Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday strongly defended a prospective Russia-Germany natural gas pipeline as economically feasible and voiced hope that European Union nations will be able to resist U.S. pressure to thwart the project.

U.S. officials have warned that Washington could impose sanctions on the undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The U.S. and some EU nations oppose it, warning it would increase Europe’s energy dependence on Russia. The U.S. is also interested in selling more of its liquefied natural gas in Europe.

Speaking Wednesday after talks with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in St. Petersburg, Putin noted that Bulgaria caved in to pressure and dumped the Russian South Stream pipeline.

He added that he hopes that “Europe as a whole won’t look like Bulgaria and won’t demonstrate its weakness and inability to protect its interests.”

“Russia always has been and will remain the most reliable supplier,” Putin said, adding that the Russian gas supplied via pipelines is significantly cheaper than U.S. liquefied gas. “Supplies come directly from Yamal in Siberia. There are no transit risks.”

It would be “silly and wasteful” if Europe opts for a more expensive option, hurting its consumers and its global competitiveness, Putin charged.

Ukraine, which has served as the main transit route for Russian gas supplies to Europe, has strongly opposed the Russian pipeline, fearing that it would leave its pipeline empty. The two ex-Soviet neighbors have been locked in a bitter tug-of-war after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Kurz spoke in support of Nord Stream 2 but also emphasized the importance to continue supplies via Ukraine.

“It’s very important that Ukraine’s interests as a key transit country be upheld,” he said.

Putin has previously pledged to consider the continuation of gas supplies via Ukraine if it settles a commercial dispute with Russia over previous gas supplies.
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Seven-year-old Ryan drew millions of views reviewing toys on YouTube. Now, he’s become a toy himself.

Walmart is selling action figures in his likeness, putty with his face on the packaging and other toys under the Ryan’s World brand. It’s a bet that kids, who are spending more time tapping tablets, will recognize Ryan from YouTube and want the toys he’s hawking.

The new line may also help Walmart lure former Toys R Us shoppers, as many chains make a play for those customers ahead of the holiday shopping season.

The first-grader, who’s been making YouTube videos for three years, has become a major influencer in the toy industry. The clips typically show him unboxing a toy, playing with it and then waving goodbye to viewers. His most watched video, in which Ryan hunts for large plastic eggs, has more than 1.5 billion views.

Toys featured in the videos can see a spike in sales, says Jim Silver, editor of toy review site TTPM.com. “Ryan is a celebrity,” he said. “Kids watch his videos. He’s entertaining.”

So much so that toymakers have paid Ryan and his parents to feature their products. Forbes magazine estimated that the Ryan ToysReview YouTube channel brought in $11 million last year, but his parents, Shion and Loann, declined to confirm that number or give any financial details about Ryan’s deals. They also do not give their last name or say where they live for privacy and safety reasons.

Ryan’s path from reviewer to tiny toy mogul started last year when his parents signed with Pocket.watch, a two-year-old company that works with several YouTube personalities to get their names on clothing, books and other products. Ryan is the first with a product line because of his large audience, Pocket.watch says.

Last month, Walmart started selling Ryan’s World bright-colored slime for $4, 5-inch Ryan action figures for $9 and french fry-shaped squishy toys for $18. The retailer is the exclusive seller of some of the line, including T-shirts and stuffed animals.

Whether kids will want them “all comes down to the toy,” says Silver, adding that hits are made on the playground, where youngsters show off their toys and tell others about it.

What Ryan does have is a built-in audience. A video of him searching the aisles of Walmart for Ryan’s World toys has nearly 10 million views in a month, and his YouTube page has more than 16 million subscribers. Anne Marie Kehoe, who oversees Walmart’s toy department, says a couple of thousand people showed up to a recent appearance at an Arkansas store just to see a kid “jumping around and acting crazy.”

Ryan, in a phone interview, says a lot of those people wanted his picture. He then left the phone call to play.

His parents, who stayed on the line, say Ryan spends about 90 minutes a week recording YouTube videos. They say he helped with the creation of some of the toys, like when he asked for an evil twin version of himself for a figurine.

“I’m always amazed at the point of view Ryan has,” said his dad, Shion.

Chris Williams, Pocket.watch’s founder and CEO, sees Ryan as a franchise, like how “Nickelodeon looks at SpongeBob.”

But unlike a cartoon sponge, Ryan will grow up. Williams says he expects the products to evolve with Ryan’s taste. And Ryan’s parents agree, saying they’re prepared to follow his interests as he gets older, like to video games.

