Podcasts about gdp

Joe's Premium Subscription: www.standardgrain.comGrain Markets and Other Stuff Links-Apple PodcastsSpotifyTikTokYouTubeFutures and options trading involves risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone.0:00 Crop Tour Update4:21 CME / Fanduel Casino7:32 Russia Wheat Update10:21 Cattle Surge Again12:14 Fed Minutes13:59 Ethanol Production14:46 Flash Sale

Send us a textThe economic landscape is sending mixed signals to wealth builders, and your strategic positioning needs to account for these crosscurrents. Home Depot's recent earnings miss reveals a telling shift in consumer behavior that directly impacts your investment strategy. With net sales falling short at $45.28 billion and a 2.2% decline in foot traffic, consumers are clearly pulling back from large renovations in favor of small maintenance projects. This isn't just about one retailer's performance—it's a broader indicator of how rate sensitivity is reshaping spending patterns across markets.The spotlight now turns to Federal Reserve Chair Powell's upcoming Jackson Hole speech, potentially the most consequential market event this season. Markets have already priced in an 83% probability of a September rate cut, but the real question remains: will Powell signal a dovish turn or maintain a cautious stance? Treasury officials and political figures are pushing for aggressive cuts between 150-400 basis points, yet the Fed's independence will ultimately determine the path forward. Make no mistake—analysts warn that without clear dovish signals, markets could slide 7-15% this fall, making your defensive positioning critical right now.Meanwhile, the S&P's reaffirmation of the US AA+ credit rating offers temporary fiscal reassurance, with tariff revenue estimated to contribute up to $2.8 trillion, offsetting recent spending increases. However, persistent deficits exceeding 100% of GDP remain a long-term vulnerability. The rating agency explicitly cited Federal Reserve independence as the strongest defense against future downgrades—a powerful reminder that monetary policy autonomy directly impacts market stability. Whether you're repositioning for potential rate cuts, adjusting exposure to consumer cyclicals, or monitoring fiscal developments, staying informed and strategically nimble will be your greatest advantage in capitalizing on the opportunities ahead.Support the showIntroducing the 60-Day Deal Finder!Visit: www.wealthyaf.mediaUse the Coupon Code: WEALTHYAF for 20% off!

สภาพัฒน์เผย GDP ไทยชะลอตัว เศรษฐกิจขยายตัว 2.8% ใน Q2/2568 ชะลอตัว 2 ไตรมาสติด สวนทางเพื่อนบ้าน รายละเอียดเป็นอย่างไร วิเคราะห์ GDP ไทยโตชะลอ 2 ไตรมาสติด รั้งท้ายอาเซียน น่าห่วงแค่ไหน พูดคุยกับ ดร.มิ่งขวัญ ทองพฤกษา Chief Economist บลจ.บัวหลวง

When the EU and US hit Russia with fresh sanctions in 2022, many analysts expected the country's economy to crack. Instead, Russia has shown strong GDP growth, powered in large part by a massive boost to war-related industries. Now, the effects of that boost appear to be fading. Have western sanctions finally started to bite? What would happen to Russia's economy if the Ukraine war were to end? And how difficult might it be for the country's economy to return to normal? To find out, the FT's economics editor Sam Fleming speaks to Elina Ribakova. Elina is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a non-resident fellow at Brussels think-tank Bruegel and vice-president for foreign policy at the Kyiv School of Economics.Sam Fleming is the FT's economics editor. You can find his articles here: https://www.ft.com/sam-flemingWant more? Free links:Russia moves to contain concern over banks' bad loan exposureVladimir Putin's war economy is cooling, but Russians still feel richerRussia's central bank speeds up rate cuts as war economy coolsThere's no money to be made in RussiaThe FT Weekend Festival returns for its 10th edition on Saturday, September 6 at Kenwood House Gardens in London. Get details and tickets hereSubscribe to The Economics Show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen. Presented by Sam Fleming. Produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval. Flo Phillips is the executive producer. Manuela Saragosa is the FT's acting co-head of audio. Original music from Breen Turner, and sound design by Breen Turner & Sam Giovinco.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

[깊이 있는 경제뉴스] 1) 대만 1인당 GDP 4만불 뚫는다.. 내년 한국 추월 2) 로켓에 홀린 대만.. 쿠팡, 이커머스 1위 3) 연차휴가 개편 검토.. '6개월부터?20일' 4) 공휴일 요일제로 바꾸면 소비 2조원 는다 - 정지서 연합인포맥스 기자 - 조미현 한국경제신문 기자 [친절한 경제] 부동산 PF 부실 터지면 여파가 어디까지 번지나요? - 청취자 정승일 씨

A senior US Senator says Australia's level of defence spending is much closer to 3% of GDP – if shipyards and other defence infrastructure is included.

Guy Adami and Dan Nathan host Neil Dutta, partner and Head of Economic Research at Renaissance Macro Research, on the RiskReversal Podcast. Neil shares his career journey, his time at NYU, and his experience working with David Rosenberg and Ethan Harris at Merrill Lynch. The conversation covers current economic issues including the US housing market recession, labor market dynamics, and the impact of restrictive monetary policy. Neil also discusses the significant investment in AI and its potential to boost GDP growth. The discussion touches on the Federal Reserve's focus on inflation over employment, the global interest rate environment, and the potential risks concerning AI investment momentum. Neil offers his market outlook, focusing on defensive strategies and the potential future direction of interest rates. Show Notes Neil Dutta's Gut Check: Three Economies (Bloomberg) New York City Companies All but Stopped Hiring in First Half of the Year (NYT) Follow RenMac on X: https://x.com/RenMacLLC —FOLLOW USYouTube: @RiskReversalMediaInstagram: @riskreversalmediaTwitter: @RiskReversalLinkedIn: RiskReversal Media

European leaders, having agreed to spending 5 percent of their GDP on defense, now must decide where that money goes. What factors should they consider to make sure the money leads to the continent's growth and a cutting-edge defense industrial base? Ravi Agrawal sits down with Jared Cohen, the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs, to discuss. Note: This discussion is part of a series of episodes brought to you by the Goldman Sachs Global Institute. Ravi's Recommendations: Amitav Acharya: Pharaohs, Maharajas, and the Making of a Multipolar World Robert Kagan: The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World Additional Reading: Ravi Agrawal: NATO Is Avoiding a Difficult Conversation Jared Cohen: Don't Bet Against the Dollar Justin Logan: Trump Shouldn't Settle for European Spending Pledges Kori Schake: Is NATO Dead? Matthew Kroenig: A Division of Labor Between Europe and Asia Won't Work Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

▽終戦から80年 全国戦没者追悼式 ▽記録的大雨となった九州 38度危険な暑さ予想 熱中症対策を ▽4-6月GDP 年率＋1.0％ 5期連続のプラス など ▽最新のニュースは「らじる★らじる」やポッドキャスト「ＮＨＫラジオニュース」からもお聴きいただけます

Today, I'm talking about stimulating your vagus nerve. If your vagus nerve has a high vagal tone, it can easily help you drop out of your chronic stress state into your rest and digest state. About the Host:Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and a Board Designated Trainer of NLP, Time Line Therapy®, Hypnotherarpy, and NLP Results Coaching, helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements. Melissa's business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don't have to figure it all out on your own.Melissa has launched Amplify Impact Academy, with business partner, Billie Aadmi and together they train other coaches, practitioners and counsellors in the 4 mind-body healing modalities mentioned above, giving them powerful tools to use with clients to get results with greater ease, speed and grace. These courses teach life skills and anyone can take them, if you wanto be a better leader, parent, partner, be empowered in your own life, these courses are for you!Melissa's passion project is her non-profit, Girls Matter (www.girlsmatter.ca), breaking the poverty cycle 1 girl, 1 family, 1 village at a time. The mission is to keep girls in school and stop teenage marriages, because school isn't free in over 50 countries around the world and when parents have to make the difficult choices of feeding their kids or paying for school, food wins. And when the girls hit their teen years, they will often be married off so that someone else becomes responsible to feed them. Keeping girls in school instead creates a generational ripple effect, because an educated girl is more than twice as likely to ensure her on children are educated. Educating girls also grows the GDP of countries, when they get into the workforce. This is how together, we can change the world. Guests on this podcast are invited to donate to this important cause. Learn more here in this short video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R3-xqzJLZW14om1PhFClcU_oRSZ8zgip/view?usp=share_linkMelissa is the winner of the 2024 Women in Podcasting Awards in the “inspiration & motivation” category and the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022, 2023 & 2024 for Whistler.Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 90 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get started. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/yourguidedhealthjourney Thanks for listening!If you know somebody who would benefit from this message, or would be an awesome addition to our community, please share it using the social media buttons on this page.Do you have some feedback or...

15 Aug 2025. We crunch the numbers behind Dubai’s latest GDP data with Ed Bell of Emirates NBD. Plus, we talk Alaska-nomics, as Presidents Trump and Putin head to the icy tundra for today’s summit. Danny Sebright joins us from the US-UAE Chamber of Commerce. And, has the insurance industry bounced back from last year’s flood – and what’s happened to our premiums? We asked the Liva Insurance CEO, Martin Rueegg.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How will we feed the 100s of GWs of extra energy demand that AI will create over the next decade? On this episode, Casey Handmer (Caltech PhD, former NASA JPL, founder & CEO of Terraform Industries) walks me through how we can pull it off, and why he thinks a major part of this energy singularity will be powered by solar. His views are contrarian, but he came armed to defend them.Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsors* Lighthouse helps frontier technology companies like Cursor and Physical Intelligence navigate the U.S. immigration system and hire top talent from around the world. Lighthouse handles everything for you, maximizing the probability of visa approval while minimizing the work you have to do. Learn more at lighthousehq.com/employersTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.Timestamps(00:00:00) – Why doesn't China win by default?(00:08:28) – Why hyperscalers choose natural gas over solar(00:18:01) – Solar's astonishing learning rates(00:27:02) – How to build 50,000 acre solar-powered data centers(00:40:24) – Environmental regulations blocking clean energy(00:44:04) – Batteries replacing the grid(00:49:14) – GDP is broken, AGI's true value must be measured in total energy use(00:58:45) – Silicon wafers in space with one mind each Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

-- On the Show: -- Gavin Newsom unveils an aggressive redistricting strategy in California aimed at flipping House seats from Republicans to Democrats -- Gavin Newsom's California redistricting push is an example of Democrats matching Republican aggression with a clear plan to stop Donald Trump's second term agenda -- New data shows the Producer Price Index surging far beyond expectations signaling that higher business costs will soon hit consumers and complicate Federal Reserve rate cut plans -- Donald Trump delivers a series of rambling and contradictory comments on topics ranging from golf course grass to border wall construction to sanctions on Russia -- A string of disjointed remarks by Donald Trump raises questions about his coherence and focus after months of media attention on Joe Biden's mental fitness -- New figures show the federal budget deficit surging despite record tariff revenue as Donald Trump's economic promises collide with rising spending and slower growth -- Nebraska Republican Don Bacon publicly concedes that Donald Trump's tariffs have devastated his state's economy and slashed GDP by six percent -- Karoline Leavitt delivers a series of blunders on Fox News including falsely claiming Trump inherited a war from Joe Biden -- Eric Trump is fact checked on air for lying about Biden's market record and awkwardly defends profiting from the presidency alongside Donald Trump Jr -- On the Bonus Show: Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas plan their next move, MAGA is coming for legal marijuana, American drinking rates are declining, and much more...

Today, we ask what happens next following the mass arrests of those demonstrating in support of the proscribed terrorist group, Palestine Action.Over 500 people were arrested on suspicion of breaking terrorism laws in London on Saturday. The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that those in support of the proscribed terrorist organisation “Don't know the full nature” of the group. Joining Adam to discuss is the BBC's home and legal correspondent, Dominic Casciani.Meanwhile, new GDP figures show UK economic growth came in better than expected, despite slowing between April and June. So how positive is this for the economy? Adam and Alex are joined by the BBC's Deputy Economics Editor, Dharshini David to explain it.You can now listen to Newscast on a smart speaker. If you want to listen, just say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Newscast”. It works on most smart speakers. You can join our Newscast online community here: https://tinyurl.com/newscastcommunityhereGet in touch with Newscast by emailing newscast@bbc.co.uk or send us a whatsapp on +44 0330 123 9480.New episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bit.ly/3ENLcS1 Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Jack Maclaren with Lucy Gape and Shiler Mahmoudi. The social producers were Jada Meosa John and Joe Wilkinson. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.

UK second-quarter GDP was stronger than expected. The numbers will of course be subject to revision (and lots of revision), but for the time being this rather confounds the insistent negative narrative. Growth seems to have been focused toward the end of the quarter.

