Podcasts about us gdp

What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here:Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To FounderSign up for my AI Masterclass: AI MasterclassFOLLOW TOM:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=enTwitter: https://twitter.com/tombilyeuYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeuWOI EPISODES:FOLLOW LISA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisabilyeu/Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisabilyeuYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/womenofimpactTik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lisa_bilyeu?lang=enCash App: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl #CashAppPod*Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. 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Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at https://business.att.comPique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impactThe team dissects the viral Konstantin Kisin vs. Steve Keen debate—both former Impact Theory guests—on the central climate question of our time: is the answer to use less and shrink (de-growth), or to innovate our way forward? The host, who knows both men and calls them smart and well-intentioned, explicitly urges viewers not to pick a side and dismiss the other as stupid, but to find the one factual disagreement worth reasoning from. His own position leans hard toward innovation: drawing on Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, he argues that 80,000 years of human progress make "it all ends now" an irrational bet, that we've innovated our way out of every prior crisis, and that de-growth—especially any talk of reducing world population—would trigger economic collapse that causes far more suffering than the problem it aims to solve. He respects Steve Keen's economic mind but argues Keen has essentially "given up," wishing we'd listened to engineers 50 years ago rather than charting a path forward now. He reframes the climate fight around tradeoffs the doom narrative ignores: citing Bjørn Lomborg's "it's real but overstated, and the solutions can be worse than the disease" framing, the roughly 140,000-plus annual heat deaths that air conditioning could prevent, and Jordan Peterson's warning about sacrificing today's actual poor for tomorrow's hypothetical poor. The conversation ranges across the East-vs-West Germany innovation contrast, a Peter Diamandis-style geoengineering thought experiment, why "politics is downstream of culture," and the host's more contested claim that climate panic often masks a desire for control and resentment—before ending on a speculative, openly-unsupported musing about the psychology behind who pushes it. A wide-ranging argument for optimism, first-principles thinking, and refusing to let "we're doomed" become the whole story.The team breaks down Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's latest move to tame rising long-term bond rates—and why the bond market is likely to keep testing him. After Bessent doubled buybacks from $2B to $4B per round (which briefly knocked yields down before they rebounded past where they started), two off-the-record Treasury officials leaked to CNBC that the Treasury General Account—the government's roughly $1-trillion checking account at the Fed—could be tapped to buy bonds en masse. The host walks through why that's a bigger deal than expected: using cash to retire long-duration bonds without issuing new supply makes the debt "evaporate," and the market has, at least for now, believed the rumor enough to push the 30-year and 10-year yields down. But he's clear about the catch: the TGA isn't a magic war chest—every dollar in it was borrowed via prior auctions, so spending it down just defers the problem and eventually requires selling more debt, pressuring the curve again. He frames the backdrop honestly: $40 trillion in debt, ~123% debt-to-GDP, climbing interest costs, Japan (the largest buyer of US debt) in trouble, China dumping Treasuries while hoarding gold, and gold overtaking the dollar as the top central-bank reserve asset. His throughline is that there's no silver bullet, only tradeoffs, and the only real fix is growing the real economy—rising middle-class wages adjusted for inflation, GDP moving from ~1.2% toward 3–4%—rather than financial engineering. Absent that, he lays out the grim menu every over-indebted empire faces: austerity, default, or inflating the currency to shrink the debt (which quietly impoverishes everyone paid or saving in dollars), and warns that another Covid-scale inflation spike without real growth is how you get to "pitchforks." The conversation closes on a lengthy, contested tangent about immigration incentive structures, the Nordic model, and social trust—with the host explicitly noting the Nordic countries themselves say they aren't socialist. A dense, sobering economics breakdown.The team breaks down the escalating US-Canada trade war after Canada walked away from a deal that would have sharply lowered tariffs on several key Canadian industries. The host argues Canada is making a serious economic miscalculation—laying out the dependency math: roughly 78% of Canadian exports rely on US consumer markets, and exports make up about 33% of Canada's GDP, versus Canada representing only around 13% of US imports and a small slice of US GDP. In his read, that asymmetry means Canada has far more to lose, and pivoting toward China—geographically distant and, as he notes, a non-market economy—is a poor substitute. He digs into what actually broke the deal per PM Mark Carney: autos, French-language and cultural protections, and, most importantly, a US demand to restrict Canada's ability to sign independent trade deals with other countries (read: China), pointing to Canada's stated goal of a 50% export increase to China by 2030, Carney's January Beijing visit, and a flurry of mutual tariff cuts (including slashing Canada's 100% EV tariff to ~6%) as evidence of a rapidly warming relationship. But the host is pointedly two-sided: he says the US had understandable strategic reasons to push for guarantees, while blasting Trump's "51st state" rhetoric and bullying public posture as counterproductive—using it as a lesson he teaches entrepreneurs about always showing the other side how a deal is a win for them, and the human psychology of how people resist being forced into even things that serve their interests. He walks through the granular US demands (auto assembly, procurement, energy allocation, language laws) and their second-order effects, and closes on a contested hypothesis that Canada may be more ideologically aligned with China than the US. A dense, numbers-driven, deliberately even-handed breakdown of leverage, strategy, and a deal gone sideways.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today's guest is Paul Kedrosky, a fellow at the MIT Institute for the Digital Economy, partner at SK Ventures and former sell-side analyst. In today's episode, Paul Kedrosky explains why AI sits at the intersection of every force behind the biggest bubbles. He walks through why tokens are the fastest-deflating commodity ever, why more than half the data center buildout runs on debt instead of cash flow, and why an IPO wave pressures the market's biggest winners. To close, Paul argues AI already drives most US GDP growth, and revisits how badly humans misjudge scale. (0:00) Introduction (1:19) AI solving its own problems and historical economic crises (3:14) The impact of AI on energy and emissions (7:25) AI's economic implications (10:45) Financing and economic impact of data centers (18:42) Deflationary effects of AI tokens and tech company debt (22:26) Tech companies as utilities and the IPO surge (28:01) High PE ratios and valuation risks (34:04) AI model convergence and diminishing returns (40:22) Global attitudes toward AI and technology adoption ----- Sponsor: ⁠⁠Upwork⁠⁠ is the world's largest human and AI-powered freelance marketplace to hire top talent—trusted by businesses and professionals worldwide. ----- Follow Meb on X, LinkedIn and YouTube For detailed show notes, click here To learn more about our funds and follow us, subscribe to our mailing list or visit us at cambriainvestments.com ----- Follow The Idea Farm: X | LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTok ----- Interested in sponsoring the show? Email us at Feedback@TheMebFaberShow.com ----- Past guests include Ed Thorp, Richard Thaler, Jeremy Grantham, Joel Greenblatt, Campbell Harvey, Ivy Zelman, Kathryn Kaminski, Jason Calacanis, Whitney Baker, Aswath Damodaran, Howard Marks, Tom Barton, and many more.  ----- Meb's invested in some awesome startups that have passed along discounts to our listeners. Check them out here!  ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).

