Recommended Weekend Reads
Understanding Trump’s Latin American Military Buildup, The Secret and Massive Drug Smuggling Routes into the US, Young Adults Are Spending Less Time Together, and The Desperate Search for Safe Havens
October 31 - November 2, 2025
Below are a number of reports and articles we read this past week and found particularly interesting. Hopefully, you will find them interesting and useful as well. Have a great weekend.
The Americas
Understanding Trump’s Military Buildup in Latin America Americas Quarterly Podcast
The recent deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the U.S. Navy’s largest aircraft carrier, has intensified speculation about Washington’s true objectives in the Southern Caribbean. In this episode of the Americas Quarterly Podcast, we examine what’s really behind the Trump administration’s escalating military activity. Is it a hardline campaign against drug cartels, or the opening moves of a broader effort to pressure Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro? What do we know about dynamics within the Venezuelan military? And to what extent could this impact Washington’s relations with Colombia and other countries in the region? Our guest is Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
From Posture to Purpose: Rethinking U.S. Strategic Aims in Venezuela FIU Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy
The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean reflects a strategic confusion between counter-narcotics and regime-change objectives in Venezuela. Current operations project power but lack coherence, risking escalation without achievable outcomes. A sustainable strategy must align U.S. means and ends, favoring intelligence, law enforcement, and targeted financial tools over military coercion. Even limited “surgical strikes” risk hardening regime cohesion, triggering regional instability, fueling migration flows, and creating governance vacuums with grave humanitarian consequences. To avoid these pitfalls while focusing on transnational criminal organizations, Washington should prioritize multilateral law-enforcement cooperation, expand Coast Guard and intelligence capabilities, and strengthen sanctions enforcement targeting the regime’s illicit revenue streams. Aligning coercive, diplomatic, and economic instruments toward realistic, proportional goals offers the only path to sustainable results without deepening Venezuela’s crisis on entangling the United States militarily.
After Argentina’s Midterms, a New Chapter for U.S.-Argentina Relations Center for Strategic and International Studies
Argentina’s midterms may also herald a new era of U.S. relations with the country and Latin America as a whole. In the weeks leading up to the election, the United States announced a major financial assistance package, giving Argentina access to a total of $40 billion in U.S. dollar currency swaps, with $20 billion coming from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, and a further $20 billion from banks and sovereign wealth funds. In addition to this, the Trump administration announced plans to purchase Argentine beef, a move that was deeply unpopular with U.S. ranchers but offered a powerful signal of the importance Washington places on its relationship with Buenos Aires
See the Secret Networks Smuggling Drugs to the U.S. From Latin America The Wall Street Journal
These interactive reports and accompanying maps show how demand in America for illegal drugs such as fentanyl and cocaine fuels sophisticated systems for smuggling them in. Traffickers deploy everything from fast-moving fiberglass boats to stealthy “narco-subs” to cargo ships to get their products to users without losing shipments to seizures or couriers to arrest. With decades of experience, according to U.S. counternarcotics officials, the traffickers are usually a step ahead of America and its allies in Latin American and Caribbean waters
Youth and Family Trends and Their Future Impact on the Economy
Cognitive Skills Beyond Childhood The Economic Journal
Data from a British birth cohort followed since 1958 show that cognitive skills early in life predict wages at age 50 better than cognitive skills at age 50. Early cognitive skills likely allow for higher educational attainment or on-the-job learning.
Young Adults Are Spending Less Time With Friends Institute for Family Studies
In post-pandemic America, young adults are spending a record amount of time alone. But even before the pandemic, young adults began spending less time with friends. In 2010, young adults ages 18 to 29 on average spent 12.8 hours a week with friends. By 2019, that number nearly halved, falling to 6.5 hours a week. The pandemic exacerbated this trend with a low point of 4.2 hours a week with friends in 2020. And while we’ve seen a slight increase since, socializing has not nearly recovered. Today, young adults spend just 5 hours a week with friends. Lingering effects of pandemic-era isolation are certainly at play, but the role of technology cannot be ignored.
Mind the Fertility Gap: Why people stopped having babies and how economic freedom can help Institute for Economic Affairs
n a new paper published by the Institute, British women are falling at least 0.4 children short of their own stated family goals, according to fertility data through 2011, with this gap likely widening as fertility now hits record lows of 1.44 while desired family size remains stable at 2.2. New report shows how pro-natal policies that focus on cash incentives, such as baby bonuses, subsidies, and maternity pay, may have some short-term effect but are often found wanting and prohibitively expensive. Evidence shows policies affecting economic freedom, including Labour market, childcare and housing liberalization, can have profound effects on fertility through their impact on work-family compatibility
Geoeconomics & Financial Markets
The Role of Single-Family Rentals in the U.S. Housing Market Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
When homeownership and home sales plummeted in 2010 in the wake of the housing market collapse, investors responded by purchasing single-family homes and renting them out to households that could not afford to buy such homes but still desired this type of housing. Subsequently, investor-owned single-family rentals (SFRs) increased as a share of total single-family properties, and they continue to increase as a housing supply shortage and higher mortgage rates make homeownership difficult for many first-time homebuyers. This blog post summarizes economic research that has been done on the role of investor-owned SFRs in the U.S. housing market. Such research has found that the vast majority of SFRs are owned by small-scale investors. Properties owned by large-scale investors tend to increase prices of nearby homes, while ownership by small-scale investors appears to have the opposite effect. Research has also found that investor-owned SFRs expand housing options available to renters but may negatively impact renter welfare in terms of eviction filings4and rent increases.
The Desperate Search for Safe Havens Robin Brooks Substack
Countries with low debt burdens are outperforming ones with lots of debt. The right chart above shows this dynamic. Since Jackson Hole, the Swedish Krona (red line) is the best performing currency against the Dollar, followed by the Norwegian Krone (orange line) and Swiss Franc (black line). The Euro (pink line) is flat against the Dollar, no surprise since it consists mostly of high-debt countries, with Germany’s recent move to soften up its debt brake and pursue big fiscal stimulus a major destabilizer for the region. The Japanese Yen (blue line) is down over two percent against the Dollar, no surprise given that gross government debt is 240 percent of GDP. The fact that Sweden is at the top of the pack makes sense. The Krona is massively undervalued (it’s at the same level against the Euro as during the global financial crisis), while Sweden has also managed to steer clear of endlessly rising debt levels that so bedevil the Euro periphery.
As New Jobs In Finance Dry Up, New York City’s Fiscal Model Is Wilting The Economist
According to the Citizens Budget Commission New York state’s share of American taxpayers reporting more than $1m in income declined from 12.7% in 2010 to 8.7% in 2022. Such people paid $34bn in income tax to the state and city in 2022, a figure that would have been $13bn higher if New York’s share of millionaires had held up. Estimates from Goldman Sachs suggest that fully 10% of households in New York City with incomes of more than $10m established residency elsewhere between 2018 and 2023. As the ultra-rich have headed for the exit, the city’s employment growth has become concentrated in much worse-paid industries than finance. Since the end of 2019, New York has added more than 268,000 jobs in health care and social assistance, particularly home health care. Employment as a whole rose by just 220,000 over the same period, meaning that, if it was not for that industry, overall employment would have shrunk.