The UK economy is slowing... but not as much as expected. So that's good - isn't it?--Thursday morning, data was released showing that UK gross domestic product (or GDP) has slowed to 0.3% growth in the second quarter of the year - not as much as predicted.Also, JD Vance has been holidaying in the UK, recently meeting with a who's who of right-wing populists - from Robert Jenrick, to Nigel Farage, to, somewhat bizarrely, enjoying a BBQ with ex-Apprentice contestant and social media star, Thomas Skinner.Anoosh Chakelian is joined by George Eaton and Will Dunn.Read: The Cotswolds plot against JD Vance - Finn McRedmond Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stepping into the world of small business banking requires a fresh perspective, and that's exactly what Eyal Lifshitz brought when he founded Bluevine twelve years ago. Having watched his father run a physical therapy practice, Eyal witnessed firsthand the financial challenges small business owners face daily. Today, as Bluevine's CEO, he's transformed that understanding into a revolutionary banking platform serving over 750,000 small businesses across America.Traditional banking has long overlooked the unique needs of businesses generating less than $5 million in annual revenue. These companies represent half of the U.S. GDP and typically operate without finance departments, leaving owners to handle everything from payroll to invoicing themselves. Bluevine's solution? A comprehensive financial operating system that brings checking accounts, credit products, accounts payable, and receivable management together in one digital platform.What makes Bluevine truly stand out is its branchless, digital-first approach. While most banks still require small business owners to visit physical locations weekly, Bluevine delivers a fully online experience with no monthly fees and competitive yields on deposits. This approach resonates particularly with younger entrepreneurs who expect the same digital convenience in business that they enjoy in personal banking.Looking ahead, Eyal sees several transformative trends reshaping small business finance: accelerating adoption of digital-first banking, demand for real-time payment capabilities across all rails, and integration of AI-powered financial guidance. Listen to Eyal's full interview for insights on breaking free from traditional banking limitations and embracing the future of small business finance.

Keyu Jin is an economist specializing in China's economy, international macroeconomics, global trade imbalances, and financial policy. She is the author of The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep477-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/keyu-jin-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Keyu's X: https://x.com/KeyuJin Keyu's Website: https://keyujin.com/ The New China Playbook (Book): https://amzn.to/4lpgmyK SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Allio Capital: AI-powered investment app that uses global macroeconomic trends. Go to https://alliocapital.com/ UPLIFT Desk: Standing desks and office ergonomics. Go to https://upliftdesk.com/lex Hampton: Community for high-growth founders and CEOs. Go to https://joinhampton.com/lex Lindy: No-code AI agent builder. Go to https://go.lindy.ai/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (00:35) - Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (08:26) - Misconceptions about China (12:57) - Education in China (22:14) - Economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping (27:33) - Mayor economy and GDP growth race (41:20) - Growing up in China (46:58) - First time in the US (51:12) - China's government vs business sector (54:46) - Communism and capitalism (58:25) - Jack Ma (1:04:37) - China's view on innovation and copying ideas (1:11:15) - DeepSeek moment (1:15:09) - CHIPS Act (1:16:56) - Tariffs and Trade (1:29:21) - Immigration (1:34:08) - Taiwan (1:39:54) - One-child policy (1:47:51) - China's economy collapse predictions (1:52:34) - Advice for visiting China PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

Is private equity destroying your favorite consumer products? Today we discuss economic news, recent Trump-era tariffs, and private equity. We touch on corporate profit margins, wage growth versus price increases, and how different industries—like autos—are affected unevenly. We also explore interest rates and the possibility that traditional cause-and-effect in markets is “broken,” questioning whether metrics like CPI, GDP, and rate changes meaningfully influence market behavior anymore, given recent patterns where markets defy economic logic. We discuss...  Recent economic updates included the rollback of several Trump-era tariffs, though many remain in place. Companies are currently absorbing most tariff-related costs instead of passing them directly to consumers. Concerns were raised that if companies start passing these costs along, price increases could hit consumers later in the year. Wage growth trends are compared with rising prices, raising questions about future consumer spending strength. Industry impacts from tariffs vary, with the auto sector singled out as experiencing specific pressures. Recent market resilience even in the face of economic data could historically trigger volatility or declines. Earnings reports no longer move markets as much because companies lower expectations to easily beat estimates. The focus on quarterly earnings is misleading; long-term company growth matters more on an individual level but less on a macro scale. Value investing has underperformed for about 20 years because fundamentals matter less in today's market. The Fed's interest rate tools are less effective because global capital flows and supply shocks weaken their control. The Fed can still cause recessions by raising rates too high but can't fine-tune the economy like before. Supply-driven inflation (like energy and supply chains) is less responsive to Fed rate hikes. Market rates often lead Fed policy, meaning bond traders set financial conditions before the Fed acts. Private equity often overleverages companies, leading to bankruptcies despite popular products, like Instapot. Private equity uses dividend recapitalization to extract value quickly, saddling companies with unsustainable debt. Examples like Sears, Joanne Fabrics, Red Lobster, and Toys “R” Us show how private equity can ruin beloved brands. Private equity has been successful for investors but often at the expense of the long-term health of companies. Financial planning for college funding is increasingly critical given new loan limits and repayment changes.   Today's Panelists: Kirk Chisholm | Innovative Wealth Douglas Heagren | ProCollege Planners Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moneytreepodcast Follow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/money-tree-investing-podcast Follow on Twitter/X: https://x.com/MTIPodcast For more information, visit the show notes at https://moneytreepodcast.com/favorite-consumer-products-737 

Today, I want to talk about parasites and H pylori, and they sound horrible and scary and maybe things that you don't think about in our first world however, the reality is that 14% of North Americans have parasites and 30% have H Pylori. About the Host:Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and a Board Designated Trainer of NLP, Time Line Therapy®, Hypnotherarpy, and NLP Results Coaching, helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements. Melissa's business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don't have to figure it all out on your own.Melissa has launched Amplify Impact Academy, with business partner, Billie Aadmi and together they train other coaches, practitioners and counsellors in the 4 mind-body healing modalities mentioned above, giving them powerful tools to use with clients to get results with greater ease, speed and grace. These courses teach life skills and anyone can take them, if you wanto be a better leader, parent, partner, be empowered in your own life, these courses are for you!Melissa's passion project is her non-profit, Girls Matter (www.girlsmatter.ca), breaking the poverty cycle 1 girl, 1 family, 1 village at a time. The mission is to keep girls in school and stop teenage marriages, because school isn't free in over 50 countries around the world and when parents have to make the difficult choices of feeding their kids or paying for school, food wins. And when the girls hit their teen years, they will often be married off so that someone else becomes responsible to feed them. Keeping girls in school instead creates a generational ripple effect, because an educated girl is more than twice as likely to ensure her on children are educated. Educating girls also grows the GDP of countries, when they get into the workforce. This is how together, we can change the world. Guests on this podcast are invited to donate to this important cause. Learn more here in this short video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R3-xqzJLZW14om1PhFClcU_oRSZ8zgip/view?usp=share_linkMelissa is the winner of the 2024 Women in Podcasting Awards in the “inspiration & motivation” category and the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022, 2023 & 2024 for Whistler.Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 90 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get started. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/yourguidedhealthjourney Thanks for listening!If you know somebody who would benefit from this message, or would be an awesome addition to our community, please share it using the social media buttons on this