This week we talk about borders, trade wars, and belligerence.We also discuss Trump's tariffs, inflation, and nationalism.Recommended Book: Vulture Capitalism by Grace BlakeleyTranscriptThe US and Canada share the longest international border in the world, totaling more than 5,500 miles, or nearly 8,900 km. The specific details of this border have changed over the decades, but the current delineation was largely in place following the San Juan Islands water arbitration of 1872, which brought a 12-year joint military standoff between the US and Great Britain, known as the Pig War, to an end, and fed into a 1908 legal framework that relied on modern mapping of the entire frontier, which led to the precise cartography of the current international border between the US and Canada.Since then, after some issues with gold rush-era land rights were figured out in Alaska, and some treaties were signed regarding the disarmament of the Great Lakes, things have been pretty calm along this massive border. Trade hasn't always been the most efficient and free—the early 20th century in particular was pretty fraught in this regard, as Anti-Americanism raged through Canada. That led to a dismissal of a proposed lowering of trade barriers by the Canadian Liberal government in 1911, anti-American sentiment flogged by the Conservatives, who rode their slogan, “No truck or trade with the Yankees,” to a Canadian nationalism-powered victory.After the US entered WWI and the Allies tallied a victory, though, the US and Canada exchanged their first ambassadors, Warren Harding became the first US President to make an official visit the confederated Canada, visiting Vancouver in 1923, and things between these two countries were looking pretty good until 1930, when the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was a protectionist trade act that, among other things, raised tariffs on incoming Canadian goods in order to protect competing American business interests; making the local offerings artificially more competitive than the stuff coming in from Canada, basically.The Canadian government hit back with their own higher tariffs and shifted more of their trade to other Commonwealth nations, which led to a decrease in trade between the US and Canada of about 75%; and this was happening during the Great Depression, which is why that Act was enacted, the US government was hoping to bolster their own economy, but instead of helping, it furthered those economic difficulties, because of that drop in trade and international custom—Smoot-Hawley is generally considered to have been an incredibly bad economic move, and US President Hoover signed it against the advice of senior economists, because it seemed politically expedient, US businesses were clamoring for advantages because they thought it would help them, but instead it worsened the Great Depression, and this Act is now taught as a cautionary example of why protectionist trade policies, while appealing in a nationalist sense, tend to be pretty bad, almost always, economically.US-Canadian relations improved a bit in the WWII-era, and into the early decades of the Cold War. By the late-1960s, the US had become Canada's largest export market, and that's why Nixon's 1971 decision to enact a 10% tariff on all imports, including those from Canada, hit the Canadian economy so hard. Overall US-Canadian relations soured during Nixon's time in the White House, in part because the Canadian government pivoted toward Europe, rather than kowtowing to the US' economic demands, and Nixon's belligerence in the face of that pivot didn't help matters.When US President Carter stepped into office, however, things improved for a while, and though there were serious bouts of stagflation in both nations through his time in the White House, American investment in Canada increased, and relations continued to be friendly leading into the 1990s, at which point the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA was signed, in 1994. NAFTA created a common market in North America, between the US, Canada, and Mexico, and that meant the $19 trillion or so in trade between the 470 million people or so living in North America by 2014, would be entirely or almost entirely without barriers, no tariffs or very small, focused tariffs.Though imperfect by many measures, NAFTA is generally considered to have been a major success, at least in terms of raw economic productivity in North America. And in 2020, is was replaced by the USMCA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is often called NAFTA 2.0, which is in many ways just a modernization of NAFTA that updates many of the earlier provisions and focuses more on digital trade and intellectual property than its precursor.In July of 2026, however, the US government announced that it would not be renewing the USMCA, after Canada asked the US and Mexico to renew it for another 16 years. The pact remains in effect until it expires in 2036, though it can also be renegotiated or replaced before that. The US Trump administration pointed at rising trade deficits between the US and both Mexico and Canada as the rationale for not renewing it, and at loopholes in the agreement that allowed other nations, like China, to send car components to Mexico and then essentially get Chinese vehicles into North American markets, benefitting from the agreement despite not being a signatory of it.What I'd like to talk about today is a new trade scuffle between the US and Canadian governments, and what it might mean for the two nations in the coming years if said scuffle becomes a more persistent trade war.—In July of 2026, US President Trump threatened to invoke a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, that Act from 1930, the Great Depression, which was previously unused, to impose additional tariffs on Canada, despite the continued existence of the USMCA trade agreement.Stepping back a bit, in his second administration, Trump has unilaterally imposed all kinds of tariffs on pretty much everybody, arguing that those tariffs would bring in more money and thus allow him to lower taxes on the wealthy and on businesses while still bringing in enough to reduce the federal deficit. This claim wasn't backed by economists and the deficit has continued to increase at a record rate under his administration, but he's continued to try this approach and make these claims, regardless.The Supreme Court eventually stepped in to limit Trump's ability to impose tariffs in early 2026, saying that the Presidency doesn't have the power to create a bunch of tariffs and impose them on everyone, even when he points at the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as justification. That halting of Trump's tariffs seem to have helped temper inflation in the US a bit, but now Trump is now taking another approach to try to accomplish the same, invoking this 1930, Great Depression-era act to try to give himself broad tariff-applying powers, once more, despite that Supreme Court decision.As I mentioned in the intro, the application of Smoot-Hawley tariffs worsened the Great Depression, as the US applied all these tariffs on foreign goods to try to give its own industries an advantage, and that led to counter-tariffs from most of its targets. Within a few years, the people behind those tariffs were booted from office, and the bad taste it left in the US government's mouth is part of what led to the wave of trade liberalization that happened post-WWII—everyone was done with the heavily tariffed trade environment because it kind of sucked for everyone, so free trade was the name of the game for decades.Now at the time, even though the tariffs had a net-negative impact on the US, they didn't exactly crush the US because international trade only made up about 10% of the US economy back then. Today, about 25-27% of US GDP relies on international trade. So still not a majority by any means, and the global average is about 63%, so the US is more capable of undertaking this sort of trade barrier strategy than many other nations, but that's still a pretty substantial chunk of economic activity in the US that's impacted by such efforts.This declaration by Trump that he would be using this old Tariff act to apply new tariffs on Canadian goods arrived after trade negotiations between the US and Canada fell apart, reportedly mere minutes before a deadline, with both sides claiming to the press that the other side attempted to make a last-minute change that was untenable.After Trump announced that additional 50% tariff on certain goods, the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announce that he would be matching those tariffs, dollar for dollar—a move that's likely to hurt Canada more than the US, though many US industries, including those that are already hurting because of resource shortages that have been amplified by Trump's war with Iran and the consequent shut-down of the Strait of Hormuz, not to mention all the uncertainties that have arisen because of his other tariff threats, those industries and businesses will suffer more than most; the US auto industry, for instance, relies on goods that pass back and forth across the Canadian border several times before eventually ending up in US-made automobiles. The US construction industry is likewise reliant on Canadian lumber products.It seems like Canada has generally tried to work with the US government to come to a mutually beneficial and appealing compromise, but when that happens, the US then pushes for more, then blames Canada for fighting back when the US attempts to punish them for not just giving in. And this is something the Trump administration, and Trump himself, have become fairly notorious for, so it's a decent assumption, even though we don't know all the details here, yet, that this is what happened in this case, too.And as a result, it sounds like the US will apply 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods coming into the US, including things like honey, seeds, and agricultural products, and some types of furniture, clothing, and fabric.About 72% of all Canadian exports went to the US in 2025, and many of those exports, the ones to which this new tariff will be applied, will now be more expensive, because these costs are almost always passed on to the end-consumer, not just eaten by the business, which in some cases wouldn't be able to afford to eat those higher costs and stay in business. This is part of why these sorts of tariffs often increase inflation rates.Both sides of this conflict have publicly committed to not back down, and there's political hay to be made in sticking with that sentiment; the US is not terribly popular in Canada, or in many allied countries, right now, due to the antagonistic stance the Trump administration has taken toward those relations, so the Canadian government might actually benefit from taking a hard line against the US, here. Likewise, Trump's supporters might rally around his bullying of a neighboring nation, especially if the administration can successfully frame this as an effort to reduce the deficit or support US businesses, protecting them from foreign competitors are are unfairly competing.There's still a fair bit of fog of war on all of this, and we'll know a lot more within the next few weeks, both in terms of the details of what happened, and in terms of what's likely to happen next. Right now, though, it would seem that we could be headed for a new trade war between two of the world's most deeply intertwined wealthy economies, and that could lead to a lot of global economic disruptions as some of that trade is rerouted, and as inflation continues to spiral.Show Noteshttps://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-us-trade-war-293908564c7a381ea58a61db6e9a8517https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-tariffs-trump-857ef76b20a766e370d70176135b678ehttps://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-war-trump-carney-tariffs-4d18583fe52134ca8550652ad9772d2chttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/business/economy-trade-war-us-canada.htmlhttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-illegalhttps://access.heinonline.com/HOL/LandingPagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreementdoi.org/10.1017%2FS0022050700019549https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Acthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_trade_relationshttps://www.axios.com/2026/08/22/us-canada-tariffs-trade-trump-carneyhttps://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5941584/us-canada-tariffshttps://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-tariffs-trump-857ef76b20a766e370d70176135b678ehttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgvyy4x2mvohttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/canada/carney-trump-canada-tariffs.html 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

If an AI Crash Happens, It Will Be 5x Worse Than Dot-Com Bubble PoppingIn this episode of Macro, Micro and Small Cap News, we examine two major macro developments pointing to aggressive financial engineering.First, US national debt crosses $40 trillion, pushing 30-year Treasury yields to near 20-year highs. We break down the US Treasury's bond buyback programme and why funding it with short-term T-bills introduces severe rollover risk into the financial system.Second, we analyze the AI earnings bubble and circular funding structures involving Nvidia, hyperscalers, and neocloud providers like CoreWeave. We explore what happens if commercial AI monetization continues to lag behind massive infrastructure capex.We also cover market movements in Gold and Bitcoin, followed by company research on UK-listed small caps: gaming publisher Everplay (EVPL) following the launch of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, and SaaS provider Cerillion (CER).Special Summer OfferGet 40% off membership to the Sharepickers Investment Club with our Summer Special discount: Discount Code: POD40 (Capital letters, no spaces) Offer Price: £149 (reduced from £249) Expiry Date: 31st August 2026 How to Claim: Visit Sharepickers.com, scroll down to the checkout section, and enter POD40 in the "Have a Coupon" field. Show Notes Macro Story 1: US National Debt Crosses $40 Trillion Contextualizing $40 trillion: servicing costs exceeding $1 trillion annually and debt reaching roughly 120% of US GDP. Surging 30-year Treasury yields reaching ~5.3% and the impact on borrowing costs. US Treasury bond buyback expansion funded via short-term T-bills and the resulting rollover risk. Macro Story 2: The AI Earnings Bubble & Circular Deals The divergence between massive capex spend on data centers/GPUs and realized end-user software revenues. Hyperscaler cash flow pressures in the race for market dominance. Case study of circular vendor financing structures, accounting useful life vs. debt maturities, and index concentration risks. Market Movements: Commodities & Crypto Spiking bond yields driving Gold's rally. Bitcoin price strength, short liquidations, and US administration commentary regarding digital asset purchases. Small-Cap Stock Research Everplay (EVPL): Early SteamDB concurrent user data and estimated gross unit sales for Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, alongside its importance to H2 2026 weighting. Cerillion (CER): Review of H1 performance, the £42.5m Omantel contract, an expanding back-order book (£56m+), £31m cash position with zero debt, and moving average technicals. About The SharePickers Investment ClubThe SharePickers Investment Club employs a unique, systematic method to uncover small, profitable companies on the London Stock Exchange.Each potential investment undergoes comprehensive analysis and is evaluated against 15 crucial financial metrics. This fact-based, quantitative approach allows us to pinpoint high-potential growth businesses and deliver consistent results, bypassing the hype and focusing strictly on the numbers.Learn more at www.sharepickers.com.

The US national debt is hovering around $30 trillion and has hit 100% of the US GDP. How did we end up here and what happens now? James Peregoy joins us.

The economy and markets can feel dizzying and ever changing. That's where we can help. Fisher Investments' “This Week in Review” is a weekly segment designed to highlight a few things you may have missed this week, what they could mean for financial markets and why they matter to investors like you. This week, Fisher Investments reviews: • The Fed's recent interest rate decision • US first estimate for Q2 2026 GDP growth • The eurozone's first estimate for Q2 2026 GDP growth Below are the sources for all data cited in today's show: 1. Source: Trading Economics, as of 7/30/2026. United States Fed Funds interest rate, 7/29/2026. 2. Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, as of 7/31/2026. US GDP growth, annualized, Q1 2026 – Q2 2026. 3. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 7/31/2026. Y/y US Headline and Core CPI Inflation, January 2026 – June 2026. 4. Source: FactSet, Finaeon, Inc., as of 7/31/2026. S&P 500 Total Return Index annual returns categorized by US real GDP annual percent changes of the following year, yearly, 1970 – 2025. 5. Source: Eurostat, as of 7/31/2026. Euro area GDP growth, annualized, Q1 2026 – Q2 2026. 6. Source: Eurostat, as of 7/31/2026. Euro area y/y GDP growth, by country, Q1 2026 – Q2 2026. 7. Source: Trading Economics, as of 7/30/2026. Eurozone Headline HICP Inflation, January 2026 – June 2026. 8. Source: FactSet, Macrobond, as of 7/30/2026. GDP-weighted developed markets excluding US government bond yield spreads (10Y – 3M), daily, 1/1/2025 – 7/16/2026, eurozone y/y loan growth, monthly, 6/30/2023 – 5/31/2026. Want to dig deeper? • Ken on why the Fed shouldn't rush to hike rates: https://tinyurl.com/ykdedvcz • What you need to know about GDP and why it's important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm4iOcLX62M Have feedback for this Fisher Investments video? Share your thoughts on this episode in just 1 minute by filling out this survey: https://fi.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6Vw1ezlogR044S2?VideoCode=WeekInReview31July2026 Connect with Fisher Investments on: • Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/FisherInvestments • X - https://twitter.com/fisherinvest • LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/fisher-investments • Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/fisher.investments/ • TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@fisher_investments You can also follow Ken Fisher here: • Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/KenFisher.FisherInvestments • X - https://twitter.com/KennethLFisher • LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-fisher/ • Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kenfisher_fisherinvestments/ Investing in securities involves a risk of loss. Past performance is never a guarantee of future returns. Investing in foreign stock markets involves additional risks, such as the risk of currency fluctuations. The foregoing constitutes the general views of Fisher Investments and should not be regarded as personalized investment advice. Nothing herein is intended to be a recommendation. The opinions expressed are subject to change without notice.

