costs of petrol and diesel at the pump surging higher.
The majority of academic economists polled by the Clark Center for Global Markets on behalf of the Financial Times said that, if oil prices were to remain at $100 a barrel, slightly above their current level, US growth will decline markedly.
Tehran has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows, in retaliation for the strikes on Iran. The disruption has caused a global supply crunch and is hitting US consumers and businesses despite the US’s role as a major energy producer.

“The key question is the extent and duration of a blockage of the Strait of Hormuz,” said James Hamilton, professor at University of California San Diego and an energy market expert. “If it goes on for a month or so, then this is a very big deal. And I think it would lead to a significant downward revision in the kind of growth we’re expecting for this year.”
Some 68 per cent of respondents anticipated a significant hit to GDP growth this year of at least 0.25 to 0.5 percentage points should oil stay at $100 for the rest of 2026, compared with a scenario with $75 oil. Just 2 per cent thought the economic impact of high oil prices would be positive, with the rest expecting little to no impact in either direction.
The US economy expanded at a 0.7 per cent annualised clip in the final quarter of 2025, from the previous quarter’s 4.4 per cent growth rate.

Panellists’ growth warnings contrast with White House officials, who say the conflict will do little harm to the prospects of the world’s largest economy.

“If [the war] were to be extended, it wouldn’t really disrupt the US economy very much at all,” said Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, on Tuesday.

“It would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about — if that continued — what we’d have to do about that, but that’s really the last of our concerns right now because we’re very confident this thing is going ahead of schedule,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

The Trump administration’s war on Iran has exacerbated the challenges facing Fed officials, who are set to make their latest policy decision on Wednesday.

Even before the conflict began, the central bank was facing a delicate balancing act over whether to prioritise its fight against inflation or the latest signs of a slowdown in the US labour market.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February while corporate America has laid off tens of thousands of workers this year.
At the same time, the jump in petrol and diesel costs — now at the highest levels in either of President Donald Trump’s White House terms — risks undermining the American public’s faith in the central bank’s commitment to stamp out inflation.

Headline personal consumption expenditures inflation (PCE) is 2.8 per cent and has been above the 2 per cent level the Fed targets since early 2021.

If oil stays near $100 for a prolonged period, it would lead to a rise in headline PCE inflation of at least 0.25 to 0.5 percentage points by the end of the year, according to more than 80 per cent of those polled.

The 47 economists — surveyed quarterly by the Clark Center, part of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business — also say the Fed will now need to wait longer before core PCE inflation falls to its 2 per cent goal. That category excludes food and energy prices.

Six in 10 participants in the survey now expect it will take until at least the first half of 2028 before price pressures return to 2 per cent — up from just under half in December.

Fed watchers widely expect the central bank to hold the federal funds target range at 3.5 per cent to 3.75 per cent on Wednesday. Markets are betting the oil price rise has pushed the next cut back until the spring of next year, after three quarter-point cuts in 2025.
Fed officials will also publish their latest economic and rate projections, known as “dot plots”, later on Wednesday.

The FT panel in the latest survey was less sure US benchmark borrowing costs would end the year lower than their current level. Roughly a third said they now expected no cuts for the duration of 2026, compared with 15 per cent in December.