“We can change,” Shion said.
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China’s hopes of negotiating a free trade pact with Canada or Mexico were dealt a sharp setback by a provision deep in the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that aims to forbid such deals with “non-market” countries, trade experts said on Tuesday.

The provision specifies that if one of the current North American Free Trade Agreement partners enters a free trade deal with a “non-market” country such as China, the others can quit in six months and form their own bilateral trade pact.

The clause, which has stirred controversy in Canada, fits in with U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to isolate China economically and prevent Chinese companies from using Canada or Mexico as a “back door” to ship products tariff-free to the United States.

The United States and China are locked in a spiraling trade war that has seen them level increasingly severe rounds of tariffs on each other’s imports.

Under the clause, the countries in the updated NAFTA, renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), must notify the others three months before entering into such negotiations.

Derek Scissors, a China scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said the provision gave the Trump administration an effective veto over any China trade deal by Canada or Mexico.

If repeated in other U.S. negotiations with the European Union and Japan, it could help isolate Beijing in the global trading system.

“For both Canada and Mexico, we have a reason to think an FTA with China is a possibility. It’s not imminent, but this is a very elegant way of dealing with that,” Scissors said.

“There’s no China deal that’s worth losing a ratified USMCA,” Scissors added.

After months of bashing its Western allies on trade, the Trump administration is now trying to recruit them to join the United States in pressuring China to shift its trade, subsidy and intellectual property practices to a more-market driven focus.

Beijing has demanded that the World Trade Organization recognize it as a “market economy” since its WTO accession agreement expired in December 2016, a move that would severely limit Western trade defenses against cheap Chinese goods.

But the United States and European Union are challenging the declaration, arguing that Chinese state subsidies fueling excess industrial capacity, the exclusion of foreign competitors and other practices are signs it is still a non-market economy.

Canadian Sovereignty Questioned

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, seeking to diversify Canada’s export base, held exploratory talks with China on trade in 2016, but a launch of formal negotiations has failed to materialize.

Tracey Ramsey, a legislator for Canada’s left-leaning New Democrats, said in the House of Commons on Tuesday that the clause was “astonishing” and a “severe restriction on Canadian independence.”

“Part of Canada’s concessions in this deal was to include language that holds Canada hostage to the Americans if we decide to trade with another country,” Ramsey said. “Why did the Liberal (Party) give the go-ahead for the U.S. to pull us into their trade wars?”

Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau downplayed the provision, arguing it was not significantly different from NAFTA’s clause that allows any member to leave the pact in six months’ time for any reason.

“It is largely the same. It recognizes though that the non-market economy is of significant importance as we move forward. But I don’t think it’s going to make a material difference in our activities,” Morneau told a business audience.

Mexico’s business community sided with the Trump administration in endorsing the pact.

“We are associating ourselves with countries that promote market freedom and that promote free trade in the world, free trade under equal circumstances,” said Juan Pablo Castañon, head of the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE), which represented Mexico’s private sector during the NAFTA trade talks.
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Mexico and Canada on Tuesday urged their governments to resolve a tariff dispute with the United States before signing a new trilateral trade deal that was unveiled this week.

In late May, the Trump administration announced tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports, prompting quick retaliation from top trading partners including Canada and Mexico.

Late on Sunday, the United States and Canada reached a deal to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), complementing an accord the Trump administration brokered with Mexico, the third member of NAFTA, in late August.

Mexican steel producers association Canacero welcomed the new trade pact, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), but said it viewed “with concern” the ongoing steel dispute and the “serious situation” it created for the industry.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs would remain in place for Canada and Mexico until they “can do something different like quotas, perhaps.”

In a statement, Canacero said it supported efforts to find a solution to the impasse before the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada signed USMCA, which officials say could happen at a G20 summit at the end of November.

If no solution can be found, Mexico should put tariffs on U.S. steel to level the playing field, Canacero said.

Mexico has already slapped tariffs on U.S. pork, bourbon, motor boats and other products. Canada has levied tariffs on a range of U.S. imports, including steel and aluminum.

Joseph Galimberti, president of the Canadian Steel Producers Association, said he expected Canada’s government to continue to support the industry after the USMCA breakthrough.

“There is clearly an opportunity to constructively engage the United States between the achievement of a deal in principle and the ratification or signature of that deal,” he said.