This week we talk about tech bubbles, building moats, and infrastructure investment.We also discuss capital expenditure, data centers, and employee compensation.Recommended Book: The Art of Gathering by Priya ParkerTranscriptMany technology booms have early periods in which innovators have a first-mover advantage, and a lot of what happens in their industry is informed by the decisions those innovators make.After that—depending on the technology, but this is common enough to be considered a trend—after that there tends to be a period of build-out and consolidation amongst the people and business entities that survived that initial, innovation-focused throw-down.In the context of personal computers, this moment saw computer-makers like Microsoft and Apple scramble to pivot from figuring out what an operating system should look like and whether or not to use mice to navigate user interfaces, to a period in which they were rushing to scale-up the manufacture of now-essential, but previously comparably rare components: suitable screens for their monitors, chips that could power their increasingly graphical machines, and the magnetic materials necessary to produce floppy disks and spindle-based hard drives.There's an initial period in which new ideas and approaches provide these entities with a moat that protects them against competition, in other words, but then the game they're playing changes, the rules are more fully understood and to some degree locked into place and agreed upon, and instead of competing for the biggest, most brazen new ideas, they lock onto one set of ideas that seemed to be the best of what's available at that moment and build on those, iterating them at a regular cadence, but focusing especially on scaling them.So at this second stage, they're investing in the ability to out-produce their competition in some way, so they can eventually bypass that competition and (they hope) safely increase their prices and make a profit, as opposed to just larger and larger revenues with equal or greater expenses, continuing to be reliant on investor injections of capital, rather than generating their own surplus returns.By many analysts' and insiders' estimates, we've just entered that second stage in the generative AI industry. That's the sort of AI that generates text and images and code and such, and it's increasingly becoming a sort of commodity, rather than a new, hot things that few companies can offer the market.What I'd like to talk about today are the increasingly massive financial figures associated with this industry's shift to that second stage of development, and why some of those insiders and analysts are voicing fresh concerns that this could all lead to a bubble, and possibly an historically large one.—There are many ways we could measure the growth of the AI industry over the years.The US market size, for instance, which is a measure of the value of AI-oriented companies based on how much shares of their company cost or would cost on the open market, has ballooned from just over $100 billion in 2022 to an estimated $174 billion in 2025. That figure is expected to grow at a not quite 20% compound annual growth rate through 2034, which, if accurate, would put this market, in the US alone, at more than $850 billion.Another metric we might use is that of capital expenditure, or capex, in this corner of the tech industry, which refers to the amount of money AI companies are using to buy, upgrade, or maintain their long-term assets, like new computer chips or the data centers they fill with those chips.The seven most valuable US tech companies—Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, and Broadcom (that last spot formerly held by Tesla, which was dropped from this designation in late-2024)—just those seven companies have spent $102.5 billion on capex this last financial quarter (and most of that was from just four of them, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, the remainder only spending something like $6.7 billion).That's a staggering amount of money, and due to a recent drop in consumer demand—the money individual US citizens spend on things like food and clothes and smartphones and cars and all the other things people buy—AI-related capex, spending by these massive US tech companies, has added more to GDP growth than consumer spending for the past two quarters.All the things all the people in the US bought over the past two quarters did not cost as much, in aggregate, as what these companies spent during the same period, on new and existing assets. That's pretty wild.And it's the consequence, partly, of the shift in these companies' focus from providing goods and services that relied heavily on people—salary and stock compensation, basically, which is not a capex expense, because its spent on employees, not stuff—to spending heavily on all that infrastructure that they believe will be required to help them compete with those other companies that are also frantically investing in the same.Whomever can built the biggest, baddest, most reliable and powerful data centers, and can get the AI-optimized chips to fill them, will have an advantage over their opponents in the new, developing tech world paradigm, it's thought, so they're pumping gobs of resources into exactly those sorts of assets, hoping to get ahead, build an insurmountable advantage, and put their competition out of business—or failing that, to establish themselves as the AI Coca-Cola, versus their opposition's AI Mr. Pip.Similar dynamics are playing out elsewhere, especially in China, where the market could reach a value approximating today's US AI market in 3-5 years, and several times that, up to $1.4 trillion, by 2030—though like all of these figures, it depends on how we choose to measure these sorts of things, including what counts as an AI company, and in China, several of their major AI players are heavily involved in automation, robotics, which itself is expected to be a $5 trillion industry in that country by 2050.Europe's market is comparably smaller, as is its overall tech industry, but the AI market is now just shy of 15% of its total tech sector, up from 12% in 2022, and AI startups are attracting about a quarter of all VC funding in the bloc right now—so they're starting from a less spendy start, but like pretty much everywhere the necessary knowledge and manufacturing base exists at the moment, the European AI market is growing a lot faster than anyone would have expected even just five years ago.And there are real-deal innovations coming out of this tech; these investments are flooding into AI companies because these technologies, this version of them, the generative AI stuff, has completely rewired the programming world, AI bots and agents helping coders achieve a lot more, faster, and non-coders make things they wouldn't have been able to build lacking these tools, imperfect as many of those tools are, under the hood.We're also seeing an explosion of other sorts of generated content, and the injection of these tools that make such content into Hollywood studios and consulting firms and government agencies, and everything in between, is causing equal parts panic and excitement, depending on whether you're one of the people who feels like they might be laid off soon, replaced by software, or if you're someone who profits from all those layoffs, and the payments from the companies that hope to save money by conducting them, replacing their comparably expensive employees with cheaper AI tools.Things have gotten so wild that Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has started offering compensation packages ranging from $200 million to more than a billion dollars to top AI talent. Meta's AI spending is already massive, and could hit $72 billion this year, but the company has said it could hit $100 billion in 2026, while Microsoft's leadership suggested their 2025 spending of $30 billion could balloon to $120 billion in 2026.OpenAI recently offered their employees large bonuses, in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars range, to counter those sorts of overtures from the likes of Meta, but there's a lot of money flying around from all direction right now, much of it aimed at more AI infrastructure, or the relatively few people on the planet who understand this tech well enough to make a competitive difference in this industry.That's…a lot of money. There's just so much spending happening, so many resources sloshing around in this one space right now, and all this investment is predicated on the idea that AI will change everything, we're stepping into a new paradigm, and those who control the AI, will basically own the next game. So they're all trying to set things up so they win the next game, or at least have the best hand possible when it arrives.There have been increasingly loud arguments, made by long-time generative AI critics, but also, more recently, ardent AI boosters, that we might be running up against a wall of what these things can do for us; this version of the AI concept, at least.And these arguments got louder with OpenAI's release of their long-teased GPT-5 model, which some expected to be true AGI, human-grade, flexible, omni-capable intelligence, while others thought it might be a mono-focused superintelligence of some kind: the perfect coder, the perfect image generator, something like that.What users got was not that. It seems to be better at some things, still not great at others.This was an incredibly expensive model to produce—the training costs alone are estimated to be something like a half-billion dollars, and that's just a portion of the total costs of creating this sort of model—and what OpenAI served up, instead of something groundbreaking, was a slightly better, though in some ways seemingly the same or worse version of what everyone's been playing with for years, now.There's room for disagreement on this, as while there are some more objective tests for measuring models' capabilities, a lot of it is circumstantial, and depends, among other things, on what you're trying to do, how the systems are prompted, and so on.There's also something to be said for cost-reductions and other sorts of benefits of new models, beyond raw power and capability.But this thud of a launch for what was supposed to be a sea-changing system has led to the ringing of some alarm bells, industry watchers wondering if we might be careening toward a bubble, at a moment in which, again, this segment of the tech industry is contributing more to the US's GDP than all of consumer spending, combined.A bubble, to be clear, wouldn't mean the collapse of the US economy, or even these companies, necessarily. It would mean a lot of AI entities going under, a lot of invested money lost, and a lot of people who suddenly don't have jobs.Almost always there are a few players in these bubbly spaces that make it to the other side, though—eBay, for instance, survived the dotcom bubble intact, as did Amazon, PayPal, and Adobe, among many others.But the grand shakeout, the sifting for those that could survive a mammoth downturn, and the destruction of the rest, that's a tough moment for those directly connected to the bubble-popping industry, and those adjacent to it: the folks who feed the employees who are now laid off, the suppliers of the light switches that go in all the data centers, etc.There are ripple effects to this sort of bubble pop moment, then, and though such sifting might be long-term beneficial, because it maybe weeds out some of the dead-weight and makes things more efficient in that space five or ten years in the future, that won't help the folks who lose a lot of money when the industry shrinks, including those who have their money at banks that made bad bets, or insurance companies that did the same, with their customers resources.Everything's great for everyone when these sorts of high-risk, high-reward bets are paying out, but when the golden goose of huge anticipated future profits disappears, that shakeout leaves a lot of entities and people with emptier pockets.None of which suggests this is going to happen; there's a chance that we continue to see better and better models using the current, generative AI technology, or that some of these companies successfully pivot to another AI approach that bears better, next-step fruit, and things just keep getting more and more powerful and less and less expensive for everyone; that could theoretically lead to some pretty cool, broadly beneficial things.This sort of risk is lurking in the background of everything that's happening, though, and while upbeat marketing messages and predictions about how cool it will all be when the next-step tools arrive can keep things going for a while, even lacking major milestones that can be pointed at to justify those claims, at some point we'll probably need to see something really, truly different and novel, or the bottom could fall out, leaving those who were more careful tip-toeing into this collection of technologies looking less like they're being left behind, and more like they took smart precautions and made safe, reliable investments.Show Noteshttps://www.precedenceresearch.com/us-artificial-intelligence-markethttps://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/artificial-intelligence/united-stateshttps://techcrunch.com/2024/12/23/ai-startups-attracted-25-of-europes-vc-funding/https://archive.is/20250809000924/https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/756561/openai-employees-bonus-sam-altman-ai-talent-warshttps://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/silicon-valley-ai-infrastructure-capex-cffe0431https://archive.is/20250809000924/https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/756561/openai-employees-bonus-sam-altman-ai-talent-warshttps://archive.is/20250808224658/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-07/tesla-disbands-dojo-supercomputer-team-in-blow-to-ai-efforthttps://fortune.com/2025/08/04/billionaire-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-ai-staffers-poaching-meta-mark-zuckerberg-100k-six-figure-salaries-openai-sam-altman/https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e02vx55wpohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/business/dealbook/meta-microsoft-ai-spending-shares.htmlhttps://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-meta-billion-dollars-ai-poaching-failed/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Are you using popular migration reports to guide your multifamily investments? You might be relying on the wrong signals. In this episode, Jeannette Friedrich breaks down why the U-Haul data, while eye-catching, can be dangerously misleading if taken at face value. She reveals the common pitfalls investors fall into when interpreting these trends, and how to analyse migration data in a way that supports sound multifamily investment decisions. Key Takeaways: - Why high inbound moves do not guarantee population growth: The U-Haul report shows where people are moving to, but not who is moving out. This is a critical gap in understanding net migration. - The frequency vs. volume trap: Seeing states like California mentioned often does not mean they are losing large populations. The report lacks the necessary context investors need. - Correlation does not equal causation: A spike in moves from New York to Miami does not automatically mean rents in Miami will rise. Additional factors like job growth, wage trends, and housing supply must be considered. - The overlooked macro trend: New immigration and deportation policies could result in negative net migration in the US for the first time in 50 years. This may impact labour markets, GDP, and housing demand. - How to use migration data responsibly: Jeannette shares best practices for cross-referencing sources, analysing both inbound and outbound flows, and drilling into local submarket details. This episode is essential listening for investors who want to move beyond hype and headlines. Learn how to extract meaningful insights from migration data and avoid making costly mistakes based on incomplete information.  View U-Haul's 2025 Midyear Report: https://www.uhaul.com/Articles/About/U-Haul-2025-Midyear-Migration-Trends-35212/  Timestamps 00:00 Introduction to U-Haul's 2025 Migration Trends Report 01:16 Misleading Aspects of the Report 01:37 Common Mistakes in Interpreting Migration Data 03:23 Critical Macro Factors to Consider 04:20 Best Practices for Conducting Due Diligence 05:54 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Are you REady2Scale Your Multifamily Investments? Learn more about growing your wealth, strengthening your portfolio, and scaling to the next level at www.bluelake-capital.com. Credits Producer: Blue Lake Capital Strategist: Syed Mahmood Editor: Emma Walker Opening music: Pomplamoose *

There are 34,752,434 small businesses in the United States.Small businesses employ 45.9% of American workers, which amounts toapproximately 59 million people. According to the Small BusinessAdministration, small businesses account for 43.5% of U.S. GDP.The Consumer Financial Bureau states that entrepreneursoften use personal and family savings to start their businesses:·        64.4% use personal and family savings·        16.5% use business loans from banks orother financial institutions·        9.1% use personal credit cards·        8.7% use personal family assets (otherthan the owner's savings)Chris Hurn is a business financing professional who hasfounded two companies listed on the Inc. 500. He specializes in U.S. SmallBusiness Administration lending and currently serves as CEO of Phoenix LenderServices and President of Community Bankshares, Inc. He has provided testimonybefore Congress regarding small business lending and has been referenced in 16business publications.Throughout his career, Chris Hurn has established, managed,and advised financial and business enterprises related to small businesses, SBAlending, and economic development. As President of Community Bankshares Inc.(CBI), he oversees business areas such as SBA and USDA lending and financialsoftware solutions. Under his leadership, CBI was named the top USDA B&Ilender in the U.S. for 2024 and achieved Preferred Lender Program (PLP) statusfrom the SBA. Chris also holds the position of Chief Executive Partner atLendesca, a FinTech firm focused on business financing, and is the founder andformer CEO of Fountainhead, one of 17 nonbank lenders authorized to provide SBA7(a) loans. At Fountainhead, he facilitated nearly 300,000 loans totaling $5.15billion.For more information: https://phoenixlenderservices.com/LinkedIn: @ChrisHurnEmail: Churn@Communitybankshares.com

Subscribe to Nicholas Gruen's Substack - https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/I joined the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen recently in his Melbourne home to host his first 'long-form' podcast (although I'm not sure at what hour it goes from short to long)At the core of Gruen's worldview is the “un-seriousness” he levels at Australian politics, the media landscape, institutions and in a word... bureaucracies.From his creation of the HALE Index to his decades inside Australia's public institutions, Nicholas continuously challenges orthodox thinking.The podcast covers the (in my opinion) radical yet (Nicholas's opinion) ancient idea of citizens' juries as a second pillar of representation, the reasons bold policy rarely survives bureaucratic reality, and how lessons from the Toyota production system could help governments actually listen to people at the bottom of the hierarchy.Along the way, Gruen takes us from Australia's superannuation system to pokies, from the mental health crisis to the subtle erosion of public-spiritedness inside organisations. To be specific, these are all the topics covered in this chat.The HALE Index of Well-being – Why GDP misses the mark, how HALE works, and what it reveals about Australia's progress.Measuring What Matters – The limits of subjective well-being metrics, correlations between indicators, and why faux indexes mislead policymakers.Indigenous Policy Contradictions – The tension between material “gap closing” and self-determination, and why policy rarely confronts it.Citizens' Juries & Political Reform – Introducing random selection into governance and how it could act as a check on elected officials.Goodhart's Law in Action – How turning measures into targets corrupts them, and the problem of gaming metrics in education and beyond.Internal vs External Goods – Alasdair MacIntyre's framework and its relevance to public service, corporate culture, and motivation.Institutional Stagnation – Why promising initiatives stall, and how bottom-up programs could scale without being crushed by bureaucracy.Toyota Production System Lessons – Building respect for frontline workers into systems and how it transforms performance.Australia's Superannuation System – Strengths, inefficiencies, unfair taxation, and misaligned regulation of self-managed super funds.Compulsory Voting & Preferential Systems – How they shape Australia's political centre and guard against extreme populism.Universities Today – The shift from idea-driven discourse to metric-chasing careerism, especially in economics.Trade-offs vs Synergies – Why economics often overemphasises trade-offs, and examples of where quality and cost improve together.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to Nicholas Gruen05:41 The Limitations of GDP as a Measure11:08 Inequality and Its Impact on Well-being16:45 The Role of Metrics in Policy Making22:10 The Importance of Community Engagement41:48 Connecting Education to the Real World47:24 Learning from Toyota's Success56:52 The Flaws in Superannuation System01:02:55 Reforming Auditing Practices01:11:39 The Shift in University Education01:20:59 Divergent Perspectives in Economics01:32:49 Rethinking Representation in Democracy01:48:25 The Role of Elite Consensus in Political Change02:07:58 Understanding Domestic Violence in Indigenous Communities02:21:55 The Role of New Media in Political Discourse02:26:38 The Impact of Gambling on Australian Society02:36:08 The Nature of Optimism and Serendipity in Life

Better than expected GDP data shows resilience in the economy, but is not without controversy.  Also: startling personnel changes in Gerindra and a state bank, and a plan for aiding Gazans.It takes a lot of money to run a podcast. You need subscription fees for hosting, audio recording services, editor's salary and music licensing. Luckily, you, estemeed listeners of Reformasi Dispatch podcast can help us.You can donate to us on buymeacoffee.com/reformasi and help us grow!