“My prediction right now is that you’re not going to see much action [from the Fed] for a while,” said Stephen Cecchetti, a Brandeis University professor. “The uncertainty is so high that you have to wait. I would be waiting. But I would be unhappy that I had to start from here.”
March 20, 2026
Trump praises Japan’s support in Iran war during White House meeting with PM Sanae Takaichi
In an apparent awkward moment at the Oval Office on Thursday stateside, U.S. President Donald Trump referenced Pearl Harbor in his first meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi after her landslide electoral victory.
When asked by a Japanese reporter on why the U.S. did not inform allies such as Japan before carrying out the attacks against Iran on Feb. 28, the U.S. president said it was to maintain the element of surprise.
“Who knows better about surprise than Japan … Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
Trump was referencing the surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1941, which saw the deaths of over 2,400 personnel and drew the U.S. into World War II.
Takaichi appeared to draw a deep breath and lean back in her seat with an uneasy expression.
“Who knows better about surprise than Japan … Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
Donald Trump U.S. President
Trump said that the surprise attack on Iran had helped the U.S., adding that it “knocked out 50% of what we anticipated” in the country within the first two days.
During the meeting, Trump praised Japan for “stepping up” to assist in efforts to secure the Strait of Hormuz, “unlike NATO.“
Before the meeting, Japan, as well as Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands had released a joint statement expressing their readiness to “contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait.”
Trump had called on Japan and other countries to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, but Takaichi had reportedly said Monday that there were no plans to dispatch naval vessels to escort boats in the Middle East.
Her office also said in a post on X that there was “no specific request from the United States to Japan for the dispatch of vessels.”
Japan’s prime minister on Tuesday said that the government was considering what could be done within the framework of the country’s law. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are governed by its pacifist constitution, that renounces war and the threat or use of force for settling international disputes.
Trump had taken aim at NATO allies earlier this week, saying that the alliance was “making a very foolish mistake” by not getting involved in the war.
In response, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius reportedly said on Monday that “This is not our war, we have not started it,” a stance that was also adopted by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Subsequently, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday that “we have declared that as long as the war continues, we will not participate in ensuring freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, for example, by military means,” according to Reuters.
March 19, 2026
Donald Trump White House tries to sell war and death as a game
The White House has found a new recruit to sell the US war on Iran to an increasingly sceptical American public: SpongeBob SquarePants.
In a video posted by the White House on X, a clip of the cartoon character says, “do you want to see me do it again?” as unclassified footage of US missiles blowing up Iranian jets and trucks appears. The caption reads: “Will not stop until the objectives are met. Unrelenting. Unapologetic.”
An unlikely warmonger, SpongeBob SquarePants is just one of the internet memes harnessed by US officials in a propaganda campaign that has drawn heavily on video games, action movies and cartoons to celebrate American military prowess in Iran.
Will not stop until the objectives are met.

Unrelenting. Unapologetic. 🔁 pic.twitter.com/iM9fqjn1zc
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 5, 2026