#stockmarket #finance #investing #usgdp #mandm #bajajfinance #tatasteel #swiggy #lnt #mankindpharma #embassyreit #hyundai #treasuryyields #nifty50 #businessnewshttps://shorturl.at/ZlJ11Book your seat for Delhi SessionCatch today's market updates! US GDP grew 1.5% in Q2 while Treasury yields hover near multiyear highs. Back home, M&M, Bajaj Finance, Tata Steel, and Mankind Pharma reported strong Q1 results, while Swiggy reduced net losses as Instamart hit break-even. Plus, L&T wins a ₹15,000 crore NTPC thermal order!https://shorturl.at/gM97lHow to Use Artificial Intelligence for Investing - Combo of 5 ebookshttps://shop.investyadnya.in/pages/global-portfolio-methodologyInvest in Investyadnya's Global Equity Portfolio00:00 Start00:43 Treasury Yields High as Stocks Rebound04:05 Crude oil price update04:41 US Q2 GDP Grows 1.5pc05:58 M&M Q1 FY27 Results06:43 Bajaj Finance Q1 FY27 Results07:36 Hyundai India Q1 FY27 Results08:28 Tata Steel Q1 FY27 Results09:39 Mankind Pharma Q1 FY27 Results10:44 Swiggy Q1 FY27 Results11:47 Embassy REIT Q1 FY27 Results14:05 L&T Wins ₹15,000 Cr NTPC Order15:34 Knowledge Section

The race to secure rare earth metals is about far more than technology or national defense. In this week’s episode of Educational Insights, Ashley Page explains why the U.S. is turning to Brazil to strengthen critical supply chains, what China’s dominance means for the global economy, and why an industry supporting nearly $1.2 trillion of U.S. GDP could shape the future of manufacturing, healthcare, and innovation. Watch the full video to learn why this story matters to investors and the economy alike. Watch to learn more. Ashley Page, JD, MBA Senior Vice President Wealth Consultant Email Ashley Page here Fi Plan Partners is an independent investment firm in Birmingham, AL, with a team of professionals serving clients across the nation through financial planning, wealth management and business consulting. The team at Fi Plan Partners creates strategies in the best interest of their clients using fee based investing. The opinions voiced in this recording are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. Economic forecasts set forth may not develop as predicted and there can be no guarantee that strategies promoted will be successful. No strategy can ensure success or protect against a loss. Stock investing involves risk including potential loss of principal. Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC and a registered investment advisor.The post Rare Earth Metals, Brazil, and the US GDP first appeared on Fi Plan Partners.

As a newly installed chairman takes the helm of the Federal Reserve, US monetary policy remains uncertain amid a soft inflation print and escalating tensions in the Middle East. David Mericle, chief US economist in Goldman Sachs Research, forecasts the Fed to keep interest rates unchanged this year before cutting its policy rate in 2027. He also unpacks the factors driving US inflation, highlights the surprising resilience of the US labor market, and explains why he expects US GDP to expand around 2% this year.  Recorded on July 20, 2026. The opinions and views expressed herein are as of the date of publication, subject to change without notice, and may not necessarily reflect the institutional views of Goldman Sachs or its affiliates. The material provided is intended for informational purposes only, and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation from any Goldman Sachs entity to take any particular action, or an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell any securities or financial products. This material may contain forward-looking statements. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Neither Goldman Sachs nor any of its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the statements or information contained herein and disclaim any liability whatsoever for reliance on such information for any purpose. Each name of a third-party organization mentioned is the property of the company to which it relates, is used here strictly for informational and identification purposes only and is not used to imply any ownership or license rights between any such company and Goldman Sachs. A transcript is provided for convenience and may differ from the original video or audio content. Goldman Sachs is not responsible for any errors in the transcript. This material should not be copied, distributed, published, or reproduced in whole or in part or disclosed by any recipient to any other person without the express written consent of Goldman Sachs. Disclosures applicable to research with respect to issuers, if any, mentioned herein are available through your Goldman Sachs representative or at ⁠http://www.gs.com/research/hedge.html⁠ Goldman Sachs does not endorse any candidate or any political party. Copyright 2026. All rights reserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most small and midsize businesses, financial operations still look a lot like they did a decade ago. Bills get keyed in manually. Receipts pile up. W-9s get chased down at tax time. While the tools have multiplied, the work hasn't gone away. “Most finance teams work in an incredibly manual way,” says Michael Cieri, Chief Product Officer at BILL. “There's a ton of work done by finance professionals that could be automated, and could actually be done better through the use of technology.” The gap between the promise of modern financial software and the day-to-day reality of running the books at a small business is something BILL has spent nearly two decades trying to close. The company processes over 1% of US GDP in payments and has moved more than a trillion dollars across its platform – a scale that gives it both a data advantage and a particular sense of accountability. When you're handling that volume of transactions for the long tail of American businesses, the stakes of getting automation wrong are very high. Cieri joins us on the show to talk through where BILL's product thinking stands today: how Cieri's team decides when to take big swings versus make incremental improvements, how it builds and validates AI features for a high-trust domain.

Many Western economists and media outlets claim that Americans are wealthier than Europeans, but this is not true; it's based on a misunderstanding of the difference between average wealth and median wealth. Ben Norton explains how the extreme inequality in the US make its average wealth misleadingly look high, and why GDP per capita is not a good measurement. He debunks the myth of "Europoors", which is often spread by Donald Trump supporters. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzFUd8uj7pA Topics 0:00 The myth that Americans are wealthy 1:15 Average wealth vs median wealth 3:50 Data on US median wealth 6:42 Wealth inequality (Gini coefficient) 9:31 Poverty and homelessness 10:19 USA vs Europe 12:02 Wealth concentration of US elites 13:28 Distribution of growth in income 15:01 GDP per capita is misleading 21:18 US GDP by sector 23:13 Imputed rent and GDP 25:05 Life expectancy, mortality, etc. 27:10 US healthcare system 28:40 US health system vs OECD 32:58 Ridiculous "Europoor" myth 33:32 Trump cuts taxes on rich 34:27 Trump family corruption 36:20 Insider trading 36:56 Myth of American dream 38:18 Outro

“The pinnacle of capitalism is still flawed. Any idea that it's perfect — this idea of the perfect union — is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been.” — Keith Teare With July 4 finally done, we can look forward to the next American revolution. Just as AI is revolutionizing the economy, so too are radical ideas about harnessing this disruption for the benefit of all Americans. One idea that is acquiring more and more currency in and out of Silicon Valley is what we might call universal basic capitalism. Six months ago, nobody knew what “universal basic capital” even meant. Now everyone is talking about it. What if the answer to inequality, AI disruption, and the slow hollowing out of the American economy isn't a return to socialism — but a new, more distributive kind of capitalism? As That Was The Week's Keith Teare argues in our weekly tech roundup, universal basic capitalism offers the best way to simultaneously empower all Americans without turning them into the welfare “queens” so disparaged by neo-liberals. Economists agree that AI is going to eliminate vast numbers of jobs, probably within the decade, certainly in time for America's 300th anniversary. One fix is the democratic socialist strategy of tax and spend through the state. Universal basic capitalism, in contrast, takes the wealth generated by AI companies, puts it into a sovereign wealth fund, and distributes the dividends directly to citizens. Rather than an ever-more-bloated bureaucracy redistributing wealth, the state miraculously shrinks. It's a neat idea. Instead of welfare queens, we get shareholding kings. But is this really the next American revolution? Or just the trickle-down economics of the DOGE crowd for an AI age of mass unemployment? Five Takeaways •       America the Beautiful — and Its Profound Flaws: Keith's 250th editorial acknowledges America's extraordinary achievements: the growth in wealth, living standards, and democratic governance over two and a half centuries. The fact that Donald Trump won the presidency, Keith notes, is itself evidence that the people still rule — most intellectuals didn't want him, but the people voted for him. At the same time: capitalism at its best still has huge swathes of poor people who can barely eat. The perfect union is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been. America has probably peaked in world terms. The next 250 years are not a foregone conclusion. •       1,200 New Millionaires a Day: The American Prosperity Machine: The stat of the week: the United States added 1,200 new millionaires a day last year, bringing its total to nearly 24 million. China has just over 5 million; Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, Australia, France, and the UK are all under 3 million. The math: US GDP per capita is around $85,000 a year; China's is around $20,000-something. In California in particular, where house prices routinely exceed $1 million and there are 50–60 million residents, the numbers are doing a lot of work disguising a highly skewed distribution concentrated in coastal cities. •       Universal Basic Capital vs Democratic Socialism: The State Shrinks: Keith draws a sharp distinction between UBC — the sovereign wealth fund model — and democratic socialism as practised by Mamdani, Sanders, and AOC. In the socialist tradition, you seize the state through elections and use taxes and spending for good ends. Under UBC, the sovereign wealth fund becomes the distribution mechanism and the state shrinks to an administrative function: roads, health, education, defence. The actual AI companies don't become the state. The state becomes a shareholder in the fund. Money flows to citizens; the state shrinks. It's an interesting inversion. •       The AI Jobs Debate: Short-Term Boom, Long-Term Automation: Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford is at the centre of a debate this week. One body of evidence says companies using AI are hiring faster than companies that don't — Amazon and Microsoft both announced plans to put thousands of engineers on the front line helping customers implement AI. But Brynjolfsson's longer view says automation will accelerate: the things you need a front-end engineer for today will be done by agents tomorrow. Keith agrees with the long view: declining employment over five to fifteen years, which doesn't have to be a bad thing if universal basic capital is in place. Look at Musk's robot plans. It is definitely declining employment. •       Om Malik: The Liberal Humanist Who Prefigured Substack: Om Malik died this week at 59 — the tech journalist and venture capitalist who founded GigaOm and co-hosted the Crunchies with Mike Arrington. Keith knew him from Iceland, from photography, from the whole era of early tech blogging. His assessment: Om was a liberal with a capital L and a humanist, often writing critically about the extremes of capitalism and favourably about remedies. He became a capitalist to be independent, and that independence gave him freedom. Without GigaOm and TechCrunch, there would be no Substack. The line runs from the New York Times to GigaOm to TechCrunch to Substack to That Was The Week. Thank you, Om. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was The Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was The Week by Keith Teare — the newsletter on which this episode is based. •       Erik Brynjolfsson (Stanford) — referenced for his argument that AI will accelerate long-term job automation, despite short-term hiring booms. •       Jennifer Harris, “The Generational Force Hollowing Out the Economy,” The New York Times — referenced in the closing discussion. •       Om Malik — founder of GigaOm; venture capitalist at True Ventures; died July 4, 2026, aged 59. •       MG Siegler — referenced for his obituary of Om Malik. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

Protect your investments with And We Know http://andweknow.com/gold Or call 720-605-3900, Tell them “LT” sent you. ————————— ➜ Our AWK Website: https://www.andweknow.com/ ➜ AWK Shirts and gifts: https://shop.andweknow.com/ ------- *DONATIONS SITE: https://bit.ly/2Lgdrh5 *Mail your gift to: And We Know 30650 Rancho California Rd STE D406-123 (or D406-126) Temecula, CA 92591 ➜ AWK Shirts and gifts: https://shop.andweknow.com/ ➜ Audio Bible https://www.biblegateway.com/audio/mclean/kjv/1John.3.16 Connect with us in the following ways: + DISCORD Fellows: https://discord.gg/kMt8R2FC4z

"US GDP is a hallucination propped up by government spending." Ex-BlackRock manager Ed Dowd warns 2026's converging risks—housing, AI bubble, China slowdown—set the stage for a crash.