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,Nuclear fission is a safe, powerful, and reliable means of generating nearly limitless clean energy to power the modern world. A few public safety scares and a lot of bad press over the half-century has greatly delayed our nuclear future. But with climate change and energy-hungry AI making daily headlines, the time — finally — for a nuclear renaissance seems to have arrived.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Dr. Tim Gregory about the safety and efficacy of modern nuclear power, as well as the ambitious energy goals we should set for our society.Gregory is a nuclear scientist at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory. He is also a popular science broadcaster on radio and TV, and an author. His most recent book, Going Nuclear: How Atomic Energy Will Save the World is out now.In This Episode* A false start for a nuclear future (1:29)* Motivators for a revival (7:20)* About nuclear waste . . . (12:41)* Not your mother's reactors (17:25)* Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. A false start for a nuclear future (1:29)The truth is that radiation, we're living in it all the time, it's completely inescapable because we're all living in a sea of background radiation.Pethokoukis: Why do America, Europe, Japan not today get most of their power from nuclear fission, since that would've been a very reasonable prediction to make in 1965 or 1975, but it has not worked out that way? What's your best take on why it hasn't?Going back to the '50s and '60s, it looked like that was the world that we currently live in. It was all to play for, and there were a few reasons why that didn't happen, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It's a startling statistic that the US built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Three Mile Island than it has built since. And similarly on this side of the Atlantic, Europe built more nuclear reactors in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than it has built since, which is just astounding, especially given that nobody died in Three Mile Island and nobody was even exposed to anything beyond the background radiation as a result of that nuclear accident.Chernobyl, of course, was far more consequential and far more serious than Three Mile Island. 30-odd people died in the immediate aftermath, mostly people who were working at the power station and the first responders, famously the firefighters who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation, and probably a couple of hundred people died in the affected population from thyroid cancer. It was people who were children and adolescents at the time of the accident.So although every death from Chernobyl was a tragedy because it was avoidable, they're not in proportion to the mythic reputation of the night in question. It certainly wasn't reason to effectively end nuclear power expansion in Europe because of course we had to get that power from somewhere, and it mainly came from fossil fuels, which are not just a little bit more deadly than nuclear power, they're orders of magnitude more deadly than nuclear power. When you add up all of the deaths from nuclear power and compare those deaths to the amount of electricity that we harvest from nuclear power, it's actually as safe as wind and solar, whereas fossil fuels kill hundreds or thousands of times more people per unit of power. To answer your question, it's complicated and there are many answers, but the main two were Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.I wonder how things might have unfolded if those events hadn't happened or if society had responded proportionally to the actual damage. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are portrayed in documentaries and on TV as far deadlier than they really were, and they still loom large in the public imagination in a really unhelpful way.You see it online, actually, quite a lot about the predicted death toll from Chernobyl, because, of course, there's no way of saying exactly which cases of cancer were caused by Chernobyl and which ones would've happened anyway. Sometimes you see estimates that are up in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. They are always based on a flawed scientific hypothesis called the linear no-threshold model that I go into in quite some detail in chapter eight of my book, which is all about the human health effects of exposure to radiation. This model is very contested in the literature. It's one of the most controversial areas of medical science, actually, the effects of radiation on the human body, and all of these massive numbers you see of the death toll from Chernobyl, they're all based on this really kind of clunky, flawed, contentious hypothesis. My reading of the literature is that there's very, very little physical evidence to support this particular hypothesis, but people take it and run. I don't know if it would be too far to accuse people of pushing a certain idea of Chernobyl, but it almost certainly vastly, vastly overestimates the effects.I think a large part of the reason of why this had such a massive impact on the public and politicians is this lingering sense of radiophobia that completely blight society. We've all seen it in the movies, in TV shows, even in music and computer games — radiation is constantly used as a tool to invoke fear and mistrust. It's this invisible, centerless, silent specter that's kind of there in the background: It means birth defects, it means cancers, it means ill health. We've all kind of grown up in this culture where the motif of radiation is bad news, it's dangerous, and that inevitably gets tied to people's sense of nuclear power. So when you get something like Three Mile Island, society's imagination and its preconceptions of radiation, it's just like a dry haystack waiting for a flint spark to land on it, and up it goes in flames and people's imaginations run away with them.The truth is that radiation, we're living in it all the time, it's completely inescapable because we're all living in a sea of background radiation. There's this amazing statistic that if you live within a couple of miles of a nuclear power station, the extra amount of radiation you're exposed to annually is about the same as eating a banana. Bananas are slightly radioactive because of the slight amount of potassium-40 that they naturally contain. Even in the wake of these nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, and more recently Fukushima, the amount of radiation that the public was exposed to barely registers and, in fact, is less than the background radiation in lots of places on the earth.Motivators for a revival (7:20)We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.You just suddenly reminded me of a story of when I was in college in the late 1980s, taking a class on the nuclear fuel cycle. You know it was an easy class because there was an ampersand in it. “Nuclear fuel cycle” would've been difficult. “Nuclear fuel cycle & the environment,” you knew it was not a difficult class.The man who taught it was a nuclear scientist and, at one point, he said that he would have no problem having a nuclear reactor in his backyard. This was post-Three Mile Island, post-Chernobyl, and the reaction among the students — they were just astounded that he would be willing to have this unbelievably dangerous facility in his backyard.We have this fear of nuclear power, and there's sort of an economic component, but now we're seeing what appears to be a nuclear renaissance. I don't think it's driven by fear of climate change, I think it's driven A) by fear that if you are afraid of climate change, just solar and wind aren't going to get you to where you want to be; and then B) we seem like we're going to need a lot of clean energy for all these AI data centers. So it really does seem to be a perfect storm after a half-century.And who knows what next. When I started writing Going Nuclear, the AI story hadn't broken yet, and so all of the electricity projections for our future demand, which, they range from doubling to tripling, we're going to need a lot of carbon-free electricity if we've got any hope of electrifying society whilst getting rid of fossil fuels. All of those estimates were underestimates because nobody saw AI coming.It's been very, very interesting just in the last six, 12 months seeing Big Tech in North America moving first on this. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have all either invested or actually placed orders for small modular reactors specifically to power their AI data centers. In some ways, they've kind of led the charge on this. They've moved faster than most nation states, although it is encouraging, actually, here in the UK, just a couple of weeks ago, the government announced that our new nuclear power station is definitely going ahead down in Sizewell in Suffolk in the south of England. That's a 3.2 gigawatt nuclear reactor, it's absolutely massive. But it's been really, really encouraging to see Big Tech in the private sector in North America take the situation into their own hands. If anyone's real about electricity demands and how reliable you need it, it's Big Tech with these data centers.I always think, go back five, 10 years, talk of AI was only on the niche subreddits and techie podcasts where people were talking about it. It broke into the mainstream all of a sudden. Who knows what is going to happen in the next five or 10 years. We have no idea what emerging technologies are on the horizon that will also require massive amounts of power, and that's exactly where nuclear can shine.In the US, at least, I don't think decarbonization alone is enough to win broad support for nuclear, since a big chunk of the country doesn't think we actually need to do that. But I think that pairing it with the promise of rapid AI-driven economic growth creates a stronger case.I tried to appeal to a really broad church in Going Nuclear because I really, really do believe that whether you are completely preoccupied by climate change and environmental issues or you're completely preoccupied by economic growth, and raising living, standards and all of that kind of thing, all the monetary side of things, nuclear is for you because if you solve the energy problem, you solve both problems at once. You solve the economic problem and the environmental problem.There's this really interesting relationship between GDP per head — which is obviously incredibly important in economic terms — and energy consumption per head, and it's basically a straight line relationship between the two. There are no rich countries that aren't also massive consumers of energy, so if you really, really care about the economy, you should really also be caring about energy consumption and providing energy abundance so people can go out and use that energy to create wealth and prosperity. Again, that's where nuclear comes in. You can use nuclear power to sate that massive energy demand that growing economies require.This podcast is very pro-wealth and prosperity, but I'll also say, if the nuclear dreams of the '60s where you had, in this country, what was the former Atomic Energy Commission expecting there to be 1000 nuclear reactors in this country by the year 2000, we're not having this conversation about climate change. It is amazing that what some people view as an existential crisis could have been prevented — by the United States and other western countries, at least — just making a different political decision.We would be spending all of our time talking about something else, and how nice would that be?For sure. I'm sure there'd be other existential crises to worry about.But for sure, we wouldn't be talking about climate change was anywhere near the volume or the sense of urgency as we are now if we would've carried on with the nuclear expansion that really took off in the '70s and the '80s. It would be something that would be coming our way in a couple of centuries.About nuclear waste . . . (12:41). . . a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup. I don't know if you've ever seen the television show For All Mankind?I haven't. So many people have recommended it to me.It's great. It's an alt-history that looks at what if the Space Race had never stopped. As a result, we had a much more tech-enthusiastic society, which included being much more pro-nuclear.Anyway, imagine if you are on a plane talking to the person next to you, and the topic of your book comes up, and the person says hey, I like energy, wealth, prosperity, but what are you going to do about the nuclear waste?That almost exact situation has happened, but on a train rather than an airplane. One of the cool things about uranium is just how much energy you can get from a very small amount of it. If typical person in a highly developed economy, say North America, Europe, something like that, if they produced all of their power over their entire lifetime from nuclear alone, so forget fossil fuels, forget wind and solar, a 100 percent nuclear-powered life for about 80 years, their nuclear waste would barely fill a wine glass or a coffee cup. You need a very small amount of uranium to power somebody's life, and the natural conclusion of that is you get a very small amount of waste for a lifetime of power. So in terms of the numbers, and the amount of nuclear waste, it's just not that much of a problem.However, I don't want to just try and trivialize it out of existence with some cool pithy statistics and some cool back-of-the-envelopes physics calculations because we still have to do something with the nuclear waste. This stuff is going to be radioactive for the best part of a million years. Thankfully, it's quite an easy argument to make because good old Finland, which is one of the most nuclear nations on the planet as a share of nuclear in its grid, has solved this problem. It has implemented — and it's actually working now — the world's first and currently only geological repository for nuclear waste. Their idea is essentially to bury it in impermeable bedrock and leave it there because, as with all radioactive objects, nuclear waste becomes less radioactive over time. The idea is that, in a million years, Finland's nuclear waste won't be nuclear waste anymore, it will just be waste. A million years sounds like a really long time to our ears, but it's actually —It does.It sounds like a long time, but it is the blink of an eye, geologically. So to a geologist, a million years just comes and goes straight away. So it's really not that difficult to keep nuclear waste safe underground on those sorts of timescales. However — and this is the really cool thing, and this is one of the arguments that I make in my book — there are actually technologies that we can use to recycle nuclear waste. It turns out that when you pull uranium out of a reactor, once it's been burned for a couple of years in a reactor, 95 percent of the atoms are still usable. You can still use them to generate nuclear power. So by throwing away nuclear waste when it's been through a nuclear reactor once, we're actually squandering like 95 percent of material that we're throwing away.The theory is this sort of the technology behind breeder reactors?That's exactly right, yes.What about the plutonium? People are worried about the plutonium!People are worried about the plutonium, but in a breeder reactor, you get rid of the plutonium because you split it into fission products, and fission products are still radioactive, but they have much shorter half-lives than plutonium. So rather than being radioactive for, say, a million years, they're only radioactive, really, for a couple of centuries, maybe 1000 years, which is a very, very different situation when you think about long-term storage.I read so many papers and memos from the '50s when these reactors were first being built and demonstrated, and they worked, by the way, they're actually quite easy to build, it just happened in a couple of years. Breeder reactors were really seen as the future of humanity's power demands. Forget traditional nuclear power stations that we all use at the moment, which are just kind of once through and then you throw away 95 percent of the energy at the end of it. These breeder reactors were really, really seen as the future.They never came to fruition because we discovered lots of uranium around the globe, and so the supply of uranium went up around the time that the nuclear power expansion around the world kind of seized up, so the uranium demand dropped as the supply increased, so the demand for these breeder reactors kind of petered out and fizzled out. But if we're really, really serious about the medium-term future of humanity when it comes to energy, abundance, and prosperity, we need to be taking a second look at these breeder reactors because there's enough uranium and thorium in the ground around the world now to power the world for almost 1000 years. After that, we'll have something else. Maybe we'll have nuclear fusion.Well, I hope it doesn't take a thousand years for nuclear fusion.Yes, me too.Not your mother's reactors (17:25)In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming.I don't think most people are aware of how much innovation has taken place around nuclear in the past few years, or even few decades. It's not just a climate change issue or that we need to power these data centers — the technology has vastly improved. There are newer, safer technologies, so we're not talking about 1975-style reactors.Even if it were the 1975-style reactors, that would be fine because they're pretty good and they have an absolutely impeccable safety record punctuated by a very small number of high-profile events such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. I'm not to count Three Mile Island on that list because nobody died, but you know what I mean.But the modern nuclear reactors are amazing. The ones that are coming out of France, the EPRs, the European Power Reactors, there are going to be two of those in the UK's new nuclear power station, and they've been designed to withstand an airplane flying into the side of them, so they're basically bomb-proof.As for these small modular reactors, that's getting people very excited, too. As their name suggests, they're small. How small is a reasonable question — the answer is as small as you want to go. These things are scalable, and I've seen designs for just one-megawatt reactors that could easily fit inside a shipping container. They could fit in the parking lots around the side of a data center, or in the basement even, all the way up to multi-hundred-megawatt reactors that could fit on a couple of tennis courts worth of land. But it's really the modular part that's the most interesting thing. That's the ‘M' and that's never been done before.Which really gets to the economics of the SMRs.It really does. The idea is you could build upwards of 90 percent of these reactors on a factory line. We know from the history of industrialization that as soon as you start mass producing things, the unit cost just plummets and the timescales shrink. No one has achieved that yet, though. There's a lot of hype around small modular reactors, and so it's kind of important not to get complacent and really keep our eye on the ultimate goal, which is mass-production and mass rapid deployment of nuclear power stations, crucially in the places where you need them the most, as well.We often think about just decarbonizing our electricity supply or decoupling our electricity supply from volatilities in the fossil fuel market, but it's about more than electricity, as well. We need heat for things like making steel, making the ammonia that feeds most people on the planet, food and drinks factories, car manufacturers, plants that rely on steam. You need heat, and thankfully, the primary energy from a nuclear reactor is heat. The electricity is secondary. We have to put effort into making that. The heat just kind of happens. So there's this idea that we could use the surplus heat from nuclear reactors to power industrial processes that are very, very difficult to decarbonize. Small modular reactors would be perfect for that because you could nestle them into the industrial centers that need the heat close by. So honestly, it is really our imaginations that are the limits with these small modular reactors.They've opened a couple of nuclear reactors down in Georgia here. The second one was a lot cheaper and faster to build because they had already learned a bunch of lessons building that first one, and it really gets at sort of that repeatability where every single reactor doesn't have to be this one-off bespoke project. That is not how it works in the world of business. How you get cheaper things is by building things over and over, you get very good at building them, and then you're able to turn these things out at scale. That has not been the economic situation with nuclear reactors, but hopefully with small modular reactors, or even if we just start building a lot of big advanced reactors, we'll get those economies of scale and hopefully the economic issue will then take care of itself.For sure, and it is exactly the same here in the UK. The last reactor that we connected to the grid was in 1995. I was 18 months old. I don't even know if I was fluent in speaking at 18 months old. I was really, really young. Our newest nuclear power station, Hinkley Point C, which is going to come online in the next couple of years, was hideously expensive. The uncharitable view of that is that it's just a complete farce and is just a complete embarrassment, but honestly, you've got to think about it: 1995, the last nuclear reactor in the UK, it was going to take a long time, it was going to be expensive, basically doing it from scratch. We had no supply chain. We didn't really have a workforce that had ever built a nuclear reactor before, and with this new reactor that just got announced a couple of weeks ago, the projected price is 20 percent cheaper, and it is still too expensive, it's still more expensive than it should be, but you're exactly right.By tapping into those economies of scale, the cost per nuclear reactor will fall, and France did this in the '70s and '80s. Their nuclear program is so amazing. France is still the most nuclear nation on the planet as a share of its total electricity. In 2005, France got 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. They almost decarbonized their grid by accident before anybody cared about climate change, and that was during a time when their economy was absolutely booming. By the way, still today, all of those reactors are still working and they pay less than the European Union average for that electricity, so this idea that nuclear makes your electricity expensive is simply not true. They built 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, and they did them in parallel. It was just absolutely amazing. I would love to see a French-style nuclear rollout in all developed countries across the world. I think that would just be absolutely amazing.Commercial fusion, coming soon . . . ? (23:06)I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.What is your enthusiasm level or expectation about nuclear fusion? I can tell you that the Silicon Valley people I talk to are very positive. I know they're inherently very positive people, but they're very enthusiastic about the prospects over the next decade, if not sooner, of commercial fusion. How about you?It would be incredible. The last question that I was asked in my PhD interview 10 years ago was, “If you could solve one scientific or engineering problem, what would it be?” and my answer was nuclear fusion. And that would be the answer that I would give today. It just seems to me to be obviously the solution to the long-term energy needs of humanity. However, I'm less optimistic, perhaps, than the Silicon Valley crowd. The running joke, of course, is that it's always 40 years away and it recedes into the future at one year per year. So I would love to be proved wrong, but realistically — no one's even got it working in a prototype power station. That's before we even think about commercializing it and deploying it at scale. I really, really think that we're decades away, maybe even something like a century. I'd be surprised if it took longer than a century, actually. I think we're pretty good at doing things when we put our minds to it, but certainly not in the next couple of decades. But luckily, we already have a proven way of producing lots of energy, and that's with nuclear fission, in the meantime.Don't go to California with that attitude. I can tell you that even when I go there and I talk about AI, if I say that AI will do anything less than improve economic growth by a factor of 100, they just about throw me out over there. Let me just finish up by asking you this: Earlier, we mentioned Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. How resilient do you think this nuclear renaissance is to an accident?Even if we take the rate of accident over the last 70 years of nuclear power production and we maintain that same level of rate of accident, if you like, it's still one of the safest things that our species does, and everyone talks about the death toll from nuclear power, but nobody talks about the lives that it's already saved because of the fossil fuels, that it's displaced fossil fuels. They're so amazing in some ways, they're so convenient, they're so energy-dense, they've created the modern world as we all enjoy it in the developed world and as the developing world is heading towards it. But there are some really, really nasty consequences of fossil fuels, and whether or not you care about climate change, even the air pollution alone and the toll that that takes on human health is enough to want to phase them out. Nuclear power already is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and I read this really amazing paper that globally, it was something like between the '70s and the '90s, nuclear power saved about two million lives because of the fossil fuels that it displaced. That's, again, orders of magnitude more lives that have been lost as a consequence of nuclear power, mostly because of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even if the safety record of nuclear in the past stays the same and we forward-project that into the future, it's still a winning horse to bet on.If in the UK they've started up one new nuclear reactor in the past 30 years, right? How many would you guess will be started over the next 15 years?Four or five. Something like that, I think; although I don't know.Is that a significant number to you?It's not enough for my liking. I would like to see many, many more. Look at France. I know I keep going back to it, but it's such a brilliant example. If France hadn't done what they'd done in between the '70s and the '90s — 55 nuclear reactors in 25 years, all of which are still working — it would be a much more difficult case to make because there would be no historical precedent for it. So, maybe predictably, I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a French-scale nuclear rollout, let's put it that way.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were PromisedMicro Reads▶ Economics* The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics - WSJ* AI Spending Is Propping Up the Economy, Right? It's Complicated. - Barron's* Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. - NYT* Sam Altman says Gen Z are the 'luckiest' kids in history thanks to AI, despite mounting job displacement dread - NYT* Lab-Grown Diamonds Are Testing the Power of Markets - Bberg Opinion* Why globalisation needs a leader: Hegemons, alignment, and trade - CEPR* The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are not Getting Harder to Find - SSRN* An Assessment of China's Innovative Capacity - The Fed* Markets are so used to the TACO trade they didn't even blink when Trump extended a tariff delay with China - Fortune* Labor unions mobilize to challenge advance of algorithms in workplaces - Wapo* ChatGPT loves this bull market. Human investors are more cautious. - Axios* What is required for a post-growth model? - Arxiv* What Would It Take to Bring Back US Manufacturing? - Bridgewater▶ Business* An AI Replay of the Browser Wars, Bankrolled by Google - Bberg* Alexa Got an A.I. Brain Transplant. How Smart Is It Now? - NYT* Google and IBM believe first workable quantum computer is in sight - FT* Why does Jeff Bezos keep buying launches from Elon Musk? - Ars* Beijing demands Chinese tech giants justify purchases of Nvidia's H20 chips - FT* An AI Replay of the Browser Wars, Bankrolled by Google - Bberg Opinion* Why Businesses Say Tariffs Have a Delayed Effect on Inflation - Richmond Fed* Lisa Su Runs AMD—and Is Out for Nvidia's Blood - Wired* Forget the White House Sideshow. Intel Must Decide What It Wants to Be. - WSJ* With Billions at Risk, Nvidia CEO Buys His Way Out of the Trade Battle - WSJ* Donald Trump's 100% tariff threat looms over chip sector despite relief for Apple - FT* Sam Altman challenges Elon Musk with plans for Neuralink rival - FT* Threads is nearing X's daily app users, new data shows - TechCrunch▶ Policy/Politics* Trump's China gamble - Axios* U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China - NYT* A Guaranteed Annual Income Flop - WSJ Opinion* Big Tech's next major political battle may already be brewing in your backyard - Politico* Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants - Nature* China has its own concerns about Nvidia H20 chips - FT* How the US Could Lose the AI Arms Race to China - Bberg Opinion* America's New AI Plan Is Great. There's Just One Problem. - Bberg Opinion* Trump, Seeking Friendlier Economic Data, Names New Statistics Chief - NYT* Trump's chief science adviser faces a storm of criticism: what's next? - Nature* Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project - NYT Opinion▶ AI/Digital* Can OpenAI's GPT-5 model live up to sky-high expectations? - FT* Google, Schmoogle: When to Ditch Web Search for Deep Research - WSJ* AI Won't Kill Software. It Will Simply Give It New Life. - Barron's* Chatbot Conversations Never End. That's a Problem for Autistic People. - WSJ* Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop' off Wikipedia - Wapo* Trump's Tariffs Won't Solve U.S. Chip-Making Dilemma - WSJ* GenAI Misinformation, Trust, and News Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment - NBER* GPT-5s Are Alive: Basic Facts, Benchmarks and the Model Card - Don't Worry About the Vase* What you may have missed about GPT-5 - MIT* Why A.I. Should Make Parents Rethink Posting Photos of Their Children Online - NYT* 21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work - NYT* AI and Jobs: The Final Word (Until the Next One) - EIG* These workers don't fear artificial intelligence. They're getting degrees in it. - Wapo* AI Gossip - Arxiv* Meet the early-adopter judges using AI - MIT* The GPT-5 rollout has been a big mess - Ars* A Humanoid Social Robot as a Teaching Assistant in the Classroom - Arxiv* OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt - Wired* Sam Altman and the whale - MIT* This is what happens when ChatGPT tries to write scripture - Vox* How AI could create the first one-person unicorn - Economist* AI Robs My Students of the Ability to Think - WSJ Opinion* Part I: Tricks or Traps? A Deep Dive into RL for LLM Reasoning - Arxiv▶ Biotech/Health* Scientists Are Finally Making Progress Against Alzheimer's - WSJ Opinion* The Dawn of a New Era in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Treatment - RealClearScience* RFK Jr. shifts $500 million from mRNA research to 'safer' vaccines. Do the data back that up? - Reason* How Older People Are Reaping Brain Benefits From New Tech - NYT* Did Disease Defeat Napoleon? - SciAm* Scientists Discover a Viral Cause of One of The World's Most Common Cancers - ScienceAlert* ‘A tipping point': An update from the frontiers of Alzheimer's disease research - Yale News* A new measure of health is revolutionising how we think about ageing - NS* First proof brain's powerhouses drive – and can reverse – dementia symptoms - NA* The Problem Is With Men's Sperm - NYT Opinion▶ Clean Energy/Climate* The Whole World Is Switching to EVs Faster Than You - Bberg Opinion* Misperceptions About Air Pollution: Implications for Willingness to Pay and Environmental Inequality - NBER* Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent - Ars* Data Center Energy Demand Will Double Over the Next Five Years - Apollo Academy* Why Did Air Conditioning Adoption Accelerate Faster Than Predicted? Evidence from Mexico - NBER* Microwaving rocks could help mining operations pull CO2 out of the air - NS* Ford's Model T Moment Isn't About the Car - Heatmap* Five countries account for 71% of the world's nuclear generation capacity - EIA* AI may need the power equivalent of 50 large nuclear plants - E&E▶ Space/Transportation* NASA plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon—a space lawyer explains why - Ars* Rocket Lab's Surprise Stock Move After Solid Earnings - Barron's▶ Up Wing/Down Wing* James Lovell, the steady astronaut who brought Apollo 13 home safely, has died - Ars* Vaccine Misinformation Is a Symptom of a Dangerous Breakdown - NYT Opinion* We're hardwired for negativity. That doesn't mean we're doomed to it. - Vox* To Study Viking Seafarers, He Took 26 Voyages in a Traditional Boat - NYT* End is near for the landline-based service that got America online in the '90s - Wapo▶ Substacks/Newsletters* Who will actually profit from the AI boom? - Noahpinion* OpenAI GPT-5 One Unified System - AI Supremacy* Proportional representation is the solution to gerrymandering - Slow Boring* Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist - The Ecomodernist* How Many Jobs Depend on Exports? - Conversable Economist* ChatGPT Classic - Joshua Gans' Newsletter* Is Air Travel Getting Worse? - Maximum Progress▶ Social Media* On AI Progress - @daniel_271828* On AI Usage - @emollick* On Generative AI and Student Learning - @jburnmurdoch Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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Confused about when mortgage rates will finally drop? You're not alone—and this episode brings the answers. Kendall Garrison, CEO of Amplify Credit Union, joins Mike Mills to unpack what the Fed's latest decision means for interest rates, real estate professionals, and your clients' wallets.

