The Federal Reserve’s legal mandate is clear. It must focus on stable prices and maximum employment. In the past five years, the Fed has failed on both. Inflation remains materially above the 2 percent target, reaching a decade-high 25% cumulative inflation in the 2021-2025 period, while restrictive monetary conditions have been limited to rate hikes, which weigh most heavily on the small and medium-sized firms that generate most of net employment growth.

This failure was not merely a matter of missing a forecast but a policy framework that became narrative-driven rather than data-dependent. The Fed spent much of 2025 moving between concerns about inflation from tariffs based on ideology and a growing admission of weakness in the labor market. However, it continued to treat interest rates as its overwhelmingly dominant instrument. That is a poor policy mix when the problem of persistent inflation was caused by excessive government spending. Kritzman, at MIT Sloan, concluded that “mathematically, the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain.” However, the Fed’s policy was directed at penalizing the private sector while incentivizing large government deficit spending.

The new migration crisis in Ceuta is not an isolated episode or a simple border emergency.

It is the result of a deeply irresponsible and damaging political and economic model. Sánchez boasts about aggregate growth while destroying cohesion, productivity, net real income per capita, and institutions. Spain is not an example of growth, migrant integration, or cohesion. It is a statistical mirage juiced by population increase and a fiscal time bomb. It has taken a migration crisis for the European Union to wake up.

Illegal immigration is not a stroke of fate or a recipe for growth and for shoring up public finances; it is a strategy of control and demolition of the nation from within, with the aim of creating a dependent, captive underclass, buying votes by altering demographics and shifting onto future generations the enormous cost to the state of a population increase whose net contribution to public accounts is overwhelmingly negative.

Europe’s wildfire crisis has also exposed the failure of public spending rhetoric unsupported by effective land and forest management. EU governments spent 40.6 billion euros on fire protection services in 2023. In 2022, the total expenditure stood at EUR 37.4 billion.

The European Court of Auditors discovered that spending oversight was incomplete, result monitoring was weak, and there was no assurance that the most impactful actions received financing. At the same time, the average annual burnt area in the EU rose to 527,000 hectares in 2021-2024, up sharply from 268,000 hectares in 2006-2010, showing that more money has not guaranteed better outcomes.

European Commission policy documents acknowledge that sustainable forest management, vegetation thinning, firebreaks, access roads, buffer zones, mixed grazing, and prescribed burning are essential to reduce wildfire risk. Therefore, the worsening wildfire record is not only a climate story but also a policy failure in land management, prevention design, and execution.

The latest U.S. inflation report and jobs data do not justify another interest rate increase. Additionally, June data show that inflation is slowing down, especially in the core CPI measure that is most closely watched by monetary authorities, while ongoing tightening is stopping the labor market from reaching its full potential.

Hiking rates while maintaining elevated liquidity harms families and small businesses and perpetuates the very factors that drive inflation, including rising money supply and government spending.

Keeping rates above the neutral level has cost the U.S. economy nearly one million jobs, as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) find it increasingly difficult to access credit and face prohibitively high borrowing costs. For investors, a 25-basis-point increase may seem insignificant, but for small businesses, it often means either no access to credit or excessively expensive borrowing rates. In the U.S., the average cost of debt for SMEs typically ranges from 6% to 12% APR, making it extremely difficult to hire new employees.