Donald Trump’s White House has deployed a galaxy of pop-culture icons to hype up American martial virtues and divert attention from the growing human and economic devastation of the war.
“This is a memification and a gamification of war,” said Nick Cull, a historian of propaganda at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “It’s an appalling way to represent conflict.”
It is unclear how effective it’s been. An Ipsos poll this month found only 29 per cent of Americans approved of the US strikes in Iran and 43 per cent disapproved.
But Roger Stahl, professor of communications studies at the University of Georgia, said the purpose of the videos wasn’t necessarily to win over voters unconvinced about the wisdom of going to war against Iran.
“It’s to galvanise the Maga base with a kind of thrilling, easy-to-digest version of that conflict that appeals to the base instincts of gamers and people who think that war is just a series of one-liners from Hollywood,” he said. “But to probably 70 per cent of the population, a good majority at least, it’s just shocking.”
Perhaps the most striking video put out by the White House depicts the war as a Nintendo game, mixing footage of missile strikes with images from Wii Sports.
To a sprightly soundtrack, a cartoon player is shown scoring a bullseye, hitting a hole in one and bowling a strike, with each shot cutting to footage of missile strikes in Iran. An announcer bellows sporting clichés: “It’s Out of the Park!” “Slam Dunk!” and “Knockout!”
Another video along the same lines, entitled “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, includes clips from Top Gun, Braveheart, Breaking Bad and the anime Dragon Ball Z, and ends with a voiceover saying “flawless victory”, lifted from the video game Mortal Kombat.
White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr reposted the clip with the caption “Wake up, Daddy’s Home”.
“They’re like ads for a knock-off Tom Cruise movie,” said Peter Loge, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.
“It hides the gruesome realities of conflict and war,” he went on. “You don’t feel the grief, you never see the aftermath of the conflict or the violence.”
The Justice video has drawn angry responses from some in Hollywood. Director and actor Ben Stiller, whose film Tropic Thunder was featured in the montage, demanded the White House remove the clip.
“We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine,” he wrote on X. “War is not a movie.”
Even former members of the military have expressed disgust. “Sorry to be Debbie downer,” Connor Crehan, an Iraq war veteran and BarStool Sports host, wrote on X. “War isn’t a video game. The consequences of war are final. I wish we didn’t treat it with such a cavalier approach.”
The White House denied that it was trying to reduce the war to a game. “The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States Military’s incredible success,” said spokeswoman Anna Kelly.
“But the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time.”
The videos mark a big departure from the high moral tone normally adopted by US administrations entering into a global conflict.
When President Woodrow Wilson took the US into the first world war, he famously argued that “the world must be made safe for democracy”. In framing Operation Desert Storm in 1990, George HW Bush hailed the prospect of a “new world order” emerging from “these troubled times”.
“Traditionally the US government has spoken about war as something regrettable and necessary for a carefully considered diplomatic objective,” said Cull.
“They’ve sought to carry the American public with them . . . and persuade the world that it is in the best interests of humanity. And I don’t think those sorts of priorities are detectable in [Trump’s] messaging here.”
On the contrary, the videos seem squarely aimed at the president’s core supporters, especially the young men who voted for him in huge numbers in the 2024 presidential election.
Posts by White House officials over the past three weeks have been sprinkled with gamer and streamer slang. “W’s in the chat boys,” wrote Steven Cheung, Trump’s director of communications, above a video mixing strikes in Iran with an animation from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
“Based Department? Yes. I’ll hold,” wrote Kaelan Dorr as he reposted another propaganda video on X, using the Gen Z word that means “bold” or “unapologetic”.
The clips build on a tradition established by the Department of Homeland Security last year. One viral video with the caption “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” showed ICE agents blowing in doors, and handcuffing and leading away undocumented immigrants to a song from the Pokemon cartoon. The clip was viewed 75.5mn times.
Loge compares Trump’s messaging style to pro wrestling. “He’s embracing the spectacle [of war] more than any of his predecessors have,” he said. But he warned that there was a risk for the White House that public support could collapse when the reality of the conflict hits home.
“It’s like turning on the lights on an amusement ride,” he said. “You can only suspend disbelief for so long.”
March 19, 2026
Jerome Powell Says US Job Creation Near Zero as Fed Signals Steady Unemployment
Job creation in the US has slowed to essentially zero, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday as the Fed released its latest economic projections, which included slightly higher economic growth than previously projected and little change to the unemployment rate.
Altogether, Powell said, central bankers see “a degree of stability” in the labor market.
“But the thing that I think a good number of people on the committee are concerned about is just the very, very low level of job creation,” Powell said in a press conference following the Fed’s decision to hold interest rates steady.
“Effectively, there’s zero net job creation in the private sector,” after accounting for revisions over the past six months, Powell said. “But actually, that looks like that’s about what the economy needs, in terms of dealing with very, very low — nonexistent, really — growth in the labor force, which of course we’ve never had in our history.”
Indeed, the country may not need as many jobs as it once did amid lower labor force participation rates and immigration declines. But Powell also noted that “labor demand has clearly softened as well.”
The job market hasn’t shifted dramatically since Powell’s last press conference in late January. But whatever brief glimmers of optimism existed are now in doubt. The unemployment rate, now at 4.4%, ticked back up in February as the economy shed 92,000 jobs, while December and January’s job gains were revised lower by 69,000, meaning there’s been barely any job growth in three months.
In their new policy statement, Fed officials removed language that noted the “unemployment rate has shown some signs of stabilization,” saying instead that “job gains have remained low, and the unemployment rate has been little changed in recent months.”
March 19, 2026
US Intelligence chief avoids contradicting Trump on Iran war threat claims
Donald Trump’s top spy chief refused to say whether Iran had posed an imminent threat to the US as the president claimed at the outset of the war.
Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard struggled to avoid contradicting Trump as she and other top national security officials testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday about the biggest security threats facing the country.
Pressed repeatedly on whether the intelligence community had assessed that Iran posed “an imminent nuclear threat” ahead of the start of the US-Israel attack on February 28 — one of the administration’s main justifications for the war — Gabbard said: “It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat. That is up to the president.”
Gabbard’s testimony at the intelligence committee’s annual global threats hearing came a day after another top intelligence official resigned over what he claimed were the administration’s “unfounded” justifications for the war, further amplifying doubts about a conflict that has killed 13 American service members so far.
In prepared opening remarks submitted to the committee ahead of her appearance, Gabbard said that Iran’s nuclear programme had been “obliterated” by US and Israeli strikes against the country’s nuclear sites last June.

