Thanks to a surge in prices from Canada and Asia Near East, US Import Prices soared more than expected in February. The 4.6% rise is the highest since February 2012, driven by a 40.5% surge year-over-year in Fuels and lubricants.
Notably US import prices from Mexico fell 0.3% YoY.
As had been periodically leaked over the past several weeks, overnight both Poliico and the WSJ confirm that President Trump has offered former Utah governor Jon Huntsman the job of U.S. ambassador to Russia and is in the process of submitting paperwork to accept the position; Huntsman is said to have accepted the offer. This is the latest sign of backtracking from plans for Washington-Moscow conciliation, a development which will make future reports based on "anonymous sources" that Trump is a Kremlin puppet even more problematic.
Via Damiel Lang of SHTFPlan.com,
Job creation has been a key focus of the Trump administration which has blamed outsourcing to lower cost countries like Mexico and China for the stagnant wages of the middle-class working folks of America's Midwest.
American companies are riding high on the optimism created by President Trump’s election victory, adding a staggering 298,000 jobs to the U.S. economy during Trump’s first month in office. That monster figure comes from ADP, a payroll processing company that surveys the U.S. job market. The number far exceeded the 190,000 new jobs that economists were forecasting. President Trump tweeted a self-congratulatory note from the @POTUS account, referencing the long overdue “surging” growth in the jobs market and admitting the numbers are “much more than expected!“ U.S.