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For Immediate Release
April, 21 2026, 10:58am EDT
Contact:
press@groundworkcollaborative.org
April’s Beige Book Reveals Trump’s War in Iran Is Devastating Economy At Home
First report compiled after Trump started war in Iran shows consumers are on the hook for ‘skyrocketing’ prices
The Federal Reserve released its April 2026 Beige Book, which provides economic commentary from each of the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. In this month’s report, the first since the start of Trump’s war in Iran, regional contacts reported painful price increases tied directly to the conflict, sustained consumer strain, and instability in the labor market.
Groundwork’s Chief of Policy and Advocacy, Alex Jacquez, offered his reaction:
“The Fed last week confirmed what working families already know to be true. Trump’s illegal war in Iran is driving up prices and squeezing wallets across the country, while businesses struggle to keep up with market instability. The Beige Book’s message couldn’t be clearer – as long as the president continues on this destructive path, workers and consumers will pay the price.”
Background:
The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book contains critical economic indicators, including the risk of recession. It is compiled with firsthand reports from contacts at businesses, banks, and community organizations across each of the 12 Federal Reserve Districts to report regional economic conditions. April’s Beige Book reveals the following.
Trump’s war in Iran is directly responsible for driving up prices across the economy. Increased input costs for producers and tightened oil supply ballooned prices on everything from fertilizer to plastic products.
- Volunteers may have to cut back on delivering meals to homebound seniors due to exorbitant gas prices, according to a contact in Dallas.
- Business leaders in Atlanta admitted that should the war in Iran continue, they’ll be forced to reevaluate their pricing.
- Contacts at Richmond ports forecast that the longer Trump pursues the war in Iran, the greater impact the conflict will have across supply chains.
- Businesses are holding off on long-term hiring, instead turning to temporary and contract workers, according to a temporary employment agency in Chicago that has seen a surge in demand amidst the uncertainty, as well as contacts in Cleveland and Boston.
- A Chicago manufacturer said they have instituted a hiring freeze in anticipation of higher input costs related to the Iran war.
Energy costs are hitting everyone, everywhere. Higher freight and shipping costs hit producers and families face budget-shattering utility bills.
- In Cleveland, contacts reported that their fuel costs are ‘skyrocketing,’ and attributed the spike directly to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
- Atlanta energy contacts anticipate that crude oil prices will remain elevated or increase further into the summer due to infrastructure destruction in the Middle East.
- In New York, a contact reported that Trump’s war is pushing up utility prices for working and middle class families.
Low-income households are struggling while high earners pull away. The K-shaped economy is on display as high earners splurge and working families scrimp.
- A Kansas City report says that working families’ budgets don’t stand a chance against low wages, tariff fallout, and elevated inflation.
- Food bank lines are getting longer thanks to price increases at the grocery store and an uncertain economic outlook in the wake of the Trump administration’s attacks on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to contacts in Dallas and Atlanta.
- In St. Louis, a contact noted that increased overdraft fees reflect that budgets are strained and working families have been forced to make difficult choices to reduce discretionary spending.
The Groundwork Collaborative is dedicated to advancing a coherent and persuasive progressive economic worldview and narrative capable of delivering meaningful opportunity and prosperity for everyone. Our work is driven by a core guiding principle: We are the economy. Groundwork Collaborative envisions an economic system that produces strong, broadly shared prosperity and power for all people, not just a wealthy few.
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Amnesty Calls for Resistance to 'Predatory World Order' Pushed by Trump, Netanyahu in Annual Rights Report
"We must imagine a transformed and transformative human rights vision for the world that we are becoming, not merely defend human rights in terms of the world we once were."
Apr 21, 2026
Opening Amnesty International's annual report on human rights around the globe on Tuesday, the group's secretary general named the leaders of two powerful countries as being at the forefront of a push for a "predatory alternative world order."