Are things looking up in the economy after a rough few months? GDP is up and stocks are reporting positively, but just because the economy appears to be strong, it's impossible to know where the stock market will go from here. The guys discuss Trump accounts, child financial literacy, mortgage fraud schemes and the risks of buy now, pay later loans.   LINKS cainwatters.com Submit a Question Facebook | YouTube | Instagram

Today I want to talk to you about that connection between the movie that is running in your mind and food.About the Host:Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner and a Board Designated Trainer of NLP, Time Line Therapy®, Hypnotherarpy, and NLP Results Coaching, helping people get to the root cause of their health issues and then get lasting results. Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements. Melissa's business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don't have to figure it all out on your own.Melissa has launched Amplify Impact Academy, with business partner, Billie Aadmi and together they train other coaches, practitioners and counsellors in the 4 mind-body healing modalities mentioned above, giving them powerful tools to use with clients to get results with greater ease, speed and grace. These courses teach life skills and anyone can take them, if you wanto be a better leader, parent, partner, be empowered in your own life, these courses are for you!Melissa's passion project is her non-profit, Girls Matter (www.girlsmatter.ca), breaking the poverty cycle 1 girl, 1 family, 1 village at a time. The mission is to keep girls in school and stop teenage marriages, because school isn't free in over 50 countries around the world and when parents have to make the difficult choices of feeding their kids or paying for school, food wins. And when the girls hit their teen years, they will often be married off so that someone else becomes responsible to feed them. Keeping girls in school instead creates a generational ripple effect, because an educated girl is more than twice as likely to ensure her on children are educated. Educating girls also grows the GDP of countries, when they get into the workforce. This is how together, we can change the world. Guests on this podcast are invited to donate to this important cause. Learn more here in this short video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R3-xqzJLZW14om1PhFClcU_oRSZ8zgip/view?usp=share_linkMelissa is the winner of the 2024 Women in Podcasting Awards in the “inspiration & motivation” category and the 2021 & 2022 Quality Care Award by Business From The Heart and is also the recipient of the Alignable “Local Business Person of the Year “Award 2022, 2023 & 2024 for Whistler.Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, the Aim Higher Summit and many more! She has also guested on over 90 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get started. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/yourguidedhealthjourney Thanks for listening!If you know somebody who would benefit from this message, or would be an awesome addition to our community, please share it using the social media buttons on this page.Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a note in the comment section...