In this Daily Editorial, we sit down with Dave Erfle, founder and editor of the Junior Miner Junky, to unpack the current divergence in the commodities sector. While copper continues its powerful breakout, the precious metals sector has lulled many investors to sleep despite remarkable corporate health and macro tailwinds. Key Discussion Points: Precious Metals Range-Bound Trading: An overview of gold ($4,500/oz) and silver price action relative to their 50-day and 200-day moving averages, and why a technical decision point is rapidly approaching. Stagflationary Economic Drivers: How the latest downwardly revised US GDP data (1.6%) and rising PCE inflation (3.3%) are providing a fundamentally supportive backdrop for hard assets. Unprecedented Corporate Health: A look at the record-breaking Q1 earnings and strong balance sheets of producers like Newmont, contrasting their historically low valuations against an overextended broader stock market. The Speculative Frenzy Absence: Why the lack of a sector-wide bubble in junior equities and multi-year low open interest indicate that the precious metals sector remains completely overlooked. Copper vs. Gold Rotations: Analysis of the strong volume and capital flowing into critical minerals and copper compared to the summer doldrums gripping gold and silver.   Click here to visit the Junior Miner Junky website to learn more about Dave's investment letter - https://www.juniorminerjunky.com/   --------------------------- For more market commentary & interview summaries, subscribe to our Substacks:  The KE Report: https://kereport.substack.com/  Shad's resource market commentary: https://excelsiorprosperity.substack.com/ Investment disclaimer: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security or investment product. Investing in equities, commodities, really everything involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Guests and hosts may own shares in companies mentioned.

This week, we discuss the Cloudflare CEO's op-ed, upcoming tech IPOs and GitHub getting breached. Plus, ranking our favorite manifestos. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 573 Runner-up Titles We're not making money so we can't put in place the enshitification strategy. Go easy on the AI I hope they're not using PowerPoint in the Vatican I didn't' come here to talk about the Pope I should take more showers I came to measure and chew bubblegum Matt Ray Dalio is not a wave rider. Usability golf No dependencies, no problems Peak Software We are a safe haven for measures Tools and Rules Rundown Layoffs How do AI Layoffs Work? Some Speculation. How I Choose Which Cloudflare Employees to Replace With AI Revenue and IPO Anthropic is paying SpaceX $15 billion per year OpenAI Prepares to File to Go Public in Coming Weeks SpaceX TAM - $28.5 trillion. US GDP - $31 trillion. GitHub Got Hacked. The AI Security Arms Race is Here NHS Pulls OSS Wiz + Anthropic: Claude Enterprise Meets the Security Graph | Wiz Blog Relevant to your Interests Grafana breach caused by missed token rotation after TanStack attack Introducing UniFi 5G Backup SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought Microsoft admits its "infuriating" floating AI button was a mistake Microsoft admits forcing the floating Copilot button on Office users was a mistake—but engagement went up anyway IBM and U.S. Department of Commerce Announce America's First Purpose-Built Quantum Foundry, Supported by Proposed $1 Billion CHIPS Award Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date" Blackstone and Google launch $5B TPU cloud venture with 500MW of AI capacity What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks U.S. companies have an AI problem. Indian IT wants to be the solution Audio-generation app Huxe, founded by former NotebookLM developers, shuts down Spotify adds AI-powered Q&A and briefing generation features to podcasts Sponsors Sentry - Quit Buggin': use code sdt26 for $100 in credit for new customers Nonsense GE's nugget ice maker is nearly half off if you buy it refurbished Watch: Drones crash into water after Sydney light show malfunction America the Tasty: The Best Breakfast in Every State Listener Feedback Jason built the DepartTime App iPhone App Conferences VMware User Group, Dallas, June 9-11, 2026 WeAreDevelopers Europe, July 8-10, 2026 Berlin, Coté speaking. DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026 DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26 25 Free Tickets DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026 DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006 DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026 , Coté keynoting. VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026 SDT News & Community Join our Slack community Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté Sponsor the show Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media Recommendations Brandon: Trek Austin Matt: VESA Coté: AI-Generated Summaries Table for Two Slim Daddy's Repair

 Today's show starts with review of latest US GDP, inflation and income numbers showing inflation accelerating and GDP slowing sharply in latest 2nd GDP numbers. Rest of show focuses on dangerous new events in the Ukraine war as Europe pushes drone attacks deep inside Russia and Russia public opinion demands more aggressive action by Putin. Russia warns 'get out of Kiev' as something big coming soon. Russia talks directly about attacking Baltics sites where drones are being launched into northern Russia and warns will target drone production in the EU. EU NATO political leaders keep saying they're preparing for war with Russia inevitably by 2030. 

A US official said the US military carried out new strikes on an Iranian military site and shot down multiple Iranian drones that posed a threat to US forces and commercial maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.IRGC said it targeted a US air base in response to the US aggression near Bandar Abbas Airport, while it added that any further US attacks would trigger a more decisive response.Air raid sirens sounded in Kuwait, and the Kuwaiti Army said air defences were intercepting hostile missiles and drone attacks, according to Al Hadath.US President Trump said he was not discussing easing sanctions on Iran and would keep control of Iran's money until it behaves, while adding he was uncomfortable with Russia or China taking Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpileCrude futures edged higher after reports of explosions in Iran's Bandar Abbas; 10yr UST futures continued their slide amid a rebound in oil.APAC stocks were pressured amid a flare-up of geopolitical tensions; European equity futures indicate a lower cash market open with Euro Stoxx 50 futures down 1.2%.Looking ahead, highlights include Spanish Retail Sales (Apr), EU Consumer Confidence Final (May), US Initial Jobless Claims (May/23), US GDP 2nd Estimate (Q1), US Core PCE (Apr), US Durable Goods Orders (Apr), US Real Consumer Spending 2nd Estimate (Q1), Atlanta Fed GDP (Q2), ECB Minutes (Apr), SARB Policy Announcement (May). Speakers include Fed's Williams & Barkin, BoE's Breeden, ECB's Lane, Lagarde, Cipollone, Schnabel & SNB's Schlegel. Supply from the UK, Italy & US, Earnings from Dell.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

A US official said the US military carried out new strikes on an Iranian military site and shot down multiple Iranian drones that posed a threat to US forces and commercial maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.IRGC said it targeted a US air base in response to the US aggression near Bandar Abbas Airport, while it added that any further US attacks would trigger a more decisive response.Air raid sirens sounded in Kuwait, and the Kuwaiti Army said air defences were intercepting hostile missiles and drone attacks, according to Al Hadath.European and US equity futures slip as markets digest the recent flare-up; DXY firmer, Brent Aug'26 +2.5%, with fixed income benchmarks on the backfoot.Looking ahead, highlights include US Initial Jobless Claims (May/23), US GDP 2nd Estimate (Q1), US Core PCE (Apr), US Durable Goods Orders (Apr), US Real Consumer Spending 2nd Estimate (Q1), Atlanta Fed GDP (Q2), ECB Minutes (Apr), SARB Policy Announcement (May). Speakers include Fed's Williams & Barkin, BoE's Breeden, ECB's Schnabel & SNB's Schlegel. Supply from the US, Earnings from Dell.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

