Opinion Today: What’s going on at Treasury?

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August 27, 2026

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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Notable

Our financial hole is deep. “Efforts to engineer ourselves out of higher interest rates are unlikely to work.”

— Geng Ngarmboonanant, a managing director at J.P. Morgan Asset Management

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The best thing Dolly Parton ever wrote. “To understand Dolly, you have to read her as a writer. Writing her own story was the most radical, precise way to define herself in a world that kept trying to fit her into a box.”

— Tressie McMillan Cottom, an Opinion columnist

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Can a moderate be an insurgent? “So while I had Mr. Moulton on the phone, I asked him: What does his campaign stand for, besides a new generation of leadership?”

— Charlotte Alter, author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America”

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Spotlight

An illustration of many gun barrels, each with a tiny yellow human figure inside wielding a handgun.

Alexis Beauclair

The Point of a Gun

Owning a gun is an emotional choice, and these days, for more and more kinds of Americans, it feels like empowerment.

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ICYMI

Trump is fighting the wrong trade war. “Washington needs to rally all potential allies in the collective fight against China’s market dominance.”

— Chad P. Bown, an author of “How to Win a Trade War”

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There Is a Sickness Worse Than Wokeness

The anti-woke movement’s “cure” was more intolerance and more repression.

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Even Machiavelli Wouldn’t Like Trump’s America

We are hated, but not feared.

By Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens

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Guest Essay

This Is How the A.I. Debt Binge Sinks the Economy

The A.I.-fueled debt bubble will likely result in a painful downturn.

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In Your Words

Re: “A Question for the Formerly Woke: What Exactly Do You Regret?”

Melanie

California

Flippantly dismissing “woke 1” is like throwing away the baby with the bathwater. I'm a 56 year old woman and the “woke” movement opened my eyes to things that I could feel but couldn't name. Yes, some of it now seems contrived, particularly the language, but so much of it offered awareness of other peoples’ truths.

Institutionalized racism is still a thing, so is the pay gap and discrimination against the LGBTQ community. White privilege? Real. Disparity of health care between men and women? Still there. “Me too” was so necessary.

I think part of the problem was the inability to explain it in simple terms. So, yes, exactly which part of “woke 1” are they abandoning?

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