Alcohol, motorcycles: Which Canadian products are banned by the US?
What to know about the U.S. ban of Canadian products. (American Action Forum Office of the United States Trade Representative.)
(WASHINGTON) A United States ban of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Canadian products took effect on Tuesday, escalating a trade war between the longtime allies and pinching imports from one of the top U.S. trade partners.
The ban applies to an array of products spanning from alcohol to motorcycles to dairy goods, White House documents show.
In all, the affected products account for $967 million worth of annual imports from Canada, Jacob Jensen, director of trade policy at the right-leaning American Action Forum, said in a blog post.
Nearly $9 of every $10 worth of impacted products belongs to the category of alcoholic beverages, making them the primary target of the ban, Jensen said. The move comes after some Canadian provinces pulled U.S.-made alcohol off of liquor store shelves, crimping sales for American producers.
The list of banned alcoholic products includes beer, wine, whiskey, vodka, rum and brandy.
The policy also bars some mopeds and motorcycles, as well as some food items featuring whey, a popular protein-rich additive derived from dairy. Molasses and non-alcoholic beer also stand among the banned imports.
Still, the U.S. ban applies to a small fraction of U.S. imports from Canada. The U.S. imported roughly $381 billion worth of goods in 2025, the Office of the United States Trade Representative found, meaning the ban covers 0.2% of Canadian products shipped to the U.S.
The Toasts Not Tariffs Coalition — a trade group representing farmers, retailers and other members of the U.S. alcohol supply chain — issued a statement on Tuesday criticizing the ban.
“We appreciate the Trump administration’s commitment to encouraging Canada to reopen its market to American spirits and wine products,” the organization told ABC News.
“However, as this ban on Canadian spirits and wines takes effect today, America’s restaurants, bars, retailers and consumers are being pulled further into a trade dispute that has already taken a significant toll on U.S. wine and spirits producers,” the group added.
A tit-for-tat trade war erupted in August after official negotiations collapsed and a fresh round of U.S. levies took hold. Within days, Canadian officials unveiled what they described as a set of matching tariffs.
Canada’s retaliatory measure, which took effect earlier this month, targets about $20 billion worth of U.S. products, mirroring the size of the U.S. levies.
The goods impacted by both countries’ levies total about 4.5% of annual trade between the U.S. and Canada, the Office of the United States Trade Representative said. For now, levies apply to a sliver of goods that travel between the U.S. and Canada, limiting the impact of the trade dispute.
Trump has carried out on-again, off-again trade negotiations with Canada since he took office, aiming to resolve a dispute that began with tariffs announced by Trump early in his second term.
Trump has repeatedly claimed Canada takes advantage of its proximity to the large U.S. consumer market, while preventing many U.S. sellers from reaching Canadian shoppers.
“On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump said on his social media platform in August. “They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has criticized fresh U.S. tariffs as a pressure campaign that disadvantages Canadian exporters, describing retaliatory levies as an effort to protect Canada’s economy.
“I don’t believe in escalating the conflict. That’s not constructive, but our tariffs are necessary to protect our workers, protect our companies and our communities. We can’t let American goods into Canada tariff-free while they charge our companies to export,” Carney said in a video message posted earlier this month.
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk speaks via video at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square during the launch of the SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk-led rocket and AI company SpaceX joined the Nasdaq 100 on Tuesday, clearing the way for a potential influx of investment as funds pegged to the major index were expected to add the firm.
SpaceX will all but certainly become a part of many individuals’ 401(k) accounts soon. Those accounts often hold index funds, which track indexes like the Nasdaq 100.
Until recently, newly listed companies were barred from major indexes until after an extended waiting period. But the Nasdaq issued a rule change in May permitting “fast entry” to the Nasdaq-100 for some major IPOs. Over the ensuing weeks, some other top exchanges also tweaked their rules.
Entry into the index marked the latest development for SpaceX after a roller coaster in the company’s shares following an initial public offering (IPO) last month. The stock price soared roughly 50% in the initial three days after the public listing on June 12, before shedding just about all of those gains within days.
SpaceX shares dropped nearly 6% in early trading on Tuesday, putting the price at about $151. The SpaceX IPO, the largest ever, opened trading last month at $150 per share.
The IPO made Musk the first trillionaire, vaulting the world’s richest person further ahead of other financial titans. After SpaceX shares tumbled on Tuesday, Musk’s net worth fell to $973 billion, according to Forbes. The second-wealthiest person alive, Google founder Larry Page, holds a net worth of $303 billion, Forbes said.
The IPO pulls in fresh funds for the Texas-based firm, which oversees Musk’s ambitions in the fast-growing but cost-intensive AI industry. The company aims to raise as much as $75 billion from its public listing.