“Anyone that's properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You're not a passive victim — you're an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare Do we really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare — who thinks all tech innovation results in human progress — thinks we do. No hands, no problem, Keith says. But I'm not sure. Especially given the powers-that-be giving us that no-hands job. Keith welcomes the end of what he calls the “typed” and “touched” computing era — keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and all the manifold ways we have used our hands to interact with computers since the 1980s. That's the outcome, he predicts, of the race to AGI. So far so good. But what happens if our no-hands AI future is controlled by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook? This week these four behemoths committed 00 billion to AI infrastructure investment in 2026 alone — 2 percent of all US GDP. These companies are racing to build (and own) the foundational mechanics of AGI. That's always how it's been, Keith says, embracing our no-hands future. I'm less open-armed. What happens if we want our hands to fend off AGI? No, I'm not so keen on a no-hands job from Silicon Valley. Especially one couched in the altruism of human progress. Five Takeaways •       The End of the Hand-Driven Computing Era: Andrej Karpathy's observation at Sequoia's AI Ascent: he no longer uses his hands to do his work. He speaks to the computer; the computer acts; he judges and refines. The keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen — all the hand-driven interfaces that have defined computing since the 1980s are entering their twilight. Karpathy calls it “software 3.0”. Keith, two years ago, wrote an editorial called “eyes, hands, ears, and mouth” about the inclusion of other human attributes beyond hands. That prediction has arrived. •       $700 Billion: The CapEx Explosion: A post by @Signal framed the week's numbers: $700 billion in AI infrastructure spending in 2026, equivalent to 2 percent of all US GDP. This kind of spending, the post observes, usually happens via governments or wars. This time, it's four private companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — racing to build the foundational mechanics of AGI. Meta was punished by Wall Street for overspending; Google was rewarded because its numbers were strong enough to justify it. The same bet, two different verdicts, depending on your quarterly earnings. •       Was the Internet Privately Built? The ARPANET Argument: Keith's claim: innovation waves have always been privately financed. The railways, the telephone, the electricity grid, the commercial internet. Andrew's counter: ARPANET was a massive government investment that created the protocols on which the internet runs. Keith's response: ARPANET was a university bulletin board that created the precedent, not the infrastructure. Andrew's response: that's not exactly what ARPANET was. They agree that government research matters. They disagree on how much credit it deserves for what became the commercial internet. •       The Revenge of the Idea Guy: Sam Altman's line of the week. In the past, an idea person came up with a concept and then needed expensive engineers to build it. Many ideas never saw the light of day because the engineering cost was prohibitive. Now, anyone can speak an idea into existence. AI builds the plan, executes the work, and you judge and refine. That changes the economics of creativity, advertising, software development, and anything else that used to require specialist execution. The specialist is not dead — but specialists will increasingly use AI to scale themselves, rather than being hired one at a time. •       Should Kids Use AI in Schools? A New Yorker piece asks what it would take to get AI out of schools. Keith's view: the premise misunderstands how AI works now. The fear is passive students asking chatbots for answers and having their brains atrophy. The reality is that proper AI use requires active judgment at every step — telling it what you want, refining the plan, evaluating the output. If schools understand that, they embrace AI. If they don't, they produce graduates unequipped for a world in which the idea guy with AI tools now has the power the engineering team used to have. Andrew's prediction: the kids whose parents ban AI will eventually sue them. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America. References: •       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week's editorial: “Hand Job?” •       Andrej Karpathy at Sequoia Capital AI Ascent 2026 — the Karpathy interview on Software 3.0 and the end of typed input. •       @Signal, “$700 billion on AI infrastructure” — the post that framed the CapEx question. •       Jessica Winter, “What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?” The New Yorker, 2026. •       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on how information technology knitted America together — the ARPANET backstory that feeds directly into this week's argument. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Keith leads with “Hand Job?” — explaining the headline (03:27) - Karpathy at Sequoia: the end of typed and touched input (04:30) - CapEx: the real story of the week (05:35) - $700 billion — 2% of US GDP on AI infrastructure (06:38) - Was the commercial internet privately built? (07:35) - ARPANET: pathetic bulletin board or foundational infrastructure? (09:08) - Keith and Andrew agree to disagree on government's role (11:00) - Big Tech earnings: Google up, Meta down, and why (17:00) - OpenAI's strategy: the long game

Today's show reviews latest US GDP numbers showing mostly driven by AI investing and top 10% consumers' spending. History of GDP from 2020 covid recession to the present. Why after $10 trillion fiscal-monetary stimulus we're still getting only a 2% annual growth rate. Show also discusses Fed chair Powell's decision to remain and implications for interest rate policy. AI boom latest numbers. Why the US empire cannot continue as structured and why Trump will bomb the hell out of Iran and declare victory and leave, much like Nixon did in Vietnam in 1972-73

AI spending is moving the needle on the US GDP, and the Option Block panel is here to break down the massive capital allocation driving the markets. In this episode, Mark Longo is joined by Henry "The Flowmaster" Schwartz from Cboe and Mike Tosaw from St. Charles Wealth Management to discuss whether the market is "cutting a fat hog in the butt" with these record AI expenditures or if we're witnessing a historic capital misallocation. In this episode: The Trading Block: A deep dive into the mega-cap earnings sweep. From Meta's spending spook to Alphabet's cloud success and Microsoft's mixed bag, the team analyzes how AI CapEx is now a primary driver of market sentiment. The "Fat Hog" Trade: Mike Tosaw explains his covered call strategy in Qualcomm (QCOM) and why sometimes making a 6% premium in a month still feels like leaving meat on the bone. The Odd Block: Unusual activity in Blue Owl Capital (OWL), Imperial Petroleum (IMPP), and a "palette cleanser" trade in Levi Strauss (LEVI). Around the Block: Predictions for Apple earnings, the upcoming OIC conference, and why the "buy the dip" mentality persists in the face of macro uncertainty.

  The US GDP grew by 2% between January and March, recovering from a tumble taken during the 43-day federal shutdown. Now, Americans are wondering how the war in Iran will affect these numbers. Greg and guest host Jim Bennett spoke to Robert Spendlove, Senior Economist for Zions Bank, to break down these numbers and what the average Utahns can expect.

AI spending is moving the needle on the US GDP, and the Option Block panel is here to break down the massive capital allocation driving the markets. In this episode, Mark Longo is joined by Henry "The Flowmaster" Schwartz from Cboe and Mike Tosaw from St. Charles Wealth Management to discuss whether the market is "cutting a fat hog in the butt" with these record AI expenditures or if we're witnessing a historic capital misallocation. In this episode: The Trading Block: A deep dive into the mega-cap earnings sweep. From Meta's spending spook to Alphabet's cloud success and Microsoft's mixed bag, the team analyzes how AI CapEx is now a primary driver of market sentiment. The "Fat Hog" Trade: Mike Tosaw explains his covered call strategy in Qualcomm (QCOM) and why sometimes making a 6% premium in a month still feels like leaving meat on the bone. The Odd Block: Unusual activity in Blue Owl Capital (OWL), Imperial Petroleum (IMPP), and a "palette cleanser" trade in Levi Strauss (LEVI). Around the Block: Predictions for Apple earnings, the upcoming OIC conference, and why the "buy the dip" mentality persists in the face of macro uncertainty.

Talk is growing globally of the negative impacts of the Iran War on the US and global economies. The US and Iran appear to have settled into a longer term conflict, as Trump will likely escalated the conflict inevitably over the next four weeks. The long term impacts on global and US GDP are considered. On the fate of the Petrodollar. Asian and EU economies. The multiple impacts on US inflation. The first full month, March, of the war is compared to the February US economy.  What's the outlook for US deficits and debt. Financial markets. Jobs.

US growth disappoints while inflation refuses to play along – Matete Thulare breaks down weak GDP and sticky PCE data still sitting well above target. Janina Slawski unpacks the December 2025 Manager Watch™️ Survey, with multi-managers steadily gaining ground in a shifting investment landscape. And Simon weighs in on the latest ceasefire developments – fragile, complex, and unlikely to be a smooth path forward.

Grab your limited edition ‘Energy Sovereignty Now!' t-shirts! There is now an insufficiency of energy sufficiency AND sovereignty tees in the world, but don't worry, the LMSU merch store has got you covered! Promises made, promises kept folks - grab your limited edition t-shirt right here. Subscribe to LMSU's Patreon for the latest episode of My Little GSOO™ This week Tennant and Frankie give Luke the slip as we unpack AEMO's 2026 Gas Statement of Opportunities. Electrification at pace? You betcha! Gas import terminals? Some still like ‘em! Global fuel crisis? So far unaccounted for, but we can't say the same for one c-word. Run, don't walk, over to www.letmesumup.net and subscribe to our Patreon to check it out. — Wouldn't you know, the world is *still* cray cray, but extant so let's take that win! The PM is one national address into this crisis and throw in the National Cabinet's latest four point plan (the National Fuel Security Plan) and some COVID-style PTSD is kicking in! But not to worry folks, we are at Level Two and the message is very much Don't Panic, Take The Train Or Work From Home If You Can. We reckon this is a fascinating exercise in laying down markers for messaging that will be ramped up, and we'll continue to speculate over some of the woolier bits in Levels 3 and 4. WATCH THIS SPACE. Our main course There's no shortage of ideas abounding at the moment on how exactly not to waste the current fuel crisis, but your intrepid hosts landed upon the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis' latest paper, ‘The perfect storm to boost energy security: How Australia can reduce its oil exposure in the wake of the Iran conflict.' Brought to us by Kevin Morrison and Amandine Denis-Ryan, the crew at IEEFA do a splendid job of laying out the history and context around Australia's current predicament of much more marginal reserves than our IEA counterparts and while they're at it, serve up a menu of sensible solutions on the supply and demand side, to ensure we don't find ourselves in this particular pickle again. Bilateral crisis supply agreements? We're seeing some signs of that! Electrification and energy efficiency? That sounds like a thing we're about! One more things Tennant's One More Thing is: true nerd appreciation for the just launched Artemis II! A cool, technically stupendous and peaceful adventure into space! Fun fact: Apollo-era NASA took funding peaking at about 4.6% of US GDP to land men on the moon. Artemis-era NASA is rebooting this while getting about 0.1% of US GDP Frankie's One More Thing is: A plug for the NSW Net Zero Commission's advice to the NSW Government intended to help inform the work underway for the new NSW Net Zero Plan to 2025, due to be released in mid-2026. They're big on electrification and methane, and Frankie is, unsurprisingly, a fan. Luke's One More Thing is: the just released movie of The Magic Faraway Tree. Luke had some trepidation noting Enid Blyton's outsized impact on his childhood reading, but the ultimate verdict was 3 out of 5 stars - from Menzel and his younguns! And that's it for now, Summerupperers. There is now a one-stop-shop for all your LMSU needs: head to letmesumup.net to support us on Patreon, procure merch, find back episodes, and leave us a voicemail!

Is the United States on the verge of another financial crisis? Some top Wall Street executives fear the bankruptcies in the $3 trillion private credit industry could spread, as firms prevent investors from withdrawing their capital, in what resembles a bank run. Then there are problems with the AI bubble and Big Tech stock market bloat. Ben Norton explains. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1cx9Zk6WZk Check out our other video explaining how the Iran war will transform the global economy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kocFwbTbs1Q Topics 0:00 New financial crisis coming? 0:36 Private credit industry 1:27 Cockroaches in private credit 2:18 Bank run similarities 3:32 Bank exposure 5:13 (CLIP) ex Goldman Sachs CEO 6:06 Trump admin scheme 7:55 Blackstone CEO funded Trump 8:48 AI and software companies 9:13 AI bubble 9:42 Big Tech Magnificent 7 (Mag 7) 10:13 US stock market bubble 10:40 AI drives US GDP growth 11:11 Most Americans in recession 11:43 Richest 10% consume 50% 11:57 Iran war, energy crisis, food 13:17 Outro

The big things you need to know:First, the tactical indicators we've been tracking to gauge when equity investors' fears may have gone too far continue to show signs of significant deterioration but are not yet pointing to extreme fear suggesting more downside in stocks remains possible in the near term.Second, other things that jump out include new stress tests on our valuation/EPS model, the latest C-suite tone, the signals from our US GDP model for the S&P 500 if consensus forecasts start to erode, and evidence of derisking in equities in the latest funds flows data.