欢迎收听雪球出品的财经有深度，雪球，国内领先的集投资交流交易一体的综合财富管理平台，聪明的投资者都在这里。今天分享的内容叫美国降息，下半年全球资产配置的主线是什么？来自超级定投家主理人。最近的美股，有点热闹。8月初，美国就业数据暴雷，市场担忧美国经济的衰退，带动美股大跌，各大类资产呈现典型的“衰退交易”；不过，第二周立刻就发生了反转，市场冷静下来，开始期待美联储降息，以扶持经济增长，因此美股的几大指数纷纷强势上涨，开始体现“降息交易”的行情。“降息交易”行情下，几大指数大涨。一些新手投资者朋友可能对“降息交易”“衰退交易”这类名词还有点陌生。事实上，这两个都是市场对经济数据的反应，但方向可能完全相反。还是先上结论。我们先来看看降息交易和衰退交易对大类资产的传导逻辑。对于宏观背景来说，衰退交易通常发生在就业、消费、经济增长等核心经济数据下滑之际，预示经济可能衰退，在此背景下，风险资产面临不利局面，避险资产则更受青睐；降息交易则出现于美联储即将下调基准利率的情境中，预示无风险利率和融资利率将整体下降，此时风险资产和避险资产均能受益，但汇率会承受较大压力 。对于股票来说，衰退交易阶段，市场对公司运营基本面的担忧加剧，且投资者风险偏好降低，令股票表现承压；而降息交易中，若经济未出现大幅衰退，降息会降低公司融资成本、助力发展，同时无风险利率下降使股票回报率相对提升，从而对股票形成利好 。对于债券来说，在衰退交易时期，因自身相对稳健的特性，契合经济下行周期中市场的 “避险” 需求，故而受到青睐；在降息交易场景下，依据债券定价公式，无风险利率的下降会直接推动债券价格上涨，同样为债券带来利好支撑 。对于汇率来说，在衰退交易中面临不利局面，当本国经济下滑时，国内外投资者会产生换汇前往其他国家投资的动力，给本币汇率带来抛售压力；降息交易也对汇率不利，由于降息本质上会增加货币发行量，假设需求不变，货币供给增加将导致汇率承压 。对于黄金来说，在衰退交易阶段，作为传统避险资产，会因市场避险需求上升而受益；在降息交易过程中，当债券收益率下行、汇率出现下跌后，黄金的避险属性与抗通胀价值会进一步凸显，同样迎来利好表现 。首先我们以史为鉴，复盘美国历史上三次降息周期。我们所说的美联储“降息”，降的是美国联邦基金利率。，这也是美国最核心的政策利率，所有债券的收益率、贷款的利率，都是围绕这个利率来变动的。2000年以后，美国一共经历了3次降息周期：分别是2001-2003年，2007-2008年和2019-2020年。这3次降息周期，有一个显著的共性，在开启降息的前后，美国经济均遇到了一定的困境。当然，细究起来，肯定存在许多不同，接下来我们就一一来拆解。首先第一个降息周期是2001-2003年。2000年，美国遭遇的重要挑战是多方面的。首先，是互联网泡沫破裂。当时，以思科、英特尔、雅虎等互联网公司为代表的纳斯达克指数，在2000年3月触顶后快速下跌，一年内最大回撤超60%。随后，股市崩盘蔓延至实体经济，导致GDP增速持续下行；与此同时，美国还面临“911恐怖袭击”事件，以及阿富汗战争和伊拉克战争的冲击，政治经济面临了多重压力。为了刺激经济增长和稳定金融市场，美联储2001年1月开启了第一轮降息周期。从整体降息节奏来看，2001年联邦基金利率从年初的6.50%降至12月的1.75%，在一年的时间里就快速降息了475bp，并最终在2003年6月进一步降至1%，累计降息幅度达到了550基点。从资产表现来看，权益资产上，主要股指在降息期间发生了下跌，并在降息结束后6个月内反弹；黄金资产上，期间上涨27.24%，主要还是因为互联网泡沫破裂带来的避险情绪和经济衰退预期；美债资产上，表现相对较好，不过在停止降息后发生了一定下跌。再看第二次降息周期，2007-2008年。这一次降息的背景，想必大家比较熟悉——全球金融危机来了。2007年2月开始，因为美国房地产次级抵押贷款业务暴雷，信贷市场紧缩，流动性枯竭。美联储为应对危机，在2007年9月开始首次降息，后续到了2008年4月，联邦基金目标利率已经从5.25%降低到了2%。但这并没有彻底解决问题。随着2008年9月，美国top4投行的雷曼兄弟倒闭，次贷危机正式爆发，全球金融市场陷入恐慌，美国GDP增速快速下行。为了应对危机，美联储大幅加快了降息速度，到2008年12月，就将联邦基金利率降至0.25%的历史低位，累计降息500bp。期间，从资产表现来看：从权益资产来看，因为次贷危机和金融危机，美股、A股和港股在降息期间都发生了大幅下跌，并在停止降息后反弹；从美债和中债来看，在降息期间表现都很好，不过结束降息后出现回撤；而黄金在降息前后持续上涨。最后第三次降息周期2019-2020年。这次降息周期，和之前两次的区别还是比较大的。2019年美国的经济和就业市场相对比较稳健，并没有特别明显的衰退。那么，美联储为什么要降息呢？这主要源于中美贸易的局势紧张，是一种“预防性操作”，旨在防范经济减速；而且当时通胀较低，对于降息来说不构成阻碍。所以，在2019年9月，美联储开启了一次25基点的降息。但2020年有一些变化，在新冠疫情的冲击下，全球经济增长不确定性加大，美国的生产和经济也遭受重创。因此，美联储为救市，实施“无限量化宽松”，并继续降息至0.25%，本轮累计降息幅度达到225基点。期间，从权益资产来看，美股、A股和港股的方向是相对一致的，在降息期间出现较大回撤，当然核心原因还是新冠疫情的冲击；在停止降息后，都发生了反弹。再从固收资产来看：美债和中债在降息期间表现都不错，降息结束后则稍有些熄火。而黄金还是持续地保持了较好的表现。大家可以发现，这三次的行情方向都非常一致。对于权益资产，不论是美股、A股、港股，在美国的降息通道中，通常是下跌的。当然，这不是因为降息行为本身，而是因为，当美联储采取快速降息措施时，通常都是因为经济基本面受到了较大的冲击和挑战，这才是股市下跌的本质。而固收资产——美债和中债，都显著上涨。黄金也是显著上涨的，因为在降息周期中，黄金兼具避险和抗通胀的性质。那么，回到当前，降息会如何影响我们的投资？从美联储近几次降息情况来看，背景共同点是比较明显的：发生了全球性危机事件、经济发生了实质性衰退。那如果美联储，现在即将开启新一轮的降息周期，目前宏观背景与之前有何异同，我们能否借鉴一些历史经验呢？要回答这个问题，我们需要先从“如何看待美国非农就业大幅下修”开始分析。7月新增非农就业7.3万人，前值是14.7万人，大幅低于彭博一致预期的10.4万人。更令人意外的是，还对前两个月的数据进行了大幅下修，6月从14.7万人下修至1.4万人，5月数据从14.4万人再度下修至1.9万人，基本只留了个原有的零头。首先，下修确实反映了美国就业市场在二季度以来的明显降温，可能是因为关税政策对企业雇佣意愿的扰动所致。其次，也反映出非农统计的准确度出现波动。这可能与新冠疫情后，机构调查的初次收集率持续走低有关。其实，自从2022年以来，夏季就业数据均有向下大幅调整，而6月被下修较多的政府、休闲和酒店业、建造业行业，历史上预测误差也比较高，容易出现较大波动。所以，这次非农数据下修可能有点属于“意料之外、情理之中”——虽然这个操作看上去很令人迷惑、幅度也非常大，但相对来说也属于“正常操作”了。倒是很难仅凭此，就断定美国存在数据造假、经济衰退等严重问题。下半年，除了降息和“大美丽法案”带来的财政扩张以外，对美国经济形成支撑还有一个重要因素。就是TACO：当美国的重要经济数据和资本市场发生大的动荡时，特朗普通常会采取一些正面的措施来呵护美国经济。因此，我们认为，未来美国的经济难说将陷入衰退，可能还是以温和降温为主。那本轮和过去3次降息就存在了一个本质性的不同。而外界普遍认为，美国经济当前发生实质性大衰退的风险可能会相对低一些，那么权益资产大跌的风险可能也会小一些。除了这点之外，基于当前的宏观环境，我们还总结了本次降息相对利好的大类资产，以及与之前3次市场环境的异同点。对于美股来说，与前几次的相同点是就业数据降温、经济下行背景下降息 “放水” 助力经济恢复，本次的不同点在于本轮暂时没有显著的全球性危机，若美国经济暂时没有严重衰退迹象，美股或有一定支撑。对于美债来说，与前几次的相同点是美债收益率与联邦基金利率相关性极强，降息促使美债收益率下行，即债券价格上涨，本次的不同点在于通胀较高导致降息节奏难以很快，同时市场存在财政扩张、债券供给大增的担忧。对于 A 股来说，与前几次的相同点是美联储降息代表海外流动性充裕，外资有望流入，本次的不同点在于本轮全球性危机风险不显著，对关税冲击也逐渐钝化，市场回归国内基本面交易，短期市场情绪相对较好，或有一定支撑。对于港股来说，与前几次的相同点是美联储降息后美元资产的吸引力进一步下降，外资有望流入，港股或将受益，本次的不同点在于本轮全球性危机风险不显著，南下资金持续净流入成为主力，市场情绪面和资金面较好，或有一定支撑。对于中债来说，与前几次的相同点是美联储降息后人民币兑美元贬值压力下降，给中国货币政策的进一步宽松打开空间，或利好中债，本次的不同点在于中债收益率已到历史低位，收益率大幅下行的空间相对有限，当前债市波动率比较大。对于黄金来说，与前几次的相同点是美联储降息导致美元资产的吸引力进一步下降，同时美国债务担忧增加、美元信用走弱、通胀较高、政策不确定性存在，或利好黄金，本次的不同点在于后续关税和地缘局势的极端风险概率缓和，避险情绪降温，且金价处于历史高位，短期可能会震荡；不过长期来看，目前许多全球央行持续购金，或形成一定支撑。不过，有小伙伴可能会问了：有没有受负面影响比较大的？有的，主要是美元指数，也就是美元汇率会跌。降息通常意味着货币的超发，美元会变得没有以前那么值钱了。这也确实会对于我们的QDII基金会有一定负面影响。比如说QDII股基：正如我们上文分析，降息时市场流动性充足，股市或会上涨，涨幅或能抵消一些掉汇率贬值的损失，倒也还好。而QDII债基和美元理财：需要更谨慎了，特别是对于久期比较短的债基。在降息周期中，短久期债券价格上涨的资本利得，通常不能完全抵消美元贬值的汇率风险。不过，上面的这些还是比较理论性的推导，并不代表着美联储降息之后，这些资产走势与推导一致。毕竟，美股与企业盈利基本面高度相关；而A股、港股、中债，目前和国内基本面、市场情绪的关系比较大，美国并不是其最主要的影响变量；黄金，也可能会因为宏观不确定性的下降，而有些调整。最后，后续降息路径怎么走？可以重点关注哪些指标呢？以上我们所有的讨论，都是基于9月美联储降息的情形。目前，市场预期美联储9月降息概率超80%，幅度为25bp，年内预计降息两次。但是，在9月FOMC会议上正式确定降息前，这都只是一个可能性、一种概率。那么，有哪些重要数据，可能会对降息决策产生重要影响呢？我们认为：最核心还是基本面数据，特别是鲍威尔重点提到的指标——失业率和通胀。如果失业率上行、通胀下行，那么降息概率会大大增加。消息面上，关税的谈判结果也比较重要，因为这是影响通胀的重要变量，关税加剧很可能带来再通胀风险，降低降息概率。政治因素上，也可以关注美联储重要成员的变化，比如是否有鹰派官员请辞、特朗普推举鸽派成员上位等事件。所以8月到9月，我们该高度重视美国通胀、消费、经济、就业、景气等数据及 Jackson Hole 会议、QCEW 数据等观测焦点 。若通胀等指标下行、失业率上行，或会议偏鸽、数据下修，降息概率上升，9 月 18 日 会议将决定联邦基金利率 。

Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:17532056201798502,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-9437-3289"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");pt> Click On Picture To See Larger Picture Germany's economy is falling apart, they have been pushing the green new scam and they have been in a recession for a while. The earth is cooling not warming up. Newsom folds, wants oil companies to stay. Trump is bringing the country out of Biden's recession. Bessent is now the acting IRS directory, Scavino says abolish IRS, say goodbye to income tax. Trump is moving at very quick pace to put all the pieces in place, he is now removing the endless wars that the [DS] has setup. He is ushering in world peace. Those individuals that came after him have projected their crimes onto him, everything is now boomeranging on them and the people are going to witness that these people are the criminals and they committed the crimes. Justice has begun, the grand jury is set, the investigations are happening, eye for an eye, justice will be served.   Economy German economy in free fall  The German economy is sinking far deeper into recession than previously thought. Recent revisions to the national accounts by the Federal Statistical Office paint a dramatic picture.   the Federal Statistical Office released new data this week on Germany's economic output. And, as expected, the figures were revised downward. Instead of shrinking by 0.2% in 2023 as initially reported, Germany's GDP actually contracted by 0.9%. The outlook for 2024 has also worsened: a projected contraction of 0.5% instead of the previously assumed stagnation. Three Years of Ongoing Recession Anyone who still clung to the illusion of stability must now face reality. Germany is stuck deep in its third consecutive year of recession -- and there's no way out in sight. The downturn is deeper than previously assumed, with far-reaching consequences that politicians and media had downplayed.  Source: americanthinker.com https://twitter.com/JunkScience/status/1954173531610116516 https://twitter.com/SteveGuest/status/1954195874315169855 (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:18510697282300316,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-8599-9832"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");     https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1954241768947613897 Trump Economy Beat Biden's For All Americans, Economist Says “The rich were the only group that did better under Biden, which is ironic because Biden keeps saying he was trying to get rid of income inequality." According to newly released Census Bureau data, all income groups in America advanced more during President Donald Trump's first term than they did during the Biden administration. Stephen Moore, a senior visiting fellow in economics at The Heritage Foundation, presented the unpublished data for the first time in an Oval Office presentation with Trump on Thursday. The data divided Americans into three groups: lower income (bottom 25% of earners), middle income (middle 50%), and upper income (top 25%). “What I find fascinating about this, Mr. President, is every income group did better,” said Moore, displaying a chart showing the percentage gain that accrued on average in each income bracket. Under President Joe Biden, the lower class, after adjusting for inflation, lost income over the course of four years. The middle-income earners stayed about the same. But the upper income earners did noticeably better,

After President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists and statisticians across the board were horrified. Because the firing raises the spectre of potential manipulation – and it raises the worry that, in the future, the numbers won't be as trustworthy.So: we looked at two countries that have some experience with data manipulation. To ask what happens when governments get tempted to cook the books. And...once they cook the books... how hard is it to UN-cook them?It's two statistical historical cautionary tales. First, we learn how Argentina tried to mask its true inflation rate, and how that effort backfired. Then, we hear about the difficult process of cleaning up the post-cooked-book mess, in Greece. For more: - Can we just change how we measure GDP? - The price of lettuce in Brooklyn - What really goes on at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Update) - Can we still trust the monthly jobs report? (Update) - How office politics could take down Europe - The amazing shrinking economy might stop shrinkingListen free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Support Planet Money, get bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening and now Summer School episodes one week early by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I spoke with the great Paul Kedrosky to discuss the significant impact of AI capital expenditure (CapEx) on the economy, exploring how it contributes to GDP growth and the implications of this spending. Qw delve into the rapid growth of AI-related investments, the short lifespan of data centers, and the potential risks associated with this economic phenomenon. 00:00 The Impact of AI Capital Expenditure on the Economy 09:34 The Dynamics of Data Center Investments 19:39 Debt Financing and Its Implications 30:09 Potential Risks and Future Outlook for AI Investments Articles mentioned on this episode: Paul Kedrosky: Honey AI Capex Ate The Economy Chris Mims in the WSJ Noah Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When official data starts serving politics, markets lose their anchor. Alan Dunne and Niels examine the quiet shift unfolding as the U.S. edges closer to emerging market behavior - firing statisticians, sidelining inconvenient numbers, and pressuring the Fed ahead of a consequential leadership reshuffle. With labor supply falling, growth stalling, and tariffs acting as stealth taxes, the Fed's playbook no longer fits the moment. Behind the scenes, hedge fund power brokers position themselves to shape what comes next. Plus, an unvarnished look at trend following's drawdown, the lazy critiques making the rounds, and why so many allocators still miss the point.-----50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE-----Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.IT's TRUE ? – most CIO's read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.Send your questions to info@toptradersunplugged.comAnd please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.Follow Alan on Twitter.Episode TimeStamps:01:32 - What has caught our attention recently?08:53 - Dunne's global macro overview13:31 - Is our understanding of growth and GDP outdated?17:52 - The Fed is under threat from multiple angles21:38 - Dunne's impression of Kevin Warsh as a candidate for Fed chairman26:43 - An odd juxtaposition with hedge fund titans' influences on the Fed32:35 - Industry performance update37:30 - Our takeaways from The Wall Street Journal's article on Trend Following43:35 - Why should investors even consider managed futures in the first place?45:40 - Has Dunne ever been on the verge of cutting trend?52:08 - Do long term investors really need diversifiers?Copyright © 2024 – CMC AG – All...

Nowadays we hear a lot from the right-wing that sounds like this: economics is a frivolous thing to be concerned about when we have matters of existential importance at stake, or economists care only about GDP, etc. In fact, the MAGA grassroots will find its goals more readily achieved if they actually listen to the (good) economists they've been told to despise. Sponsors: Agorist Tax Advice: Pick up a free copy of the brilliant Matthew Sercely's Agorist Tax Toolkit at: AgoristTaxAdvice.com/woods  Monetary Metals: monetary-metals.com/woods Show notes for Ep. 2677

Victor Davis Hanson explains the long-running tensions between Jerome Powell and Trump, why Trump has dubbed him “Too Late Powell,” and the economic consequences for everyday Americans on today's episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” “ The Wall Street Journal was forecasting a ‘stock crash,' a ‘trade war,' ‘uncertainty over tariffs,' ‘anemic GDP,' and all of the barometers… At that point, you would've thought that Powell, who agreed, basically, with the consensus of the economic media and most of the economists, why didn't he intervene in fears that they were right, that we were headed toward a recession and lower rates? Instead, he didn't do anything. “ Jerome Powell has been in this fight with Donald Trump. … And whether we like it or not, he's acting emotionally or angrily to Donald Trump. And he has been under threat of being fired. He does not want to show that he's going to back down and lose the independence of the Fed to the president. The problem with that stance is it really hurts millions of Americans.”

We all love a boom story, until it turns into a 40‑year hangover. In 1995, Japan's nominal GDP hit its high‑water mark. It took until the 2020s to get back there. Debt has exploded to 250% of GDP. The population is shrinking so fast that by 2070, one in three Japanese will have vanished, down from 128 million in 2010 to just 87 million. What went wrong? A bursting property bubble, a banking system in denial, and a culture where shame trumps change. For four decades, Japan has been the economic equivalent of a superstar striker refusing to retire; still wearing the jersey, but stuck on the bench. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest GDP report. It contained a startling detail. Spending on artificial intelligence added more to the U.S. economy than consumer spending last quarter. This is very quickly becoming an AI economy. I'm interested in how AI will change our jobs. But I'm just as curious about how it will change our minds. We're already seeing that students in high school and college are using AI to write most of their essays. What do we lose in a world where students sacrifice the ability to do deep writing? Today's guest is Cal Newport, the author of several bestsellers on the way we work, including 'Deep Work.' He is also a professor of computer science at Georgetown. One of the questions I get the most by email, in talks, in conversations with people about the news is: If these tools can read faster than us, synthesize better than us, remember better than us, and write faster than us, what's our place in the loop? What skills should we value in the age of AI? Or, more pointedly: What should we teach our children in the age of AI? How do we ride this train without getting run over by it? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Calvin Newport Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Washington is buzzing with crypto action. From the CFTC's new crypto sprint to Hester Peirce's bold stand for privacy, this episode dives into the shifting regulatory winds—and what they mean for the future of Bitcoin, markets, and crypto infrastructure. NLW covers ETF outflows, macro pressures, and why the AI economy might be holding up GDP while the labor market struggles. Plus, Project Crypto at the SEC might be the biggest institutional shift yet. It's a packed episode on the changing rules, power struggles, and financial transformations playing out right now. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

What if our most trusted economic statistic is pointing us in the wrong direction? Diane Coyle joins Kevin Coldiron to explore why GDP - long treated as a proxy for progress - now obscures more than it reveals. As economies shift toward services, intangibles, and unpaid digital labor, much of today's value creation falls outside the frame. Drawing on her new book, The Measure of Progress, Coyle makes the case for a new way of seeing - one that captures time, trust, and the real foundations of growth. The question isn't how fast we're moving. It's whether we're measuring the right road.-----50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE-----Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.IT's TRUE ? – most CIO's read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.Send your questions to info@toptradersunplugged.comAnd please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.Follow Kevin on SubStack & read his Book.Follow Diane on X and read her book.Episode TimeStamps: 02:19 - Introduction to Diane Coyle03:55 - How did the current systems of national accounts came to be?06:55 - Why the national statistics doesn't add up11:22 - The underlying problems of GDP18:42 - How software pose a problem for measuring GDP and economic activity23:25 - The challenges of cloud computing26:39 - What is disintermediation and why is it a problem for economic...

In this episode, Dan Hugger speaks with Dave Herbert, a senior research fellow at AIER and an affiliate scholar here at the Acton Institute. They discuss the American economy from all angles. What do the latest GDP numbers mean in the real economy? Why are the new tariffs announced by the White House troubling? How […]

