Two things happened in the same American economy this week, and only one of them got a bell.
The first: the president rang the stock market's opening bell from the Oval Office - the first president ever to do it from there - capping a week of scoreboard-keeping that began with the July 4 post: 'THE TRUMP ECONOMY IS SOARING! The Stock Market just completed its BEST QUARTER since the last time I was President' [1]. The market is genuinely up - roughly 15 trillion dollars in gains since he returned [1]. When he said last week that 'everybody's profiting' from it, we checked who everybody is; that correction stands, and Friday's record only sharpens it.
The second thing happened at noon Friday, in a PDF from his own Department of Agriculture. The July WASDE - the government's master forecast for what food will cost to produce - cut its 2026 beef production estimate, citing slower steer and heifer slaughter and lighter carcass weights, and raised its cattle price forecasts for both late 2026 and 2027 [2][3]. Translated out of the commodity tables: the government's own outlook says the beef squeeze does not end this year, or next. The squeeze is already at the register - ground beef averaged 6.75 dollars a pound in May, up from 5.55 in January 2025, up 70 percent from five years ago [4]. For a family buying two pounds a week, the difference since January 2025 alone runs about 125 dollars a year - one grocery item.
Data
| Jan 2021 | 3.97$/lb |
|---|---|
| Jan 2025 | 5.55$/lb |
| May 2026 | 6.75$/lb |
Now the ownership ledger that decides which of the two economies a scoreboard reflects. About 40 percent of Americans own no stock at all, per Gallup; the wealthiest 1 percent own more than half of the country's capital-market investments [1]. The celebrated 15 trillion accrues along that line. The president's own quarterly disclosures - 3,600 trades, valued between 212 and 695 million dollars [1] - put the scoreboard-keeper among its winners, which he has said himself. The 6.75-a-pound economy, meanwhile, arrives at every table in the country, weekly, without regard to portfolio.
Here is the play, and it is older than this president: govern to the measure you can ring a bell for. The honest ledger keeps both columns - a market at highs for the people in it, and a noon forecast from the same government saying the grocery column tightens through 2027. One column got an Oval Office ceremony this week. The other got this article, and the USDA's own numbers wrote most of it.