Send us Fan MailAI is everywhere right now, but the numbers and the real-world trade-offs don't always match the hype. We dig into a headline that AI added basically nothing to US GDP growth last year, even after billions in spending from the biggest names in tech. That launches a bigger question we can't ignore: is the AI boom creating durable productivity, or mostly moving money around the same handful of companies that sell GPUs, cloud capacity, and data center hardware?From there, we get into the messy incentive layer of AI safety and AI regulation. We talk about Anthropic's shifting safety stance and why “we meant well but competition changed” is becoming a familiar pattern across the AI industry. If guardrails depend on goodwill, what happens when the market punishes anyone who slows down? And if we keep pushing responsibility onto “developers,” are vendors dodging accountability for the defaults they ship?We also zoom out to the physical footprint of AI infrastructure: energy demand, strained grids, and the environmental impact questions that show up when states consider options like data center wastewater discharge. Then we hit the human side of “AI efficiency,” including layoffs framed as automation wins, and we end with privacy concerns around Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses and footage that may capture far more than people expect.What headline worries you most right now: jobs, safety, the environment, or privacy?Purchase Chris and Tim's book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/Check out the Monthly Cloud Networking Newshttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/Visit our website and subscribe: https://www.cables2clouds.com/Follow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/cables2clouds.comFollow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@cables2clouds/Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cables2cloudsMerch Store: https://store.cables2clouds.com/Join the Discord Study group: https://artofneteng.com/iaatj

Every Bitcoin transaction needs to be verified on the blockchain. There is no central authority that does this, but Bitcoin's blockchain has run uninterrupted since 2009 and now carries a market capitalisation of $1.3 trillion, roughly 4% of US GDP. Its original promise was more radical: that we do not need a trusted intermediary to spend money, write contracts, or create finance. In the fifth LTI report, published today, Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Bruno Biais, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni ask how much of that promise has held. Bruno talks to Tim Phillips about blockchain's potential, its flaws, and its future.  It is a Nash equilibrium: if you believe others will follow the rules, it is in your interest to follow them too. On that foundation Bitcoin's ledger has been running continuously for 16 years. Smart contracts, pioneered by Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum, extend the logic to financial agreements. Decentralised finance promised to cut out rent-seeking intermediaries. Cryptocurrencies can step in where banks are broken or currencies have collapsed; in Lebanon, when bank accounts were frozen and payments stopped, businesses switched to crypto and kept operating. But the technology's libertarian origins may need to be sacrificed: As Bruno says, without transparency there is no trust, and transparency in this market may require regulation.The research behind this episode:Amoussou-Guenou, Yackolley, Bruno Biais, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. 2026. "Can Blockchain Decentralize Money, Contracts, and Finance?" LTI Report 5. CEPR and Long-Term Investors@UniTo. Freely available to download at cepr.org. To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Bruno Biais. 2025. "Can Blockchain Decentralize Money, Contracts, and Finance?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestBruno Biais is Professor of Finance at HEC Paris and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His research spanning financial market microstructure, corporate finance, and the economics of blockchain has made him one of the leading economists working at the intersection of finance and decentralised technology. He has studied blockchain and cryptocurrency markets since their early years, and his theoretical models of consensus mechanisms and cryptocurrency valuation have shaped how economists understand the conditions under which decentralised systems can and cannot sustain themselves.Research cited in this episodeThe blockchain is a distributed ledger maintained by a network of nodes, each holding an identical copy of the record of ownership. When a transaction is submitted, all nodes verify it against the existing ledger and update their copies to reach consensus on the new state. No central authority manages this process; its stability rests entirely on the incentive structure built into the protocol.Nash equilibrium is a concept from game theory, named for the mathematician John Nash, describing a situation in which each participant's strategy is the best response to the strategies of all others; no individual has an incentive to deviate unilaterally. Biais and co-authors identify the Bitcoin protocol as a Nash equilibrium: if you believe others will follow the rules, it is in your own interest to follow them too. That self-reinforcing alignment of incentives, rather than goodwill or central enforcement, is why the blockchain has remained valid since 2009.Smart contracts are lines of code deposited on a blockchain that execute automatically when specified conditions are met: if X, then Y. Vitalik Buterin introduced them through the Ethereum platform, which offers a richer programming language than Bitcoin and allows users to hold collateral on-chain to guarantee the contract will pay out. Smart contracts underpin automated market makers, decentralised lending, and a wide range of financial applications that require no counterparty or intermediary to enforce the agreement.Oracles are third-party services that transmit data about real-world events to a blockchain, allowing smart contracts to respond to things that happen off-chain. A contract that pays out when a house burns, for example, requires an oracle to report that event to the network. Oracles introduce a point of fragility: the authenticity and accuracy of off-chain information must be established before the network accepts it, and that verification is more vulnerable to error and manipulation than the on-chain consensus mechanism itself.Front-running and miner extractable value (MEV) describe the practice by which technically sophisticated actors exploit the public visibility of pending transactions to extract profits at the expense of ordinary users. Because transactions on public blockchains are broadcast to all nodes before they are confirmed, an actor who sees a large pending purchase can execute the same trade first, drive the price up, and then sell at a profit once the original transaction goes through. The cost falls on the smaller trader. Biais notes that the barriers to entry and economies of scale in this activity have concentrated power in the hands of a small, technically skilled group, recreating the kind of intermediary rents that decentralised finance was designed to eliminate.Automated market makers are smart contracts that provide continuous liquidity for trading between two assets by holding reserves of both in a pool and setting prices according to the ratio of the reserves. A large purchase of one asset depletes that side of the pool and raises its price; a large sale depresses it. Automated market makers have become a central mechanism of decentralised finance, replacing the order-book systems used in traditional exchanges.Stablecoins are cryptocurrency tokens designed to maintain a fixed value relative to a conventional currency, typically the US dollar. They are issued by private entities that hold reserves intended to back the peg. Tether, the largest stablecoin by market capitalisation, holds its reserves in a mix of Treasury bills, Bitcoin, and precious metals; in 2021, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether for misrepresenting those reserves and required it to disclose their composition, making this information publicly available for the first time. Dai is an algorithmically managed stablecoin that maintains its peg through over-collateralisation in cryptocurrency rather than conventional reserves.The Diamond-Dybvig model is a theoretical framework developed by Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig explaining why financial intermediaries that hold illiquid assets while issuing liquid claims are inherently vulnerable to runs. When enough depositors demand withdrawal simultaneously, the institution is forced to sell assets at a loss, making further withdrawals impossible and confirming the fears that triggered the run. Biais applies this logic to stablecoins: if enough holders attempt to redeem simultaneously, the issuer must sell its reserves in volume, driving down their price and potentially breaking the peg.Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are digital tokens issued and managed by central banks, distinct from both commercial bank deposits and private stablecoins. Biais distinguishes two potential use cases: retail CBDCs, which would allow individuals to hold central bank money directly, and wholesale CBDCs, which would facilitate settlement between large financial institutions. He regards the wholesale application as the more promising; a wholesale CBDC could enable fast, low-cost atomic settlement of cross-currency transactions between banks under central bank oversight, a significant improvement on current interbank settlement systems.MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) is the European Union's regulatory framework for crypto-asset service providers, which came fully into force in December 2024. It requires licensing for issuers and service providers operating within the EU and imposes disclosure, reserve, and conduct requirements intended to align the sector more closely with the standards applied in traditional financial markets.Hayek's currency competition refers to the argument by Friedrich Hayek that competition between privately issued currencies would discipline monetary policy: users would switch away from currencies managed irresponsibly, and that threat would encourage better central bank behaviour. Biais applies this argument to cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in countries where the domestic currency has been mismanaged. He cites Nigeria, where sharp depreciation of the naira was accompanied by rising crypto adoption; over the following period, Nigeria's central bank raised interest rates and created a more transparent foreign exchange market. Biais suggests, tentatively, that the competitive pressure from crypto alternatives may have contributed to that improvement.More VoxTalks EconomicsDo stablecoins threaten financial stability? Stablecoins are digital tokens, pegged to a fiat currency. What could possibly go wrong? For one type of stablecoin the answer is: plenty, according to Richard Portes. In coin we trust Crypto investors make a lot of noise, but who are they, and do they behave differently to other retail investors?Do cryptocurrencies matter? Can cryptocurrencies be useful? Not just for crypto bro speculators, but as a shield against the depreciation of the official currency if a government is determined to pursue inflationary policies.

Could AI transform our economies to produce explosive growth? Most economists are sceptical at best. Anton Korinek of the University of Virginia, leader of the CEPR research policy network on AI, thinks the threshold is closer than those models suggest.In his latest work, Korinek, Tom Davidson, Basil Halperin, and Thomas Houlden, have built a growth model that captures what happens when AI starts automating AI research itself. Automation does two things simultaneously: it accelerates research, and it offsets the diminishing returns that have historically stopped self-improving processes from compounding. Three reinforcing feedback loops: software quality, hardware quality, and general technological progress, each amplify the others. Korinek's findings are more optimistic than even the AI labs' own roadmaps, which focus on software capability alone. The research behind this episode:Davidson, Tom, Basil Halperin, Thomas Houlden, and Anton Korinek. 2026. "When Does Automating AI Research Produce Explosive Growth? Feedback Loops in Innovation Networks." Working paper, January 2026.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Anton Korinek. 2026. "When Does Automating AI Research Produce Explosive Growth?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsAnton Korinek is a professor of economics at the University of Virginia. He leads the CEPR Research Policy Network on AI, which is building a community of researchers to understand and anticipate the economic impact of artificial intelligence. He is a member of Anthropic's Economic Advisory Council and was named by Time magazine among the hundred most influential people in AI. His research spanning the economics of transformative AI, growth theory, and the implications of advanced automation for labor markets and inequality has made him one of the most widely cited economists working on these questions. He is also the founder of the Economics of Transformative AI initiative at the University of Virginia, which focuses on the long-run economic consequences of AI systems that approach or exceed human-level capabilities.Visit the CEPR Research Policy Network on AI.Research cited in this episodeDaron Acemoglu's estimate of AI's growth impact. Acemoglu calculated that AI would raise annual growth by approximately 0.07 percentage points, arriving at this figure by multiplying the share of jobs likely to be affected by AI, the fraction of tasks within those jobs that AI could perform, and the productivity gain per task. Korinek argues the estimate was a reasonable description of the AI that existed in 2024 but did not account for the trajectory of capabilities since, nor for the feedback loops between AI progress and further AI development that his own paper models.Recursive self-improvement. The idea that an AI system, once capable enough, could design improved versions of itself, triggering an accelerating cycle of capability gains. The concept was first articulated by John von Neumann in the 1950s and has since become central to debates about transformative AI. All major AI labs, Korinek notes, are working towards some version of this vision; the economic question is whether the resulting growth would be explosive or would be damped by diminishing returns.Semi-endogenous growth models. A class of economic growth models in which long-run growth depends on the scale of the research workforce and the returns to research effort. The canonical insight, associated most closely with Nicholas Bloom and co-authors, is that "ideas get harder to find"; maintaining a given rate of progress requires ever-increasing research investment. Korinek and co-authors use and extend this framework, showing that automation can counteract diminishing returns by replacing human labor with capital in the research process, creating a new feedback loop that was absent from earlier models.Kaldor's balanced growth facts. Nicholas Kaldor's observation, made in the mid-twentieth century, that the major macroeconomic aggregates, including the capital-output ratio, the labor share of income, and the rate of return to capital, remain roughly stable over long periods. Growth economists built their models, including the Solow and Ramsey models, to fit these regularities. Korinek notes that those models were appropriate precisely because they matched the historical data; the question his paper raises is whether the data of the next few decades will look different enough to require a different class of models.Moore's Law. The empirical regularity, observed in computing hardware since the 1960s, that the number of transistors on a chip approximately doubles every two years. Korinek uses chip progress as a calibration benchmark: maintaining that rate of doubling has historically required roughly an eight percent annual increase in the scientific workforce working on chips. This figure allows the model to be parameterised with a real-world measurement of how much additional research input is needed to sustain a given rate of technological progress.Consumer surplus from digital technologies. Korinek raises the problem that GDP statistics are designed to measure market transactions and therefore do not capture the value people derive from digital goods and services beyond what they pay for them. He references research from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab as an example of work attempting to quantify this surplus. The implication for the paper's argument is that explosive AI-driven growth could be underestimated even in the statistics used to monitor it.More VoxTalks Economics episodes"Our Workless Future", an earlier conversation with Anton Korinek from September 2022, in which he set out the case for taking AI's impact on labor markets seriously.Related reading on VoxEUFirms predict an AI productivity boom is coming, a survey of over 5,000 CFOs, CEOs, and executives shows that around 70% of firms actively use AI, particularly younger, more productive firms. They forecast AI will boost productivity by 1.4%, increase output by 0.8%, and cut employment by 0.7% over the next three years.How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe, firm-level evidence on AI's effects in Europe. The authors find that AI adoption increases labour productivity levels by 4% on average in the EU, with no evidence of reduced employment in the short run.From AI investment to GDP growth: An ecosystem view, how the current AI wave is contributing to US GDP, both directly through investment and indirectly through ongoing service flows. 