Canada is the top exporter of steel and aluminum to the United States. The United Steelworkers of Canada adopted a less conciliatory tone after the new trade deal was announced, calling it a “sell-out” for Canadian workers.

Mexican officials have said they hope the steel and aluminum dispute can be resolved before USMCA is signed.

Since the tariff row broke out, Mexican steel exports to the United States had fallen 30 percent on average, Canacero said.
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Palu, the Indonesian city devastated by an earthquake, tsunamis and mudslides, has strived to transform itself into a major trading hub, but the city’s buildings and other infrastructure were no match for the triple whammy that has left more than 1,200 people dead. 

The disasters that struck late Friday left the city’s port in ruins, its lone gantry crane atilt in the water. Its airport terminal was a sea of shattered glass and broken ceiling panels. A seven-story, 4-year-old hotel lay flat on its side. Its biggest bridge disintegrated, its picturesque yellow arches mangled in the mud. 

Ringed by coconut, coffee and cocoa farms, over the past two decades Palu has acquired modern shopping malls, hotels and other amenities to suit its ambitions. Poverty has fallen from nearly a third of its 380,000 residents to under one in 10, local officials say. 

A national blueprint calls for developing Palu as part of the “Sulawesi Economic Corridors” — a plan to attract investment and build up trade and commerce in a region that has remained somewhat isolated since the days of the ancient spice trade.  

Given how seismically active the area is — the Palu-Koro fault runs right through the city — it’s been a race against the odds. Historical records show the area has been hit by tsunamis — triggered by powerfully destructive earthquakes — at least seven times in the past two centuries. 

It’s unclear what standards were required, or enforced, in the construction of Palu’s modern buildings.

It’s an issue for all of Indonesia, an archipelago that sits square on the Pacific Ring of Fire. 

Teddy Boen, an expert on earthquake-resistant engineering who has consulted with foreign governments and international organizations, has been researching the problem for a half-century.

“From 50 years ago until today, there is similar damage. Somebody is not doing their job,” he said in a phone interview. “The codes are complete. The manuals are complete. The political will is not there.” 

The collapse of a mezzanine floor inside the Jakarta Stock Exchange in January that injured dozens of people underscores the extent of the problem, even in Indonesia’s capital.

After a tsunami in 2004 killed 230,000 people in Indonesia and elsewhere across Asia, it became apparent that in many communities, sturdy mosques and other strong buildings dating back to colonial times were the only structures still standing while newer structures often crumbled. 

In Palu, the Arkam Babu Rahman “floating mosque” on the city’s waterfront was pushed off-kilter by Friday’s tsunamis, while its worship halls remained intact. But a bigger, 20-year-old structure topped by a heavy dome was gutted as the debris-laden water swept through. 

Few of the buildings in Palu’s suburbs of Petobo, Biromaru and Bala Roa could withstand the sideways mudslide that engulfed those communities in expanses of oozing quicksand.  

Indonesia’s disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the soil there had liquefied and that authorities believed hundreds of people may have been buried in the mud. In Bala Roa, the ground violently heaved up and then sank in places, trapping many people under their wrecked homes. 

Traditional homes with thatched or tin roofs cannot withstand tsunamis or storm surges from typhoons but pose much less of a risk of severe damage even if they do collapse in an earthquake. Many homes built recently are hybrids, combining traditional styles with unreinforced masonry and tile roofs too heavy for the structures when they are shaken by quakes. 

The rush to rebuild after a disaster involves cutting corners, rather than fortifying buildings to prevent future calamities.

“Now, they say, build back better, build back better, but they do the same thing again,” Boen said. “The earthquake comes, they made the same mistakes and people get killed again.”
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Takako Arai’s earliest memories are of Tsukiji, playing hide-and-seek with her brother in the concrete maze of Tokyo’s sprawling fish market. Years later, she now runs the family’s seafood stall that sells mackerel and yellowfin tuna.

Arai and hundreds of other fish traders are reluctantly packing up and preparing to leave Tsukiji this week for a gleaming new $5 billion market on reclaimed land farther from central Tokyo.

“I feel torn. I grew up here and I feel like we’re losing so much of our history by leaving this place,” said Arai, 45.

The 83-year-old market, a popular tourist attraction, is a warren of shops and warehouses where small turret trucks zip around laden with ice-filled boxes of fish. But city officials say it has become dilapidated and unsanitary.

Many fishmongers want to stay in the area where they also live. They worry about contaminated soil at the new site in Toyosu, and the difficult commute to the new market.