While the US and Israel are viewed as two of the world's leading democracies, said longtime human rights advocate Agnes Callamard, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have spent the past year promoting "a global environment where primitive ferocity" is flourishing.
"Throughout 2025, voracious predators stalked through our global commons, hulking hunters plundering unjust trophies," wrote Callamard in the preface to the report, "The State of World's Human Rights."
"Political leaders like Trump, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and Netanyahu, among many others, carried out their conquests for economic and political domination through destruction, suppression, and violence on a massive scale," she added.
The report was published nearly two months after the US and Israel began attacking Iran in an unprovoked war—violating international law, including the United Nations Charter, according to legal experts. A temporary ceasefire deal was struck nearly two weeks ago, and Trump said Tuesday that he is unwilling to extend the truce and expects "to be bombing" Iran again soon if a permanent deal isn't reached.
More than 3,300 people have been killed in Iran since the US and Israel began the war, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have also killed at least 2,294 people in Lebanon as it wages what it says are attacks on the Iran-aligned group Hezbollah—an assault that has displaced about 1.2 million people, representing more than 20% of Lebanon's population, and included attacks on schools, healthcare facilities, and journalists.
Israeli officials have said they are using Gaza as a "model" for the IDF's assault on Lebanon. Israel's US-backed war on Gaza began in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, and has killed more that 72,000 Palestinians, including at least 777 people since a ceasefire was agreed to in October 2025. Leading human rights groups including Amnesty as well as Holocaust scholars have said the war on Gaza is a genocide, and South Africa has filed a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Netanyahu's arrest, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
In addition to waging war on Iran, in the past year the Trump administration has invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, accusing them of drug trafficking; bombed more than 50 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 180 people in an operation officials have also claimed is aimed at stopping the drug trade; and imposed an oil blockade on Cuba while threatening military intervention there.
Meanwhile, the White House has slashed foreign aid spending, threatening millions of lives worldwide, as well as investments in domestic social programs, as it's pushed to further increase the United States' astronomical military budget.
"The predatory world order discards racial and gender justice, mocks women’s rights, declares civil society a common enemy, and rejects international solidarity," wrote Callamard. "It directs an unprecedented hike in military investments, enables unlawful arms transfers, and imposes sweeping cuts to international aid budget, risking millions of avoidable death and decimating thousands of organizations working for human rights, sexual and reproductive rights, or press freedom."
Callamard warned that far too many world leaders—confronted with superpowers that "recklessly poured" accelerants over "dry kindling" and took "sharp U-turns... away from the international order that had been imagined out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the utter destruction of world wars"—either appeased Trump and Netanyahu over the past year, attempted to imitate their authoritarian tendencies, or "ducked for cover under their shadow."
She noted that a "handful chose to stand up to them," such as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who refused to allow the US to use its airspace and military bases for the Iran war, and countries that joined South Africa's genocide case at the ICJ.
But overall, Callamard wrote, "one firebreak after another was breached: through complicity in, or silence about, the commissions of genocide and crimes against humanity; and through imposition of crippling sanctions against those working to deliver justice. That’s how 2025 will be remembered: for its bullies and predators; for the pouring of the politics of appeasement onto burning betrayals of international obligations; for self-defeatism; for states playing with a fire that threatens now to burn us all and scorch the future too, for generations to come."
Callamard emphasized that around the world in 2025, countries showed that "predatory" leaders can still be held accountable and that "reports of the death of the international rule-based order are greatly exaggerated":
Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, was handed over to the ICC under a warrant for the crime against humanity of murder. In the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, 156 states voted for negotiations on an international instrument on autonomous weapons systems. In July, the EU extended the scope of goods covered by its pioneering Anti-Torture Regulation. Significant progress was made in 2025 towards a binding UN tax convention. At COP30, civil society and trade union pressure helped adoption of a Just Transition Mechanism for the protection of workers and communities as countries shift to clean energy and a climate-resilient future. The International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued advisory opinions affirming state human rights obligations to respond to climate damage. Colombia and the Netherlands agreed to co-host the First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in April 2026. Countrywide strikes and actions by dockworkers mounted in France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Spain, and Sweden disrupted arms shipment routes to Israel. The governments of Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Slovenia, South Africa, and Spain committed in 2025 to modify or halt arms trade with Israel. Women gained expanded abortion rights in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Luxembourg, and Malawi. In Nepal, a youth-led uprising against corruption toppled the government.