Join OANDA Senior Market Analysts & podcast guest Nick Syiek (TraderNick) as they review the latest market news and moves. MarketPulse provides up-to-the-minute analysis on forex, commodities and indices from around the world. MarketPulse is an award-winning news site that delivers round-the-clock commentary on a wide range of asset classes, as well as in-depth insights into the major economic trends and events that impact the markets. The content produced on this site is for general information purposes only and should not be construed to be advice, invitation, inducement, offer, recommendation or solicitation for investment or disinvestment in any financial instrument. Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of OANDA or any of its affiliates, officers or directors. If you would like to reproduce or redistribute any of the content found on MarketPulse, please access the RSS feed or contact us at info@marketpulse.com. © 2023 OANDA Business Information & Services Inc

In this episode, we welcome back Marc Chandler, Managing Partner at Bannockburn Global Forex and Editor of the Marc to Market website. Marc joins us to unpack the heavy impact of current geopolitical tensions on global markets, specifically focusing on the escalating conflict in Iran. We dive deep into how war is currently the primary fundamental driving market behavior, overshadowing even major domestic data like US GDP revisions.  Key Discussion Points: The Energy Inflation Formula: For every 10% increase in the price of oil, the PCE deflator typically sees a 0.2% boost. We discuss the massive 54% spike in WTI contracts over the last month and what that means for your wallet at the pump. Central Bank Pivot or Pause: Before the conflict, markets were pricing in multiple Fed rate cuts; now, the odds of a cut before the midterms have vanished, with some even anticipating potential hikes. The Dollar as a Safety Net: Why the US Dollar remains a "safe haven" during global unrest, fueled by market positioning adjustments and the liquidation of higher-risk assets like Mexican bonds. The Myth of Stagflation: Marc challenges the current stagflation narrative by comparing today's energy dependency to the 1970s, suggesting that while growth is slowing, we aren't seeing a repeat of the double-digit misery of the past. Global Interest Rate Swings: A look at how the Eurozone and UK have shifted from expecting rate cuts to bracing for hikes as inflation expectations become unanchored.   Click here to visit Marc's site - Marc To Market - https://www.marctomarket.com/   ------------- For more market commentary & interview summaries, subscribe to our Substacks:  The KE Report: https://kereport.substack.com/  Shad's resource market commentary: https://excelsiorprosperity.substack.com/ Investment disclaimer: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security or investment product. Investing in equities, commodities, really everything involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Guests and hosts may own shares in companies mentioned.

What happens when AI makes intelligence essentially free — and unlimited energy plus humanoid robots make physical labour free too? The economic models we've built our entire civilisation on stop working. In this episode I sit down with Cern Basher — a CFA charterholder, CIO of Brilliant Advice, and one of the sharpest minds at the intersection of AI, Bitcoin, and macroeconomics. Originally from New Zealand, Cern has built a massive following for his work connecting the dots between exponential technology and the future of money. We go deep on his thesis that AI and Bitcoin are two sides of the same coin — AI collapses the cost of intelligence (deflationary), and Bitcoin provides a monetary system that can't be inflated away. We explore Jason Lowery's Softwar thesis (which the US Department of Defence placed under security review), why AI agents will naturally adopt Bitcoin for autonomous transactions, and Cern's provocative argument that infinite output multiplied by zero price equals zero GDP — making our most fundamental economic metric meaningless. If you've ever wondered what the economy actually looks like when abundance replaces scarcity, this is the conversation. In this episode we discuss: Why AI and Bitcoin are "two sides of the same coin" Jason Lowery's Softwar thesis and why the DoD took notice How AI is already contributing more to US GDP growth than consumer spending Why AI agents need Bitcoin — permissionless, no KYC, no intermediaries Cern's "death of GDP" thesis — infinite supply × zero price = zero GDP The dematerialisation of physical products (cameras, maps, books, money) What this means for New Zealand and small economies How abundance economics breaks traditional supply and demand Links mentioned: Cern Basher on X: https://x.com/CernBasher Brilliant Advice: https://www.brilliantadvice.net Cern's GDP post: https://x.com/CernBasher/status/1913993658572984440 Jason Lowery's Softwar thesis: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/153030

Starting off in FOLLOW UP, we've got a tax economist who actually made money betting against the "efficiency" of Elon's budget-slashing fever dreams, while Tesla is busy trying to dodge a $243 million jury verdict for an Autopilot-assisted fatality. Not content with being legally liable, Tesla is also suing the California DMV because they're offended someone called their "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" marketing deceptive—ironic, since Jack Dorsey just "proactively" halved the staff at Block to make room for more AI slop. Speaking of which, Goldman Sachs is here to remind us that all this AI spending added a grand total of zero to the US GDP last year, mostly because we're just exporting all that cash to overseas chip makers while 80% of execs admit the tech hasn't actually done anything for productivity yet.Moving into IN THE NEWS, Sam Altman had the audacity to compare ChatGPT's energy-sucking habits to the 20-year evolution of a human, though the internet wasn't exactly buying the "my bot is just like a baby" defense. Anthropic actually stood its ground against the Pentagon's demand for killer robots and mass surveillance, so naturally, the military just signed a deal to put Elon's Grok in their classified systems instead—because what could go wrong with an "edgy" LLM in the war room? Meanwhile, cities are dumping AI surveillance contracts as citizens start a literal "smash-the-snitch-box" campaign against Flock's license plate readers, Google's AI is busy inserting racial slurs into news alerts, and the White House is apparently harboring a staffer moonlighting as a racist "masterpiece" creator on X. We've also got Reddit being slapped with a $20 million fine in the UK for being lazy with age checks, while Discord and Apple scramble to build verification tools that hopefully won't leak your entire identity to a hacker in Belarus.In MEDIA CANDY, the Paramount-Skydance merger is leaving the industry in a cold sweat of "synergy" layoffs, but at least we're getting more Game of Thrones spinoffs and Star Trek reboots to rot our brains. Face/Off 2 lost its director, Ryan Coogler is taking on The X-Files, and Google wants to use AI to turn music into generic "lo-fi" background noise for the masses.Over in APPS & DOODADS, OpenAI is planning a 2027 smart speaker that literally watches you through a camera—because you definitely wanted a $300 Sam Altman-shaped eye in your kitchen—while the Dark Sky creators are back with "Acme Weather" for the low price of $25 a year.We wrap up THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE with a deep dive into "Under Pressure" and Coruscant's urban sprawl, leaving us to reminisce about the days when KPT Bryce was the pinnacle of tech—back when "generative art" was just a fractal that took six hours to render.Sponsors:DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout.SquareSpace - go to squarespace.com/GRUMPY for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use code GRUMPY to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/735Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jdz--v3eeU4FOLLOW UPGuy Bets Entire Life Savings Against Elon Musk, WinsTesla sues California DMV after it banned the term 'Autopilot'Jack Dorsey just halved the size of Block's employee base — and he says your company is nextIN THE NEWSSam Altman: Know What Else Used a Lot of Energy? Human CivilizationStatement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of WarAnthropic Tells Pete Hegseth to Take a HikeCities Are Shredding Their AI Surveillance Contracts en MasseKalshi Suspended a California Politician and a YouTuber for Insider TradingDiscord delays age verification to address user concernsApple introduces age verification for apps in Utah, Louisiana and AustraliaMEDIA CANDYAs Paramount Skydance wins the battle for Warner Bros. as Netflix ends its bid, here's the mood inside all three companies.A Knight of the Seven KingdomsStar Trek: Starfleet AcademyThe Night Agent Season 3'Face/Off 2' Director Adam Wingard is Now/GoneRyan Coogler's X-Files reboot gets the green light at HuluMortal Kombat II | Official Trailer IIGoogle's AI Slop Machine Is Coming for Your MusicDropping Names... and other things with Jonathan Frakes and Brent SpinerOnce We Were SpacemenAPPS & DOODADSOpenAI will reportedly release an AI-powered smart speaker in 2027Instagram Will Notify Parents When Teens Use Search Terms Related to SuicideThe creators of Dark Sky have a new weather appThis App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses NearbyTHE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEDave BittnerThe CyberWireHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopOnly Malware in the BuildingStrong Songs - S08E02 - "Under Pressure" by Queen and David BowieThe Problem with Coruscant (Planet Cities Explained)Reminds me of KPT Fractal ExplorerKPT Bryce 1.0 with John Dvorak and Kai KrauseSingle-Biome PlanetKPT Shapes by Dave BittnerBald Mr Clean mascot "retired"My childhood disappointment with scrubbing bubbles.CLOSING SHOUT-OUTSActor Robert Carradine Dies At Age 71See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recent analysis from Goldman Sachs indicates that $700 billion in AI investment during 2025 resulted in no measurable U.S. GDP growth, with most AI equipment imports negating domestic benefits and 80% of surveyed firms reporting no productivity or employment improvements. This pattern suggests that AI-related spending has primarily shifted margins from enterprise IT budgets to a small number of infrastructure vendors rather than delivering distributed value. Internal concerns are rising, with 90% of IT leaders questioning AI's return on investment, and 80% citing fragmented data as a primary challenge to measuring outcomes. Further context reveals that agentic AI initiatives face operational headwinds: Gartner expects 40% of such projects to be cancelled by 2027, and S&P Global found nearly half are abandoned before production, most often due to inadequate planning and data foundations. Margin erosion is widespread, attributed to AI implementation costs, and attempts to scale AI agents into production remain limited by inference costs and insufficient infrastructure. Despite increased adoption efforts, sustainable value delivery from AI platforms remains elusive for most organizations. Enterprise AI access is becoming increasingly concentrated. OpenAI's partnership with consulting firms such as BCG, McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini consolidates control of the enterprise distribution layer, narrowing competitive opportunities for smaller providers. Meanwhile, Amazon's 13-hour AWS outage, linked to the misconfiguration of an internal AI tool, underscores the liability ambiguity in agentic systems—where vendors may attribute autonomous actions to user error, complicating risk assignment. Additional updates from vendors such as Anthropic, Cloudflare, and New Relic address incremental technical capabilities, with a distinct focus on cost, operational governance, and policy enforcement. The prevailing themes for MSPs and IT leaders are increased scrutiny of AI value, heightened exposure to cost and accountability risk, and the emergence of managed service opportunities around data governance, cost instrumentation, and liability management. With enterprise market channels consolidating and risk shifting toward service providers, integrating robust contractual definitions for autonomy, incident attribution, and financial boundaries is essential to limit harm and clarify responsibility before incidents occur. Four things to know today 00:00 Goldman: $700B AI Spend Delivered Near-Zero U.S. GDP Growth in 2025 03:49 OpenAI Enlists BCG, McKinsey, Accenture to Distribute Enterprise AI Agents 06:44 Report: Amazon's Own Engineers Prefer Claude Over Its Mandated Internal Tools 08:56 AI Inference Costs Are Falling — But Governance Gaps Are Growing This is the Business of Tech.    Supported by: CometBackup  Small Biz Thoughts Community   