More than 80 percent of Tsukiji fish traders are opposed to the move, said a survey by a group fighting the relocation.

In a last-ditch bid to delay the move, 56 traders sued the city of Tokyo last month, seeking a temporary injunction. They have asked the court to rule before Tsukiji closes on Saturday.

If there are no delays, business will resume at the new Toyosu market on Oct. 11, but traders worry their customers will not follow them.

Arai, whose family have been fish traders for 95 years, said buyers have already told her the new site is inconvenient.

“They say they’re going to buy from other markets nearer to their restaurants,” she said. “What can I say? They’re business people too.”

Fewer customers will make it hard to recoup the hundreds of thousands of dollars each fish trader expects to pay for the move, including replacing freezers and refrigerators.

Some 300 fishmongers and activists voiced their anger during a protest at Tsukiji last Saturday, chanting “Toyosu No No No,” and waving banners saying “Stop the Relocation!”

Tourists visiting one of Tokyo’s most famous landmarks paused in the rain to join the chants.

“We finally made Tsukiji a famous brand and now they’re trying to destroy it,” said Kiyoshi Kimura, who owns one of Japan’s largest sushi chains, Sushi Zanmai.

His gravelly voice rising as he wept, Kimura recalled opening his first sushi restaurant in Tsukiji 17 years ago in a bid to draw tourists and revive the market. Kimura is famous for his winning bids at the market’s New Years auction, where in 2013 he paid a record $1.76 million for a bluefin tuna.

“They have no compassion. That’s it,” Kimura told Reuters. “These bureaucrats have forgotten that human beings live here. It’s all about money for them.”

Final days

The relocation plan has been delayed many times since it was conceived 17 years ago. In 2016, toxic substances were found in soil and groundwater at Toyosu, once home to a gas plant.

Tokyo spent an extra 3.8 billion yen ($33.5 million) to dig hundreds of wells to pump out groundwater.

In July, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike declared the new site safe after experts signed off on additional cleanup measures, but some fish traders remain skeptical.

An official with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said Tsukiji had long supported the city’s residents with its lively market, but it was important for that tradition to continue in a new location with better sanitary conditions.

The old Tsukiji site will provide temporary parking for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and eventually become a tourist center.

Tsukiji feels like a village with its own medical clinics, a bank, library and shops, but with some 40,000 workers and tourists passing through on its busiest days.

In its final days, the market is still a frenzy of activity.

Men unload, sort, pack and display thousands of cartons of white boxes filled with fresh fish and seafood trucked in from ports across Japan.

During the early morning auctions, traders use hand signals to buy and sell fish.

The day’s catch is typically carted to a hangar where traders sell their seafood to buyers strolling down the chaotic cobblestone walkways under large store signs.

Koji Amano, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, started working at Tsukiji after dropping out of high school. Now 47, he and two brothers manage a stall specializing in bluefin tuna, or “maguro,” considered the king of sushi.

As he filleted a hulk of tuna with a sword-like knife, Amano was resigned to Tsukiji’s fate.

“They’re determined to move us out,” he said. “So there’s not much we can really do to stop them.”
…

With his political future at stake, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will mount a charm offensive to placate dairy farmers who say he sold them out in order to win approval of a continental trade deal.

Compounding Trudeau’s challenges in the influential province of Quebec, where many dairy farmers are based, voters there tossed out one of his allies on Monday in favor of a new center-right party that opposes immigration and supports supply management, as Canada’s dairy protection system is known.

Unhappy Quebec farmers – who are a political force – are already complaining to legislators from the ruling Liberals, and insiders concede there is no guarantee of winning them over, leaving Trudeau potentially vulnerable in a federal election set for October 2019.

The prime minister needed a win on trade after a year that has left his environmental and energy policy in tatters. That said, opposition leaders have struggled to connect with voters and their parties face their own challenges in Quebec.

Under the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Ottawa on Sunday bowed to long-standing pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to grant more access to the highly protected dairy market.

In return, the United States dropped a threat to impose tariffs on Canadian auto exports. This would have caused major damage to the economy and disproportionately affected Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, which also tilted right in a June provincial election.

“Dairy was Trump’s personal obsession, and so there was no way we could have made a deal without some form of dairy concessions,” said one senior Liberal, who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the situation.

The government plans to discuss a promised compensation package with dairy farmers in coming months, as well as ways the industry can be made more competitive.