SpaceX builds and operates spacecraft, including thousands of satellites deployed in support of its Starlink satellite internet service. In February, the company merged with xAI, a Musk-led AI company that offers a chatbot in competition with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
The company’s revenue jumped to $18.7 billion in 2025, soaring 33% compared to the previous year, a financial filing showed. Nearly a quarter of that revenue came from Starlink, which counted millions of subscribers. Still, SpaceX failed to turn a profit, registering a loss of $4.9 billion last year.
In this June 27, 2016 file photo Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and president and founder of Greenspan Associates, speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images, FILE)
(NEW YORK) — Alan Greenspan, the longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, has died, his wife confirmed. He was 100 years old.
“Alan passed away at our home this morning at the age of 100 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease,” Andrea Mitchell, his wife and a chief correspondent at NBC News, said in a statement published by the network on Monday.
The economist is remembered for leading the American central bank amid periods of historic U.S. economic expansion, while critics have also said his policies contributed to and exacerbated the mortgage crisis and financial crash of 2008.
Greenspan, a libertarian Republican, became the 13th chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System two months before the stock market crash on Oct. 19,1987, known as Black Monday. He was credited with moving quickly to alleviate investors’ fears after the crash and was instrumental in ensuring the Federal Reserve made plenty of money available to alleviate the impact on financial markets. Stocks quickly rebounded.
He was appointed Fed chair by four different presidents during his career, first by Ronald Reagan in 1987. Greenspan continued to serve as Fed chairman under presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He steered the U.S. economy through the economic boom in the 1990s, the dotcom bubble, and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His final term as chair ended on Jan. 31, 2006.
Under his leadership, the Fed fostered a distaste for regulation and promoted very low interest rates in the early 2000s — two phenomena critics say encouraged a bubble in housing prices that eventually burst with disastrous effects on the global economy.
During his tenure, and before the financial crisis began, the nation experienced one of the longest periods of economic growth in its history.
A decorated economist, first inspired by music
Greenspan was born on March 6, 1926, in New York City, the only child of Herbert Greenspan, a stockbroker, and Rose Goldsmith Greenspan, a retail worker. His parents divorced when he was 4 years old, and he was raised mainly by his mother and his grandparents.
An aspiring musician, Greenspan attended Juilliard for a year and played saxophone and clarinet before dropping out and enrolling at New York University. He went on to gain his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from New York University. He also engaged in some advanced graduate work at Columbia University in New York, where he studied under the influential economist Arthur Burns.
Though short-lived, his music career was an influential portion of Greenspan’s life, and he considered the move into economics a logical progression. He saw the organization of economic data into sound fiscal modeling as analogous to the organization of musical notes into tunes, according to Greenspan biographer Justin Martin in his book, “Greenspan: The Man Behind Money.”
“I get the same kind of joy from solving a hard mathematical problem as I do from hearing a Haydn quartet,” Greenspan once told The New York Times Magazine.
Greenspan taught economics at NYU between 1953 and 1955 and then founded the economic consulting firm Townsend & Greenspan, where he served as chairman and president from 1954 to 1974. He returned to the firm in 1977 and stayed until 1987.
President Richard Nixon nominated Greenspan to chair the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1974, the first of many government economic positions he would hold. Nixon resigned as president hours after Greenspan was nominated, but he continued to serve under President Gerald Ford. Greenspan also served as a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board and was a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office.
In the private sector, Greenspan served as corporate director for many companies, including Alcoa, General Foods and J.P. Morgan & Co. He also served as a member of Time magazine’s Board of Economists and a senior adviser to the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity.
In 2002, Greenspan received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his contribution to global economic stability. In 2005, President George W. Bush presented Greenspan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He held the position of Fed chairman from the time Reagan appointed him in 1987 until 2006, serving an unprecedented five terms under four presidents before being succeeded by Ben Bernanke.
Greenspan is credited by many with facilitating the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. One day after the Black Monday stock crash, Greenspan affirmed the Fed’s “readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system” and the central bank moved to encourage banks to lend on their normal terms. Unlike prior financial crises, the events of Black Monday notably were not followed by an economic recession or a banking crisis and less than two years later, the U.S. stock market surpassed its pre-crash highs.
During his tenure, Greenspan developed a reputation for being a consensus-builder and for his strong anti-inflation stance, focusing more on controlling prices than on promoting full employment. He led the Federal Reserve through several events with major economic consequences, including two U.S. recessions, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
‘How could we have possibly got it so wrong?’
Starting in June 2003, the Federal Reserve set the federal funds rate, the rate at which banks typically borrow from each other, to one percent for a year. Though its intention was to lower the cost of borrowing and stimulate the economy, critics said the rate was too low and encouraged investments in risky subprime mortgage-backed securities, which they say contributed to the financial crisis in 2008.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a research organization seen as an authority on measuring economic performance, later said that the recession officially began in December 2007.
