Alex Frangos

And then with the trade deficit, we see countries responding to these tariffs, helping their local industries navigate around tariffs, lower their own costs domestically.

And compete.

And so net net, what you have is a bigger deficit than ever.

That's probably not a you know, not an A plus plus on his report card.

Inflation has come down a bit, but ordinary Americans are not feeling really good about it.

And if you look at the polls, they feel that the president has been kind of distracted by inflation.

foreign policy issues and focused on tariffs, which, you know, while they haven't caused the spike in inflation the way that a lot of people thought, they have put pressure on American consumers and businesses and people don't really like it.

So I think that the State of the Union, from what we're hearing from our White House reporters, is the president is going to focus on the economy.

He's going to try to sell to the American people that actually everything he's done has been really great for them and try to kind of reset the narrative that he is very focused on their pocketbook issues.

Alex, thank you for this.

Thanks.

There's been a lot of pressure on Russia from European countries and the U.S.

in terms of new sanctions on individual boats in their so-called shadow fleet that they've been using to move oil around the last few years.

There's also been these seizures that the Trump administration has conducted against shadow fleet ships that mostly work in Venezuela but are also tied to some Russian oil shipments.

And then Trump struck this deal with India to lower tariffs there in exchange for India saying they would cut back on buying Russian oil.

So all this has meant that there's all this Russian oil that gets produced, but they have fewer buyers.

And a lot of the oil is being stored on ships floating at sea waiting for a buyer to say, well, if the price gets low enough, we'll buy it.

Yeah.

So normal oil that is sold from non-sanctioned countries sells for something in the $60 to $65 a barrel range.

Russia, in order to sell its oil, has to offer a discount that's as much as $27 per barrel.