💵 🇺🇸 🏬 Half of Americans’ Spending Goes to Housing and Food, Most in 15 Years

Food and housing — which includes rent, utilities and household furniture — were the only two major spending categories to post statistically significant increases last year, according to the BLS.

Housing remained the largest household expense, accounting for 33.9% of total expenditures. Excluding a jump in 2020 after Covid hit, that share was the highest since 2010.

The share of spending Americans dedicate to food, meanwhile, has been rising since 2020 and at 13% is now the highest since 2011. The dollar value of the food budget — up 4.6% to $10,633 in 2025 — outpaced the increase in total spending.

Americans spent $1,579 on meat, poultry, fish and eggs last year. That’s 11.7% more than in 2024 and twice as much as in 2010.

Those products accounted for about 24% of grocery spending in 2025, up from 19% in 2023. Over those two years, protein accounted for about 95% of the increase in average food-at-home spending.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-30/housing-food-costs-make-up-half-of-americans-spending-most-in-15-years

📎 Bloomberg

🇺🇸❌🇿🇦According to the statement, the Trump administration’s concerns about Rwanda include barriers to trade and investment, the rule of law and political pluralism. In South Africa, it said, the administration is deeply concerned about barriers to US trade and investment, corruption and threats to US national security and foreign-policy interests.

@SouthAfricaReports

🇫🇷🇩🇪🪧 Halloween youth protests spread from France to Germany as Europe's economic model cracks

Youth-led protests swept Europe on Halloween as 320,000 people marched in France, according to the interior ministry, for a third straight weekend, while the unrest spread to dozens of German cities.

The French interior ministry put turnout on October 31 at 320,000, including 70,000 in Paris, while a coalition of youth groups and student unions claimed nearly half a million. The marches started peacefully but ended in clashes on the eastern edge of Paris, where masked protesters prised up paving stones and threw them at police, who answered with tear gas and baton charges. Police also fired tear gas in Lyon, and the ministry counted around 290 arrests nationwide by the evening.

In Germany the Gen Z regelt ("Gen Z handles it") alliance of school and university students said 120,000 people took to the streets against social spending cuts, crumbling schools, the cost of living and the return of conscription. Police used water cannon in Frankfurt, Cologne and Hamburg. Frankfurt police described "violent riots", with looting and Molotov cocktails thrown at emergency services, and in Hamburg officers said they were "repeatedly pelted with stones, fireworks and other objects" before organisers called the march off early, Al Jazeera reported.

The triggers differ from country to country but the protests share a common root: a generation that no longer believes it will live better than its parents, squeezed by a cost-of-living crisis that started with an energy shock and is now being made worse as governments divert scarce money to rearmament and the war in Ukraine. That makes this a structural crisis rather than a cyclical one, and the anger is already being harvested by the populist right.

The French movement began in the lycees on September 17 over dilapidated school buildings, teacher shortages and the Parcoursup university admissions system, and grew into the country's worst rioting in years. On October 17 the government estimated turnout at more than 500,000 and shops were looted in Paris. The wave has since reached Belgium, Italy, where there were clashes in Milan, Turin and Bologna, and Spain, where Catalan police raised their alert to the highest level after rioting in Barcelona on October 24 led to about 130 arrests, most of them minors. In Germany, school students had already walked out in more than 100 cities in September against the step-by-step return of military service.

In Albania, where students have been on the streets since October 13 demanding Prime Minister Edi Rama's resignation, Halloween brought placards reading "The real monsters wear suits!" that cast Rama and opposition leader Sali Berisha as blood-soaked vampires above a crate marked "Korrupsion". Berisha's Democratic Party had called a national rally for October 31 in support of the students, who have refused Rama's offers of talks, but the demand on the streets is increasingly for both men to go, according to the Tirana Report news account on X. The government has answered with fines for anyone who stays in a crowd that turns violent.

"These are the protests of a generation that believes it has been robbed of its future," Thomas Fazi wrote in UnHerd on November 1. The triggers are schools in France and Belgium, housing in Spain and Portugal, the cost of living in Italy and corruption in Serbia, but the social contract their parents knew - work hard and you will own a home, support a family and do better than the generation before - has collapsed, according to Fazi.

A decade of quantitative easing inflated the property and financial assets held by the old while wages stagnated, locking the young out of home ownership. Labour market reforms such as Germany's Hartz laws, Italy's Jobs Act and France's El Khomri law protected those already in work and pushed newcomers into a revolving door of temporary contracts, and after 2010 austerity fell hardest on education, youth services and public investment. Then came the pandemic, an inflation surge and an energy shock "that Europe's leaders largely inflicted on themselves", according to Fazi. Now the young are being asked to accept further cuts "to make room for rearmament and an open-ended war".

In France the over-60s, about a quarter of the population, hold around 60% of national wealth, according to Fazi, and the political consequences are already visible: a third of French under-25s backed the far-right Rassemblement National in 2024, and more than a quarter of young German men voted for the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/halloween-youth-protests-spread-from-france-to-germany-as-europe-s-economic-model-cracks-480681/