“There is going to be a rough patch and our members of Parliament are already hearing it, especially those in rural areas,” said the Liberal source.

Trudeau says farmers will be fully compensated, which in the past has helped mute their protests over concessions agreed in earlier trade deals.

“We are reaching out to them, we want to work with them.

That’s going to be the message and hopefully that will be sufficient to get over this, but there’s nothing guaranteed in life,” said the Liberal.

The dairy industry is concentrated in Ontario and Quebec, which together account for 61.5 percent of the population.

Trudeau has no chance of retaining power unless the Liberals do well in both provinces.

“People feel betrayed,” said Bruno Letendre, chairman of a group representing Quebec’s dairy farmers. “They don’t want compensation. They want to produce for the Canadian market.”

Quebec’s premier-elect, Francois Legault, plans to meet with farmers on Tuesday before deciding on what options to pursue. He told reporters, “I will do everything to defend them.”

The Liberals, who now hold 40 of Quebec’s 78 seats in the federal House of Commons, privately say that to retain their parliamentary majority next year they need to win another 20 to offset expected losses elsewhere, including in British Columbia where a pipeline dispute has pitted the province against Ottawa.

Trudeau could be spared the worst in Quebec, where a prominent Conservative recently quit to form his own party, threatening to split the right-leaning vote. The leftist New Democrats, who compete directly with Trudeau’s Liberals, are losing public support.

Opinion polls taken before the trade talks ended showed the Liberals comfortably ahead of the official opposition Conservatives, who have spent the last two days accusing Trudeau of selling Canada short in the trade deal.

“The political calculus for the Liberals would be that failing on NAFTA was really not an option because that would leave them significantly vulnerable in terms of their economic track record,” said pollster Nik Nanos of Nanos Research.

“I think they decided it would probably be easier … to take their lumps with the dairy farmers than to face a broader narrative of mismanagement of the trade file and the economy among many Canadians,” he said in an interview.
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President Donald Trump used questionable tax dodges and outright fraud to greatly increase his fortune that started with money from his parents, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Trump likes to portray himself as a self-made man, saying he started with a relatively modest $1 million loan from his father and built his riches through investments and deals.

But in an extensive and detailed 40,000-word story, the Times reports Trump received about $413 million from his father, Fred Trump, a New York real estate mogul.

Fred Trump began funneling money to Donald Trump and his siblings when they were young children, and the newspaper said they are still getting money from the real estate empire today.

Improper deductions alleged

The newspaper reported that Trump helped his father build up his fortune by dodging taxes, including what the paper called improper tax deductions.

The report alleged Donald Trump schemed to underestimate the value of Trump real estate holdings to sharply reduce the tax bill.

The Times also reported that Donald Trump and his siblings set up a fake corporation to hide large cash gifts from their father.

According to the newspaper, tax records show the Trump family paid just a small fraction of the taxes they were obligated to pay to the federal government under the tax code.

The newspaper based its story on interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and more than 100,000 pages of documents, including the elder Trump’s personal tax returns.

Apparently, none of the president’s tax returns were used to write the Times report. The president refused to release his tax returns, breaking with recent White House practices.

A Trump lawyer, Charles Harder, said in a statement Tuesday that the Times’ allegations of fraud and tax evasion “are 100 percent false and highly defamatory. There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which the Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

A statement from Trump’s brother, Robert, pointed out that Fred Trump died in June 1999, and he said the Internal Revenue Service closed his estate two years later. He said the Trump family had no further comment on the allegations and appealed to everyone to let Fred and Mary Anne Trump rest in peace.

The Times said that according to tax experts, Trump was unlikely to face criminal prosecution for tax fraud because the alleged crimes took place too long ago.

But the experts told the Times he could still face civil penalties and fines.
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Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday that he sees no need to drop the central bank’s current gradual approach to raising interest rates.

Powell said the combination of steady, low inflation and very low unemployment shows the country is going through “extraordinary times.”

The central bank is trying to make sure it doesn’t raise rates too quickly and push the country into a recession, or move too slowly and set off higher inflation, he said. He added that the Fed’s goal of gradual increases in interest rates is an effort to balance those risks and extend the current expansion, now the second longest in U.S. history.

Powell’s comments, delivered to the annual conference of the National Association of Business Economics, came a week after the central bank approved a third quarter-point hike in its benchmark policy rate, pushing it to a level of 2 percent to 2.25 percent.