This week we talk about surge pricing, Walmart, and the Robinson-Patman Act.We also discuss personal data, AC settings, and Delta's earnings call.Recommended Book: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared RubinTranscriptThe US Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 is also called the Anti-Price Discrimination Act, and it was passed to make it illegal for a product supplier to charge different prices to different customers.So a company that makes candy bars wouldn't be allowed to charge one price to most of their customers, all the smaller and mid-sized convenience stores and mom-and-pop grocery stores, for instance, and then a lower price to the big stores, the Walmarts and Amazons of the world.The concern was that these larger players, which at the time this law was passed were burgeoning grocery stores like A&P, would be able to achieve a monopolistic position in the market for these goods, these slightly lower prices giving them one more advantage over their smaller competitors.During the four decades or so of this Act's enforcement, small grocery stores has prices that were, on average, about 1% higher than those offered by their large competitors, and the eight largest grocery store chains only captured about 25% of all grocery sales in the US—essentially every city and town of any size had at least one small grocery store, and most had several of them, during this period. It was a very competitive market.During the Reagan administration in the 80s, though, enforcement was abandoned, as the folks in charge of that enforcement were convinced this Act was holding back growth; they saw it as a handout to small businesses at the expense of big business, so while it technically remained on the books, they just stopped enforcing it, and the big businesses in these spaces got the message pretty quickly.Walmart was the first big business to really lean into the new powers afforded them by this fresh governmental stance, and that led to it becoming the country's largest grocery store chain by 2001, and other big grocery brands, like Kroger and Safeway, began to do the same, consolidating all their buying so they could put in huge orders like Walmart was able to put in, and that allowed them to demand lower prices, which in turn allowed them to dramatically increase profits and gobble up their smaller competition.All of which led to the emergence of food deserts across the country, a term that was coined in 1995 to refer to areas where there are simply no grocery stores within a reasonable distance of relatively large populations of people, because smaller grocery stores can no longer compete, even when they're the only player in town; folks have to travel to the larger chain stores, and have no real options closer to home, which can result in food precariousness, and situations in which the only nearby food options are unhealthy ones—the snacks at gas stations, for instance.This same general pattern played out across all retail spaces, including pharmacies and bookstores and athletic supply stores, and between 1982 and 2017, the total market share of independent retailers in the US dropped from 53% to 22%.Which in some ways is great at the federal level, as—and this is what the Reagan administration seemed to want, back in the 80s—big businesses can grow a lot faster and bigger than small businesses, and that can lead to outsized GDP numbers, and other such macro-scale figures.Unfortunately, while independent retailers tend to keep nearly half of the revenue they pull in within their local community, major chains only keep something like 14% in the local community—so the shift from independent to chain retailers has had a deleterious impact on communities across the US, in the sense of having less competition, having food and other sorts of product deserts, and in terms of tax revenues and overall economic wealth being sapped from these areas and moved to other places, creating some relatively few winners and a whole lot of losers, in the process.What I'd like to talk about today is another type of variable pricing, this one more directly aimed at consumers, and enabled, at least in its modern incarnation, by big data and the devices we use every day.—Dynamic pricing refers to changing the price of goods or services based on all sorts of variables.Demand or surge pricing, for instance, might see the price of a bus ticket or rideshare ride with Uber cost more during rush-hour, the idea being that there are only so many bus seats and only so many available rideshare rides to go around, and when everyone's either trying to get to work or get home from work, there will be a lot more people wanting these finite number of seats and rides than there are seats and rides available.Upping the prices, then, is a means of determining who wants these things the most, because they're willing to pay at times massively inflated prices for something that would cost far less in an hour or two, once the rush has subsided.Similar price-inflation occurs during peak energy-use periods, and energy companies usually explain this price-bump by suggesting that it encourages their customers to use more energy when it's abundant and cheap, and to use less of it when it's scarce and expensive.On very hot days when everyone is using their air conditioners to stay cool, then, inflated energy prices might encourage them to be less aggressive with their AC settings, keeping their indoor temperatures at a more reasonable level, which in turn ensures there's more energy available for everyone and less risk of brownouts or blackouts.This pricing strategy is often seen by those on the receiving end of such price-bumps, as price gouging, which refers to companies taking advantage of temporary variables to massively inflate their prices, at times to abusive levels that they can justify by pointing at those variables and a desire to moderate supply and demand.So if there's a big convention in town, local hotels can argue that they're doubling or tripling their prices because there are not enough rooms for everyone who wants rooms on those days, but this could also be construed as a money-grab, these hotel companies knowing that some people won't be able to avoid paying for a place to stay during the convention they have to attend, so they're taking advantage of customers who have no choice but to pay up.We saw similar dynamics play out globally during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when folks who had high-quality masks on hand were able to charge incredible sums for those masks because production hadn't yet scaled up, so they were relatively scarce and thus precious, and these people and companies with the right product at the right time knew they could get away with charging many times the actual sticker-price of that product, because some people would feel they had no choice but to pay it.Each situation of this kind will feel reasonable and suitable for the supply-demand situation to some, and completely unreasonable and abusive to others, and it's possible to have a bit of both in many such situations—the companies in question actually want to manage a scarce supply of something, but are also keen to make as much money as possible while doing it.Dynamic pricing has become even more common in online marketplaces like Amazon, where it's not just holidays or events or the sudden emergence of global pandemics that can impact demand and thus, the prices retailers can get away with charging would-be customers.Amazon has algorithms that keep track of what competitors are charging for the goods they offer, what sort of demand the market is seeing for said goods, what inventory looks like—if they have a lot or very few of something available to sell—and all sorts of other factors that might reasonably impact the price of a product, even a little bit.As of 2024, the price of a product listed on Amazon changes several times a day, in some cases every 10 minutes, and they make about 2.5 million prices changes every single day, adjusting for those aforementioned micro-scale variables, on a product-by-product basis, but also adjusting their entire catalog so that relatively uncommon goods have higher prices, but common goods have lower prices, which means customers shopping around will tend to see Amazon's lower-priced goods more often than the higher-priced ones, which in turn can adjust their perception of the company and its marketplace in a favorable, lower-price direction.Amazon also has access to just a silly amount of data about their customers, some of it scooped up while we surf their sites, and some bought from other data-aggregators. And this allows Amazon, just like most tech companies and retailers, these days to track our behavior, watching what we click on, how long we linger on different products or product types, noticing our searches and contextualizing all of it with where we live, what we've purchased in the past, and so on.The company isn't very transparent about how it uses all this personal data, but while it's been been speculated that they might adjust prices based on our individual profiles, most evidence suggests they mostly use it to determine what we're shown—what products are promoted to us, basically, as opposed to setting prices based on what it thinks we'll pay, as individuals.The same generally seems to be true of other retailers right now, though there are concerns that this might change at some point in the near-future, as new technologies, some based on AI, enable the more-rapid and sophisticated crunching of data, and the consequent individualization of prices, even in person.US airline Delta, for instance, recently announced that it would be using AI to help it boost profits by charging different customers different prices for the same airline seat.These prices would be based on their customer profile, which means all the data scooped up by Delta from various sources, including things like past purchases, regular flight schedules, and how much money their systems think each customer makes and has available to spend.The president of the company said on a recent earnings call that they've been running a pilot project for this approach that resulted in about 3% of ticket sales being sold based on this model over the past 6 months, and by the end of the year, their goal is to increase that to 20% of tickets.In theory, this sort of system could be good for some customers some of the time, because it could drop prices on tickets that customers wouldn't want to, or wouldn't be able to pay for, otherwise. If I'm considering a trip, but the tickets are more expensive than I want to pay, these systems could theoretically recognize this and offer them to me at a price they can afford to sell them at, and which I can afford. That could lead to more ticket sales, and thus, higher profits.The evidence on the ground with these sorts of systems usually points at price increases, not decreases, though: the companies using these models to see how much they can get per unit, not using them to sell more units at lower profit margins.In other words, usually it's wealthier consumers who get the better deals, as these companies want to keep them coming back, spending larger sums of money on glitzier products and services over time, while poorer consumers have fewer options, and will thus tend to pay whatever they're told they have to pay.Delta spent most of July 2025 trying to control the backlash that erupted following that earnings call, and they're now saying, to the press but also in formal letters to government watchdogs who expressed concerns about what they said they planned to do, that no no no, we misspoke, we're not using individualized data to set prices, it's all good, don't worry about it.That announcement from Delta came shortly after lawmakers announced they would be pushing to get a new act, the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act, passed into law, and though some US Senators have said they'll block such efforts by Delta, other airlines, including Azul, WestJet, Virgin Atlantic, and VivaAerobus are also clients of the Israeli company, Fetcherr, that Delta has been working with to run their AI pricing pilot program—and representatives from Fetcherr have claimed that this pricing model is irresistible to those in charge of these companies, so it will probably take over the airline industry relatively quickly, and they plan to expand into other industries soon.These sorts of pricing models aren't typically very popular with customers, and efforts by Walmart and other big grocery chains to remove static in-store pricing labels and replace them with digital versions, or in some extreme cases to remove them entirely and rely on apps on customers' phone to show prices on goods, raised similar alarm bells, as dynamic pricing can allow the store to more rapidly change their prices based on demand, like Uber's surge pricing model, but maybe applied to flour or cough medicine instead of rideshare seats, and in-app pricing could allow them to show different prices to different people shopping for the same thing at the same time—again, based on income, buying patterns, and so on.Walmart and everyone else dabbling in this space has, like Delta, claimed they intend no such dynamism in their pricing, even as their CEOs in some cases continue to brag to investors about the possibilities. As a result, there seems to be a decent chance we'll see the large-scale deployment of these sorts of models in at least some customer-facing industries within the next year or two, some company deciding to more fully test the regulatory establishment's appetite for challenging this push into a new pricing paradigm that would, theoretically at least, allow big companies to earn still-higher profits and grow even larger.Show Noteshttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQoQhvfVv8p0XmOdDIiWTnmd2YM_za07/viewhttps://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-price-changes-2018-8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_pricinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_pricinghttps://www.archeraffiliates.com/post/amazon-dynamic-pricinghttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/delta-denies-using-ai-to-come-up-with-inflated-personalized-prices/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/will-ai-end-cheap-flights-critics-attack-deltas-predatory-ai-pricing/https://www.the-sun.com/money/14839597/walmart-kroger-electronic-labels-dynamic-pricing-demand-wendyshttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/business/kroger-walmart-facial-recognition-prices.htmlhttps://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/what-is-dynamic-pricinghttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/https://www.indieretailermonth.com/statisticshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Group Chat News is back with the hottest news of the week including the American Eagle ad with Sydney Sweeney that had thousands of critiques, friend of the pod Kevin Gould stops by to talk about Glamnetic's new major collab, what's really behind those rosy GDP numbers, Las Vegas just reported an 11% drop in tourism revenue, design software maker Figma's shares surge 158% in blowout market debut, Quince more than doubles valuation to $4.5B with second raise in 6 months, And Lebron and Bronny pick up golfing 

More Biden aides prepare to testify…and in the process, reveal just how bad Joe Biden's health was; we dig into the second quarter GDP report and what it means for the future; and Kash Patel announces a shock finding in the Russiagate scandal. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2250 - - - Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings - - - DailyWire+: Watch Journey to the UFC: Joe Pyfer now—streaming exclusively on DailyWire+. My new book, “Lions and Scavengers,” drops September 2nd—pre-order today at https://dailywire.com/benshapiro Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: Perplexity - Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine that searches the internet to deliver fast, unbiased, high-quality answers, with sources and in-line citations. Ask Perplexity anything here: https://pplx.ai/benshapiro ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/ben and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! ZipRecruiter - Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE: https://ZipRecruiter.com/DAILYWIRE Grand Canyon University - Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Visit https://gcu.edu today. Helix Sleep - Go to https://helixsleep.com/ben for an exclusive offer. - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3cXUn53  Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3QtuibJ  Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3TTirqd  Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPyBiB - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charlie is joined by Stephen Moore to unpack the newest economic news on GDP growth and inflation, both of which came in stronger than expections, how President Trump has used the threat of tariffs to negotiate a series of historic trade deals. Charlie also speaks with Douglass Mackey on his pursuit of justice after being persecuted, and then vindicated, by his own government for posting a joke meme back in 2016. Finally, Charlie reacts to a viral controversy regarding a Sydney Sweeney that has sent unhinged liberals into a rage spiral. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell holds interest rates steady despite internal dissent and pressure from President Trump, even as GDP beats expectations. Journalist Margot Cleveland breaks down the “bonkers” legal mess surrounding Mahmoud Khalil, where a district judge is overriding immigration courts. NYC Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani faces backlash over past anti-police comments, while his poll numbers surge. Ground News: Go to https://groundnews.com/megynfor 40% off the Vantage subscription and find the truth mainstream media doesn't want you to see.Byrna: Go to https://Byrna.com or your local Sportsman's Warehouse today.

The Fed holds rates steady as U.S. GDP smashes expectations, the Trump administration moves to ax the EPA endangerment findings, and ICE launches a huge recruitment campaign. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Today's Sponsors: Select Quote - Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for YOU, for LESS, and save more than 50% at https://selectquote.com/morning Shopify - Go to https://Shopify.com/morningwire to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period and upgrade your selling today. - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jason Kander and Ravi Gupta break down new revelations connected to the Epstein case that have reignited scrutiny around Donald Trump, sparking a wave of viral clips and speculation. They analyze Trump's bizarre responses to questions about Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Virginia Giuffre, including his bizarre answer to whether he'd been to Epstein's island and Maxwell's attorney calling him the “ultimate dealmaker.” Kander and Gupta also dive into Trump's escalating trade threats, with a 25% tariff on India set to begin August 1, as well as conflicting economic signals from GDP growth, consumer spending slowdowns, and steady hiring numbers. Plus, they're joined by Texas State Representative James Talarico to talk about his viral moment with Joe Rogan, his faith-driven approach to politics, and what Democrats keep getting wrong about Texas and the middle of the country. This and more on the podcast that helps you, the majority of Americans who believe in progress, convince your conservative friends and family to join us—this is Majority 54! Indacloud: If you're 21 or older, get 25% OFF your first order + free shipping @IndaCloud with code MAJORITY at https://inda.shop/MAJORITY! #indacloudpod Majority 54 is a MeidasTouch Network production. Theme music provided by Kemet Coleman. Special thanks to Diana Kander. Majority 54 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/majority54 Jason on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JasonKander Jason on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasonkander/ Ravi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RaviMGupta Ravi on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ravimgupta Ravi on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LostDebate Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices