U.S. NEWS

Rocket Mortgage's November report found the best states based on several factors, including overall affordability and social and economic elements.

The U.S. News ranked the best national universities in the U.S. and due to ties in rankings more than 40 schools were included in the list.

A Houston legend just received one of the nation’s highest honors for his contributions to his community and the country at large, awarded by President Joe Biden himself.

U.S. News in October unveiled its annual list of the best places to retire. In order to determine its ranking of the best places to retire, U.S. News analyzed 150 metro areas across the country. Houston came in at 22 out of 150, outranking the other Texas cities listed except Dallas-Fort Worth, which was ranked the 17th best place to retire. Here’s what U.S. News had to say about the city of Houston"The Houston metro area attracts people with an entrepreneurial spirit and those who want to work at some of the country’s largest companies. The region has weathered the economic downturn better than similarly sized metro areas in terms of bouncing back from lost jobs.

If the U.S. continues to raise a wall of tariffs on Chinese goods in the coming months and China responds, expect a global recession in three quarters, Morgan Stanley said Monday. "As we view the risk of further escalation as high, the risks to the global outlook are decidedly skewed to the downside," Morgan Stanley chief economist Chetan Ahya said. The firm believes a global recession will come in about nine months if the trade war further escalates through the U.S. raising tariffs to 25% "on all imports from China for 4-6 months," Ahya said. These new tariffs "raise downside risks significantly," Ahya said. "But these measures, while helpful in containing downside risks, will not be enough to drive a recovery until trade policy uncertainty dissipates."

China has halted imports of U.S. agricultural products, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the situation. This hits at a sensitive issue for President Donald Trump. The president claimed that he had secured large quantities of agricultural purchases when he met with President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit in June. He later accused China of not following through with those purchases, leading him to announce on Thursday 10% tariffs on the remaining $300 billion in Chinese imports. Trump has ordered a $16 billion aid package to U.S. farmers, an important group for him politically, to help them during the trade battle.