It marked the third rate hike this year and the eighth increase. The Fed began gradually raising rates in December 2015 after a period of seven years in which it kept its policy rate at a record low near zero to try to lift the economy out of a deep recession.

During a question and answer session, Powell discussed how the Fed might respond to the next economic downturn.

He said the Fed expects to turn to similar tactics it used during the last recession as needed. The central bank cut rates and purchased billions of dollars of bonds to push long-term rates lower, efforts that brought criticism from some in Congress that it had been too aggressive in its efforts.

“We will use the tools we used in the financial crisis to the extent that we have to,” Powell said. Last year the Fed examined potential responses to the next recession and plans to further study the issue in the coming year.

Powell noted in his speech that the unemployment rate stands near a 20-year low of 3.9 percent, while inflation has risen close to the Fed’s 2 percent target for annual increases in inflation.

The Fed’s economic forecast is in line with many others that show unemployment remaining below 4 percent through the end of 2020, with inflation staying near the 2 percent target over the same period, he said.

He was asked by a reporter at his news conference last week whether this forecast was too good to be true. He called that “a reasonable question” given that since 1950, the country has never experienced such a long period of low, stable inflation and very low unemployment for such an extended period.

He said it runs counter to an economic theory known as the “Phillips curve,” which argues that low unemployment forces employers to push up wages to compete for scarce workers, triggering more inflation.

Powell said he did not think the Phillips curve is dead. But various changes in the economy, including better conduct of monetary policy by the Fed, had “greatly reduced, but not eliminated, the effects that tight labor markets have on inflation,” he said.

He said these developments support the Fed’s current cautious approach in raising interest rates even as unemployment keeps moving to lows not seen in 50 years. But he said there were risks to the Fed’s current gradual approach to raising rate hikes. For that reason, central bank officials will be prepared quickly to change policy if conditions warrant such a change.
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Can ex-convicts completely turn their lives around? A program called “Homeboy Industries” believes so. It provides training, classes and support to former gang members and people just out of prison. The aim: make them productive citizens and leave a life of crime behind. Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story.
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About half of young Americans expect to be financially better off than their parents, according to a new poll, a sign that the dream of upward mobility is alive but somewhat tempered.

The poll, by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and MTV, found that half of 15- to 26-year-olds said they thought they would be better off than their parents in terms of household finances. About 29 percent expected to do as well as their parents, and 20 percent expected to be worse off. 

Parents were slightly more optimistic: Sixty percent said they thought their children would do better than they did, a view that held true for parents across all income groups. Overall, only 12 percent of parents said that they felt their children might do worse.

It’s no longer a guarantee that children will achieve upward income mobility. About half of the Americans born in 1984 earned more at age 30 than their parents, down from 92 percent in 1940, according to the study by famed economist Raj Chetty and others that was released in 2016.

Jennifer Narvaez, 23, is among those who expect their financial futures to be brighter than those of their parents. The Miami resident said she expected to have more opportunities as a college graduate to get a job and own a home than her parents, who grew up in Nicaragua and immigrated to the United States. Narvaez holds an undergraduate degree in biology and is planning on attending medical school to become a cardiologist. 

‘A weird time’

Narvaez is less certain about the prospects of the U.S. economy, particularly as the nation appears to be marching into a trade war with China.

“It’s a weird time,” she said. “I feel like it’s hard to predict what will happen because of the kind of administration we have.”

Alex Barner, 20, also felt optimistic that he might fare better than his mother, who had him at age 18 and raised him as a single mother. He is attending college in New Mexico and is considering a career in business management.

While Barner is hopeful he will do well in life, he also has some concerns about the trajectory of the nation and its economy. Like Narvaez, he’s concerned by the trade policy of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Barner also said he felt politicians needed to focus more on matters that affect people in the here and now, such as health care and student loan relief. 

Respondents were divided about how they expected the nation’s economy would fare in the year ahead. About 29 percent of young people expected the economy to improve, 30 percent expected it would get worse and 41 thought it would stay the same. Similarly, 35 percent of parents expected improvement, 27 percent expected conditions to get worse and 38 percent expected the economy to stay as is.

The Youth Political Pulse poll was conducted Aug. 23-Sept. 10 by the AP-NORC Center and MTV. The poll was conducted using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. It includes 580 young people ages 15-26 and 591 parents of children in the same age group. The margin of sampling error for all young people is plus or minus 6.6 percentage points and for parents plus or minus 7.5 percentage points.
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