“There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” she wrote in her statement.
But she veered from her prepared remarks when she addressed the Senate panel, saying that US intelligence believed that Iran had been “trying to recover” from the “severe damage” to its nuclear infrastructure before the renewed US-Israel strikes against the country.
When Mark Warner, the intelligence committee’s top Democrat, asked Gabbard why she had strayed from her written testimony, she responded that she had skipped the relevant section because her testimony “was running long”.
US officials have offered contradictory justifications for the war and the status of Iran’s nuclear programme, saying that Tehran was both “weeks” away from obtaining a nuclear bomb, and that its nuclear facilities had been “obliterated” by last year’s war.
At the start of her testimony Gabbard stressed she was presenting “the intelligence community’s assessment of the threats facing US citizens, our homeland and our interests” and not her personal views or opinions.
A combat veteran who has long opposed US military intervention overseas, Gabbard remained silent on the conflict until Tuesday when she posted a statement on X that repeated Trump’s justification for the war, but did not say whether she supported it.
Joe Kent, a close ally of Gabbard who was director of the National Counterterrorism Center, on Tuesday became the first senior US official to resign in protest at the war, saying that Tehran posed “no imminent threat to our nation”.
Kent’s resignation has raised questions about Gabbard’s future in the Trump administration and splits within his Maga movement which has long been opposed to US wars of regime change.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday she had no “knowledge” of whether Trump was considering firing Gabbard, but said it was “a question for him”.
Democrats expressed frustration during the hearing with the unwillingness of Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe to answer questions about the information presented to the president ahead of his decision to go to war. FBI director Kash Patel and the leaders of the US defence and signals intelligence agencies also testified.
Gabbard told the committee that US intelligence had “long” assessed that Iran would likely use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage in the event of a crisis.
But both she and Ratcliffe declined to say whether they had given that assessment directly to the president ahead of the war. Gabbard did say that her agency assessed that Iran’s regime remained largely “intact” and would seek to reconstitute its military capabilities if they remained.
Trump said this week that his administration had been surprised by Iran’s retaliatory strikes against US allies in the Middle East. There appears to have been little preparation for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil flows.
“We’re trying to figure out if the president knew what the downside was of the Strait of Hormuz being closed, and I’m having a hard time finding out whether the White House asked, or whether there was a brief, whether the president knew,” said Democratic senator Mark Kelly.
March 18, 2026
Trump Ally Warns U.S. Economy Too Weak to Withstand Iran War Shock
Donald Trump’s one-time pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics has said the US economy is too weak to handle oil at $100 per barrel as he warned of rising consumer prices triggered by the war in Iran.
“I don’t think this is an economy that is going to be able to handle $100 a barrel for oil, it’s just not,” EJ Antoni told the Financial Times.
“The economy is weaker than we thought it was, and inflation is worse than we thought it was,” he added in a call on Wednesday, shortly before the Federal Reserve’s March rate-setting meeting.
“The lower energy prices that we saw in 2025 helped put downward pressure on prices throughout the economy. Now . . . we’re going to see higher energy prices have exactly the opposite effect and put upward pressure on prices throughout the economy.”
Trump picked Antoni, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s chief economist, to lead the US labour statistics agency in August, shortly after firing the former commissioner for a gloomy jobs report the president claimed was “rigged”.
He abruptly withdrew Antoni’s nomination a month later and ultimately settled on government economist Brett Matsumoto, whose confirmation is subject to Senate approval.
Antoni’s remarks on the health of the world’s largest economy come a day after the director of the US National Counterterrorism Center resigned in protest at the Iran war, marking the first significant defection from the Trump administration since the conflict began.
Republicans are meanwhile growing increasingly worried that high oil prices — Brent crude jumped 5 per cent to almost $110 a barrel on Wednesday — will dent their chances in the midterm elections. Petrol prices at the pump have surged to $3.84 a gallon from $2.92 a month ago, while diesel has exceeded $5 — exerting a heavy toll on US consumers and businesses.
Economic data collected before the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran has done little to ease those concerns.
US GDP in the fourth quarter of 2025 was last week revised to 0.7 per cent from an initial estimate of 1.4 per cent, while data released on Wednesday showed US wholesale prices rose at a faster clip than expected in February, even before the war began. The US economy last month shed 92,000 jobs, in a sharp slide that eroded most of January’s gains.
Antoni highlighted “a lack of job growth” in the US, some of which he attributed to last year’s cuts to the federal workforce, and renewed his attacks on the BLS, which he likened to “a random number generator” in a post on X last May.
“You need a complete and total top-down review of everything from the data collection to the data processing and even the data dissemination, because there have been a few issues with leaks,” he said. In January, Trump posted some of December’s US jobs figures hours before their official release.
Antoni refused to be drawn on how Trump told him he was no longer his pick to lead the BLS, saying he would “rather keep those conversations confidential”.
March 18, 2026
Investors slash Fed rate-cut bets as Iran war drives surge in petrol prices
Investors are slashing bets that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this year, as the widening crisis in the Middle East sends petrol prices surging and threatens a fresh burst of inflation.
Markets are not anticipating a Fed rate cut until summer next year, according to trading in federal funds futures. It marks a dramatic shift from just weeks ago when traders were pricing in two quarter-point cuts in 2026.
The stark shift in Wall Street expectations highlights how the surge in energy prices caused by the war in Iran is prompting investors to rapidly rethink their outlook for inflation in the world’s biggest economy.
“This has been a wild shift. The market went completely mad today and decided to price out lots and lots of cuts,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US interest rate strategy at TD Securities.
He added: “This enormous move . . . is a function of the market betting that it will be difficult for the Fed to cut rates while oil prices remain high.”
Petrol prices, which are a major cost for consumers, hit $3.60 a gallon on Thursday, compared with $2.94 a month ago, according to motor club AAA.
The dwindling rate-cut bets undercut US President Donald Trump’s hopes for the Fed to drastically cut rates to accelerate growth and lower borrowing costs for consumers. The Fed, which is due to meet next week, reduced rates by a quarter point three times last year.
Still, the president on Thursday renewed his calls for Fed chair Jay Powell to slash borrowing costs: “Where is the Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell, today? He should be dropping Interest Rates, IMMEDIATELY, not waiting for the next meeting!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Investors have already moved to price out cuts, and price in rises, across a range of big economies, including the UK and the Eurozone, viewed as particularly vulnerable to energy-driven inflation.
Short-term US government debt, which is particularly sensitive to monetary policy expectations, fell sharply in price on Thursday, sending yields higher.
The two-year Treasury yield, which moves with interest rate expectations, rose as much as 0.1 percentage points to 3.76 per cent.
One popular trade in the market that has been put under pressure are so-called steepeners: bets that short-dated debt will outperform long-term bonds. Instead, the yield curve on Treasury debt has flattened, with the additional interest rate on 10-year debt over the two-year equivalent falling from 0.7 percentage points in early February to just above 0.5 percentage points.
John Stopford, head of multi-asset income at asset manager Ninety One, said the flattening represented the US bond market trying to price in “negative growth implications of higher oil prices and the likelihood of less accommodative monetary policy”.
Longer-term yields have also increased in recent days, something that has pushed mortgage rates higher after they hit the lowest level since 2022 late last month. The average 30-year fixed rate rose to 6.11 per cent this week, from less than 6 per cent in late February — denting one of the president’s flagship pledges to improve home affordability.
Despite market expectations that the Fed will refrain from rate cuts this year, some rate setters view the shock from higher energy prices as temporary.
Christopher Waller, a Fed governor who is one of the more dovish members of the Federal Open Market Committee, said last week: “You’re going to see a spike in gasoline prices, that’s what the American citizens are going to see at the pump, and they’re going to stare at it and be a little shocked . . . but, for us, thinking about policy going forward, it’s unlikely to cause sustained inflation.”
March 12, 2026
Trump Blames Iran for Deadly Strike on Girls’ School
President Donald Trump openly accused Iran of carrying out the Feb. 28 airstrike that destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab and killed at least 175 civilians — the vast majority of them young girls aged 7 to 12 — even though U.S. military investigators have already concluded it is “likely” that American forces were responsible.
The president’s remarks represent a sharp pivot from the White House’s earlier insistence that “the United States does not target civilians.” They came just hours after Trump attended the solemn dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base for six U.S. servicemembers killed in an Iranian drone attack during the opening weekend of the war — a moment of national mourning that the president immediately used to deflect blame onto the very country his administration and Israel have been bombing for nine straight days.
“In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Trump told reporters. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host turned Pentagon chief who has repeatedly pushed for aggressive escalation against Tehran, doubled down on the claim. “The only side that targets civilians is Iran,” Hegseth declared, while acknowledging that a U.S. investigation remains ongoing.
The coordinated attempt to pin the atrocity on Tehran comes as multiple American outlets report the opposite. Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the probe, revealed that military investigators believe U.S. forces almost certainly carried out the strike. The school sits in southern Iran — the exact zone where the U.S. Navy’s Abraham Lincoln strike group and American aircraft have focused their attacks since Feb. 28, while Israeli forces concentrated on northern targets.
During a March 4 Pentagon briefing, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine used a laser pointer on a map to highlight U.S. operations along Iran’s southern coast and into the Arabian Gulf, explicitly noting the Abraham Lincoln’s role in “attriting naval capability” in that sector. An independent analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies confirmed the geographic division of labor: U.S. strikes in the south and center, Israeli strikes in the north.
Iranian officials, including UN Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani, have consistently blamed the United States and Israel for the bombing. The Iranian news agency IRNA reported that 175 people died, including dozens of girls between the ages of 7 and 12. Images of the mass funeral — small white coffins draped in Iranian flags passed hand-to-hand through grieving crowds — aired on state television and shocked viewers worldwide.

