Earl O'Garro

There is a number that ought to keep a central banker awake, and the number is 3.8 percent. That is what the Consumer Price Index told us in April — prices rising at nearly twice the rate the Federal Reserve once swore, with the solemnity of a vow, to defend. Energy alone climbed 17.9 percent over the year, the steepest such jump since 2022, which is to say that the cost of warming a house and moving a truck and running a small shop has been quietly, relentlessly stolen from

There is a man in Hartford whose name appears on both sides of the ledger — as counsel for the accused and, if the sworn allegations of the accused are to be believed, as the instrument of his conviction — and this man, Andrew Crumbie, has been given the authority, by a city that did not check, and amplified by a press that did not ask, to pronounce upon the moral fitness of a former mayor of New Britain, and I want to say plainly what no one in Connecticut seems willing to s

There is a strait at the mouth of the Persian Gulf barely twenty-one miles across at its narrowest point, and through it moves something close to a fifth of the world’s oil supply. For weeks, mines have floated beneath its surface — some placed, some drifting — and the tankers that would ordinarily pass without ceremony have been holding at anchor, waiting. This is what a war’s pause looks like from the water: not peace, but hesitation. President Trump has been sitting on a d

There is a particular kind of gravity that settles on a man when he inherits what he did not build but must now answer for. Kevin Warsh, newly sworn in as the seventeenth chair of the Federal Reserve, sat in the East Room of the White House on May 22 and received a charge that no confirmation vote could adequately describe. His first FOMC meeting — the one where he will actually pull the lever, or refuse to — is June 16. He has twenty-four days. Consider what he inherits. The