In September 2007, Greenspan published a book that was both a memoir and economic commentary, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” in which he criticized the George W. Bush administration for overspending and admitted that he supported the administration’s tax cuts without stressing the need for spending cuts.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in August 2012, Greenspan said, “one day before Lehman Brothers crashes, conventional wisdom was not even certain that we would fall into a recession.”
“In fact, we learned many months later that the downward trend had actually started,” Greenspan said. “How could we have possibly got it so wrong? I mean, I actually was saying, ‘Yes, recession is coming, not that we’re here yet.’ We didn’t know that it had already hit.”
In October 2008, Greenspan acknowledged to a congressional committee discussing financial regulation that, “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”
After Greenspan finished his term as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006, he established Greenspan Associates, an economic consulting firm in Washington, D.C.
With Greenspan as president, the firm had four employees as of October 2012. His client list has included giant finance clients like German firm Deutsche Bank and hedge fund Paulson & Co.
Personal life
Greenspan married artist Joan Mitchell in 1952. The couple divorced in 1953 after less than a year of marriage, and the marriage was later annulled. The two remained friends.
His first wife is remembered for introducing him to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, with whom Greenspan shared a friendship, a belief in free-market economic ideals and a philosophy of objectivism. In his 30s and early 40s, Greenspan spent many hours sitting with Rand’s band of followers, known as the “Collective,” discussing topics including politics philosophy, current events and economics.
In addition to Burns at Columbia, Rand and her group were instrumental in helping hone Greenspan’s capitalist, free-market economic philosophy, according to Martin, Greenspan’s biographer.
The group’s open style of debate and discussion served Greenspan well in his various governmental roles. During his career in public service, he became known for a well-developed ability to communicate with Congress without offending those with opposing viewpoints or politicizing his messages.
Though he was said to back revamping the Social Security system and raising the retirement age, Greenspan was wary of how his public statements as Fed chairman might move markets. He rarely granted interviews. He was known for making openly ambiguous public statements about the state of the U.S. economy, once telling Congress, “If I’ve made myself too clear, you must have misunderstood me.”
Greenspan married NBC News correspondent Mitchell in 1997. Their marriage was officiated by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“We’ve had the most wonderful marriage,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek in August 2012. “It gets better every year. We’re still very much together in love.”
Customers shop at a grocery store on Sept. 10, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Inflation held steady in August but price increases remained elevated as the Iran war continued to push up fuel prices months after it began. The reading matched economists’ expectations.
Prices rose 3.4% in August compared to a year earlier, maintaining the same level from the prior month, federal government data released on Friday morning showed.
Inflation stands more than a percentage point higher than the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%.
Gas prices jumped nearly 4% in August from July, accounting for about a third of the overall price jump last month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said. Shelter prices — which include home-owner payments and rental charges — also sped up in August from July.
Groceries provided a bright spot in the report, however. The price of groceries stayed flat in August from July, putting annual inflation for groceries at 2.2%. That figure for grocery inflation stands well below the annual pace of overall price increases.
The fresh data arrived days after oil prices topped $100 a barrel and gas prices notched their highest level for any Labor Day on record.
The economy has shown signs of additional strain in recent days, including a bond selloff that threatens to raise borrowing costs for mortgages and credit cards.
Central bankers are sure to closely examine the inflation report as they weigh a potential interest rate hike at their meeting next week. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has vowed to cool off persistently elevated price increases.
Despite a stubborn bout of inflation, the economy remains fairly robust by some measures.
A blockbuster jobs report last week showed employers added 162,000 workers in August, demonstrating continued resilience for the nation’s labor market. The economy grew over three months ending in June, defying fear of a downturn triggered by the Iran war.
Inflation, however, continues to weigh on shoppers, while raising the likelihood of Fed intervention that may slow the economy.
Attacks on oil tankers in the Middle East pushed global crude prices above $105 a barrel as of Thursday, which amounted to a rise of about 50% since the Iran war broke out in late February.
The average price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. stands at $4.29, putting it more than $1.30 higher than before the war, AAA data showed.
Record-high diesel prices have raised transport costs for many everyday products, including groceries, clothes and furniture.
The price woes have divided central bankers eager to contain inflation but reluctant to cool off the labor market.
The Fed opted to hold interest rates steady at its most recent meeting in July. Three of the 12 members on the Fed’s policymaking board, however, voted in favor of a rate hike, marking the largest number of dissenters casting ballots in the same direction since 2016.
Financial markets peg the odds of a quarter-point rate hike next week at 71%, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool, a measure of investor sentiment.
Warsh, who took the helm of the central bank in May, said late last month that it should prioritize fighting inflation.
“Inflation is running above our 2% target so the Fed’s predominant focus right now should be on prices,” Warsh said in remarks last week at the Fed’s annual summer gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
“If the Fed gets inflation wrong and judges the economy wrong, who gets the worst of it? Not the financial high-fliers. Hard-working Americans are the ones left to deal with inflation that is too high or jobs that suddenly appear less secure,” Warsh added.