Despite the mounting evidence, the White House has clung to denial. Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly responded to the Reuters reporting by calling it “irresponsible and false,” insisting “there are no conclusions at this time” and repeating the mantra that “unlike the terrorist Iranian regime, the United States does not target civilians.” The Pentagon has offered only the blandest of statements: “We are aware of reports concerning civilian harm… and are looking into them,” said Capt. Tim Hawkins of U.S. Central Command.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when asked directly, referred all questions to the Pentagon and insisted the U.S. would never deliberately target a school. Hegseth himself, appearing before cameras on Wednesday, offered the same scripted line: “We, of course, never target civilian targets. But we’re taking a look.”
The pattern is now familiar. From the moment the first bombs fell, the Trump administration and its Israeli partners have insisted this is a “precision” campaign against military targets only. Yet the first major civilian catastrophe of the war — a girls’ elementary school reduced to rubble on day one — has forced repeated rhetorical contortions. First came blanket denials. Then came the quiet internal assessment that U.S. munitions were probably responsible. Now comes the public blame-shifting onto Iran itself.
The United Nations human rights office has demanded a full investigation, stating bluntly that “the onus is on the forces that carried out the attack.” Deliberately or recklessly striking a school is considered a potential war crime under international humanitarian law. If American responsibility is confirmed — as investigators already privately believe — it would rank among the deadliest single incidents of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