Those victories, suggested Callamard, don't change the fact that the world is now facing a "challenging moment, threatening to destroy all that was built up over the last 80 years."
"Today 'still we rise' means focusing on what must be defended as a matter of priority and at all costs, not only for the sake of our human rights but those of future generations too," said Callamard. "In our resistance, we must also clearly identify what must be disrupted as a matter of absolute priority, among the tsunami of laws, policies, and practices unleashed by predatory state and nonstate actors."
"We must imagine a transformed and transformative human rights vision for the world that we are becoming, not merely defend human rights in terms of the world we once were," she wrote. "Together, we must then lead that transformation into existence, with all our creativity, determination, and resilience."
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A UN official said a proposal to provide food, water, medicine, and shelter to tens of millions of those facing war and poverty could have been funded “in less than a fortnight of this reckless war.”
Apr 21, 2026
US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.
Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.
"We're already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack," Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.
The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.
"You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked," Fletcher said. "We've had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we'll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty."
Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.
“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion," he said. "We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”
Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.
He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel's genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.
"A thousand dead humanitarians in three years," Fletcher said. "When did that become normal?"
He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.
"Don't just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected," he said. "Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it."
He said "big powers" view geopolitics in a highly "transactional" way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.
"I wouldn't have thought I'd need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are," he said.
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“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”
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"Whether you're making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you're too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity," he said, "all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we're here to serve."
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The White House Correspondents' Association is facing pressure to stand up to President Donald Trump over his administration's relentless assault on the free press.
A letter sent to the WHCA on Monday and signed by prestigious US journalists—including Ann Curry, Bill Press, Sam Donaldson, and Dan Rather—urges the association to use its upcoming White House Correspondents' Dinner to "forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump's efforts to trample freedom of the press."
The letter outlines several Trump administration actions that it says have undermined the First Amendment of the US Constitution, including "retaliatory access bans, coercive regulatory investigations, frivolous lawsuits against the press, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists... the arrest of journalists, and the pardoning of those who committed violence against the press."
The letter says that making a strong statement of resistance to Trump will be particularly important because the president is expected to attend and speak at this year's dinner.
"These are not normal times," the letter states, "and this cannot be business as usual with the press standing up to applaud the man who attacks them on a daily basis."
The letter recommends journalists attending the dinner "speak forcefully, in front of the man who seeks to undermine our country's long tradition of an independent, strong, and free press."
On Monday night, Status News reported that Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, who has threatened to revoke broadcasters' licenses unless they give the Trump administration more favorable news coverage.
Mark Jacob, former metro editor at The Chicago Tribune and Sunday editor at The Chicago Sun-Times who last week called for the dinner to be canceled, wrote in a Tuesday social media post that Carr's presence at the dinner seemed like a deliberate insult to the journalists attending.
"The suck-up media will never learn," Jacob commented. "When you invite fascists to dinner, they devour you."
In a piece published by the Washington Monthly on Tuesday, journalist Bill Scher said that Trump's presence at the WHCA dinner was a betrayal of the organization's stated mission to celebrate and defend freedom of the press, and Scher also recommended canceling the event.
"A fundraising event to support 'programs to educate the public and the value of the First Amendment and a free press,'" Scher wrote, "should not have a featured speaker who is the biggest peacetime threat to the First Amendment and a free press in American history."
Scher went on to slam the "naive" rationales offered by WHCA members in showcasing Trump at the event.
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