By Gerson Freitas Jr., Bloomberg News

American beef lovers may face even leaner plates and higher prices next year as US production shrinks to a decade low and tariffs limit imports, according to a US government projection.

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Total beef supply in the US is expected to drop 2.5% in 2026 to 31.1 billion pounds — the lowest since 2019 — the US Department of Agriculture said in a monthly report. The decline threatens to push record beef prices even higher, with tariffs limiting importers’ ability to soften the blow.

US beef supplies have been constrained by a shrinking herd. For years, ranchers have been culling cows due to a combination of persistent drought and high costs, reducing the domestic inventory to its lowest level in several decades.

Record prices for slaughter-weight animals have fueled expectations that ranchers will begin rebuilding the herd in 2026 — but that would tighten supplies even further in the short term, as ranchers would need to retain more females for breeding rather than sending them to processors.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has slapped hefty tariffs on shipments from Brazil, making supplies from the world’s largest beef exporter more costly.

US beef production is expected to fall 1.8% to 25.5 billion pounds next year, the lowest since 2016, while imports are projected to decline 6.1% to 4.95 billion pounds, according to the USDA. Both forecasts were revised lower from last month.

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By MATT OTT, Associated Press Business Writer

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits fell modestly last week, remaining in the historically low range since the U.S. economy emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Applications for unemployment benefits for the week ending Aug. 9 fell by 3,000 to 224,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s below the 230,000 new applications that economists had forecast.

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Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as a proxy for U.S. layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since COVID-19 throttled the economy in the spring of 2020.

Two weeks ago, a grim July jobs report sent financial markets spiraling, spurring President Donald Trump to fire Erika McEntarfer, the head of Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tallies the monthly employment numbers. The BLS does not contribute to the weekly unemployment benefits report except to calculate the annual seasonal adjustments.

U.S. employers added just 73,000 jobs in July, well short of the 115,000 analysts forecast. Worse, revisions to the May and June figures shaved 258,000 jobs off previous estimates and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%.

Without citing evidence, Trump accused McEntarfer of rigging the jobs data for political reasons. On Monday, Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to head the BLS.

While layoffs remain low by historical standards, there has been noticeable deterioration in the labor market this year and mounting evidence that people are having difficulty finding jobs.

U.S. employers posted 7.4 million job vacancies in June, down from 7.7 million in May. The number of people quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence in finding a better job — fell in June to the lowest level since December.

Some major companies have announced job cuts this year, including Procter & Gamble, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Google and Facebook parent company Meta. Intel and The Walt Disney Co. also recently announced staff reductions.

Many economists contend that Trump’s erratic rollout of tariffs against U.S. trading partners has created uncertainty for employers, who have grown reluctant to expand their payrolls.

The deadline on most of Trump’s proposed taxes on imports kicked in last week, though some deals have been made and other deadlines for negotiations — most importantly with China — have been extended. Unless Trump reaches deals with countries to lower the tariffs, economists fear they could act as a drag on the economy and spark another rise in inflation.

Also Thursday, new government data showed that U.S. wholesale inflation surged unexpectedly last month, a sign that Trump’s sweeping taxes on imports are pushing costs higher.

Thursday’s jobless benefits report showed that the four-week average of claims, which smooths out some of the week-to-week volatility, ticked up by 750 to 221,750.

The total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits for the previous week of Aug. 2 fell by 15,000 to 1.95 million.

By PAUL WISEMAN, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. wholesale inflation surged unexpectedly last month, signaling that President Donald Trump’s sweeping taxes on imports are pushing costs up and that higher prices may be headed toward consumers.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that its producer price index — which measures inflation before it hits consumers— rose 0.9% last month from June, biggest jump in more than three years. Compared with a year earlier, wholesale prices rose 3.3%,

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The numbers were much higher than economists had expected.

Prices rose faster for producers than consumers last month, suggesting that U.S. importers may, for now, be eating the cost of Trump’s tariffs rather than passing them on to customers.

That may not last.

“It will only be a matter of time before producers pass their higher tariff-related costs onto the backs of inflation-weary consumers,” wrote Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at fwdbonds, a financial markets research firm.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core producer prices rose 0.9% from June, biggest month-over-month jump since March 2022. Compared with a year ago, core wholesale prices rose 3.7% after posting a 2.6% year-over-year jump in June.

The wholesale inflation report two days after the Labor Department reported that consumer prices rose 2.7% last month from July 2024, same as the previous month and up from a post-pandemic low of 2.3% in April. Core consumer prices rose 3.1%, up from 2.9% in June. Both figures are above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

The new numbers suggest that slowing rent increases and cheaper gas are at least partly offsetting the impacts of Trump’s tariffs. Many businesses are also likely still absorbing much of the cost of the duties instead of passing them along to customers via higher prices.

Wholesale prices can offer an early look at where consumer inflation might be headed. Economists also watch it because some of its components, notably measures of health care and financial services, flow into the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge — the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, index.

By JONATHAN J. COOPER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — First lady Melania Trump demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and threatened to sue if he does not.

Trump takes issue with two comments Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, made in an interview this month with American journalist Andrew Callaghan. He alleged that Epstein introduced the first lady to now-President Donald Trump.

FILE – Hunter Biden listens while his father, President Joe Biden, speaks during a Hanukkah reception in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)

The statements are false, defamatory and “extremely salacious,” Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, wrote in a letter to Biden. Biden’s remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” he wrote.

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Biden made the Epstein comments during a sprawling interview in which he lashed out at “elites” and others in the Democratic Party he says undermined his father before he dropped out of last year’s presidential campaign.

“Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep,” Biden said in one of the comments Trump disputes. Biden attributed the claim to author Michael Wolff, whom Trump disparaged in June as a “Third Rate Reporter.” He has accused Wolff of making up stories to sell books.

The first lady’s threats echo a favored strategy of her husband, who has aggressively used litigation to go after critics. Public figures like the Trumps face a high bar to succeed in a defamation lawsuit.

The president and first lady have long said they were introduced by Paolo Zampolli, a modeling agent, at a New York Fashion Week party in 1998.

The letter is dated Aug. 6 and was first reported Wednesday by Fox News Digital.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer who has represented Biden in his criminal cases and to whom Brito’s letter is addressed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Wednesday.