This satellite photo shows the area of a school and base of Iran’s IRGC in Minab, Iran, on Wednesday. (PBC/AP)
The timing of Trump’s accusation is particularly cynical. He delivered it immediately after honoring American dead, as if the deaths of U.S. troops somehow justified rewriting the facts about Iranian children. Hegseth, who has spent months on cable news cheerleading for maximum force against Iran, now finds himself in the awkward position of simultaneously running the investigation and publicly exonerating the U.S. before it is complete.
This is not the first time the administration has moved the goalposts. Trump began the war promising a quick, clean operation to “clean out” Iran’s leadership. When that failed, he demanded “unconditional surrender.” When civilian casualties mounted, the White House blamed Iran’s own inaccuracy. Now, facing credible evidence of a catastrophic U.S. mistake, the president and his war secretary are simply pointing the finger at the enemy — classic projection from an administration that has shown zero tolerance for accountability since day one.
The Iranian regime is brutal and repressive; no serious observer disputes that. But the American people were told this war would be surgical, professional, and morally superior to the enemy. Instead, nine days in, we have a girls’ school in ruins, 175 small bodies in flag-draped coffins, and the president of the United States blaming the victims’ own government for a strike American investigators believe their own forces carried out.
The investigation continues. But the White House’s public messaging has already rendered its verdict — and it is one that insults both the facts and the families mourning in Minab. As the bombs keep falling and the body count rises, the pattern is becoming impossible to ignore: when precision fails, this administration’s response is not reflection or restraint, but deflection and denial.
March 8, 2026