Listen to the SF Daily podcast for today, February 25, 2026, with host Lorrie Boyer. These quick and informative episodes cover the commodity markets, weather, and the big things happening in agriculture each morning. Agricultural markets are experiencing month-end positioning with mixed South American crop outlooks and quality concerns in Brazil. The ethanol industry's significant economic impact is highlighted, contributing $50 billion to US GDP and supporting over 300,000 jobs while purchasing $24 billion in corn during difficult times for farmers. Livestock markets show mixed results with cattle under pressure from rising feed costs. Weather forecasts predict light snow in the Midwest today, followed by dry, windy conditions that will elevate wildfire risk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nick Kunze from Sanlam Private Wealth unpacks the tariff turmoil after the Supreme Court rules them illegal, as US GDP prints softer and PCE inflation runs hot. Jason Swartz from Old Mutual Investment Group weighs up where the next surprises could land – and whether year-end elections pose any real market risk. Shannon Friedman, CEO of VAT Modernisation SA, outlines what it will take to overhaul South Africa's Vat system.

Trump shakes the world stage at Davos

From Minneapolis riots ❄️⚔️, illegal immigration chaos

Nouriel Roubini, chairman at Roubini Macro Associates, discusses his bullish stance on the role of AI in driving US GDP and productivity and explains why he is downplaying geopolitical risks to markets.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

as a follow up to last show's 'Review of US Economy 2025', this week the show makes predictions where it's headed in 2026. Topics include US GDP for next year, jobs & unemployment, Inflation (CPI & PCE), Fed interest rates (short & long term), continued devaluation of the US dollar and its consequences, direction of financial asset bubbles (gold, silver, crypto, stocks), AI investment & real business spending, government spending (defense vs social programs), budget deficits and national debt, US trade deficit. Impact of global trends (BRICS, sanctions, dollar demand, demand for US Treasuries by China, BRICS, etc. also discussed).

Angel Studios https://Angel.com/HermanJoin the Angel Guild today where you can stream Thank You, Dr. Fauci and be part of the conversation demanding truth and accountability.  Renue Healthcare https://Renue.Healthcare/ToddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit https://Renue.Healthcare/Todd Bulwark Capital https://KnowYourRiskPodcast.comBe confident in your portfolio with Bulwark! Schedule your free Know Your Risk Portfolio review. Go to KnowYourRiskPodcast.com today. Alan's Soaps https://www.AlansArtisanSoaps.comUse coupon code TODD to save an additional 10% off the bundle price.Bonefrog https://BonefrogCoffee.com/ToddThe new GOLDEN AGE is here! Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE at:The Todd Herman Show - Podcast - Apple PodcastsThe Todd Herman Show | Podcast on SpotifyWATCH and SUBSCRIBE at: Todd Herman - The Todd Herman Show - YouTubeEpisode links:HOLY CRAP! NBC's Kristen Welker just got EMBARRASSED on national television by Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent!Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources sayBREAKING - Three Democrats, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Susie Lee, and Sen. Mark Warner, who sit on committees controlling defense, environmental, and public works spending, have been caught buying stocks tied to those sectors, seeing gains of up to 250 percent.

US GDP utterly crushed it in Q3 and that was following Q2 when output supposedly was well more than expected, so two quarters in a row of booming numbers. So why isn't anyone buying it? To begin with, just look at gold and silver. Safe haven buying is literally off the charts. Bond yields didn't react at all. And consumer confidence keeps falling deeper into recession territory.Eurodollar University's Money & Macro Analysis---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What if your gold could actually pay you every month… in MORE gold?That's exactly what Monetary Metals does. You still own your gold, fully insured in your name, but instead of sitting idle, it earns real yield paid in physical gold. No selling. No trading. Just more gold every month.Check it out here: https://monetary-metals.com/snider---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------https://www.eurodollar.universityTwitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_EDU

The US economy depends on an unsustainable stock market bubble driven by AI companies that are almost all losing money. Nvidia seems healthier, but serious red flags explain why its stock price is extremely volatile, and why its market capitalization dropped $600 billion in just one day. Ben Norton explains. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAZqYQBwWNY Topics 0:00 AI bubble & Nvidia 2:40 Magnificent Seven (Mag7) Big Tech stocks 4:01 US GDP growth depends on AI capex 5:01 AI circular financing scheme 6:28 OpenAI is losing money, but owes $1.4 trillion 7:38 Nvidia profits rise in earnings report 9:27 US investor madness 12:04 China challenges Nvidia's chip monopoly 13:43 Crazy volatility in Nvidia stock 15:08 CEO Jensen Huang's private comments 17:11 $600 billion drop in one day 18:13 Four customers make up 61% of Nvidia revenue 20:25 IOUs: Nvidia's accounts receivable rises 21:43 GPU demand? Nvidia inventories surge 22:37 S&P 500 falls $2 trillion in 5 hours 24:12 US economy built on financial house of cards 26:13 Markets can remain irrational... 27:01 Dangers of a recession or depression 28:13 Outro

Azeem Azhar is the founder of Exponential View, a newsletter and research platform on emerging technology read by over 130,000 executives and policymakers globally, and author of the bestselling book The Exponential Age.In this episode of World of DaaS, Azeem and Auren discuss:Diagnosing an AI bubbleData centers driving 33% of US GDP growthWhether energy will constrain AI before capital doesCircular financing in AI and funding quality risksLooking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @worldofdaas.You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Azeem Azhar on X at @azeem.Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

Angel Studios https://Angel.com/ToddJoin the Angel Guild today and know you are not just watching, you're helping make bold, faithdriven stories like Disciples in the Moonlight possible. That's Angel.com/Herman.Bizable https://GoBizable.comUntie your business exposure from your personal exposure with BiZABLE.  Schedule your FREE consultation at GoBizAble.com today. Renue Healthcare https://Renue.Healthcare/ToddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit https://Renue.Healthcare/Todd Bulwark Capital https://KnowYourRiskPodcast.comRegister now for the free Review/Preview Webinar November 20th 3:30pm Pacific, scheduleyour free Know Your Risk Portfolio Review, and subscribe to Zach's Daily Market Recap at Know Your Risk Podcast dot com.Alan's Soaps https://www.AlansArtisanSoaps.comUse coupon code TODD to save an additional 10% off the bundle price.Bonefrog https://BonefrogCoffee.com/toddThe new GOLDEN AGE is here!  Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE at:The Todd Herman Show - Podcast - Apple PodcastsThe Todd Herman Show | Podcast on SpotifyWATCH and SUBSCRIBE at: Todd Herman - The Todd Herman Show - YouTubeYou won't believe what percentage of the US GDP these 5 companies make. Plus, how government intervention DISRUPTS and RUINS our economy. Zach Abraham of Bulwark Capital Management joins.Episode links: HOLY CRAP! NBC's Kristen Welker just got EMBARRASSED on national television by Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent!Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources sayBREAKING - Three Democrats, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Susie Lee, and Sen. Mark Warner, who sit on committees controlling defense, environmental, and public works spending, have been caught buying stocks tied to those sectors, seeing gains of up to 250 percent.

Ralph welcomes Andy Shallal of Busboys and Poets to discuss his new memoir, “A Seat at the Table: The Making of Busboys and Poets.” Then, Ralph speaks to business consultant and activist Bennett Freeman about why Big Business isn't standing up to the Trump Administration.Andy Shallal is an activist, artist and social entrepreneur. Mr. Shallal is the founder and proprietor of Busboys and Poets restaurants in the Washington, D.C. area, which feature prominent speakers, poets and authors and provide a venue for social and political activism. He is also co-founder of The Peace Cafe and a member of the board of trustees for The Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of the new book A Seat at the Table: The Making of Busboys and Poets.I've called Andy Shallal “democracy's restaurateur”, and he really fits the bill.Ralph NaderActivism is the best antidote to depression. It's really hard to be able to sit back—and especially now with social media and everything else that's right at your fingertips, to be able to watch the little babies being snipered and their limbs being chopped up. And it just feels so, so horrific. And the only way you can really be able to make sense of it—if there's any way to make sense of it—is to continue to fight for a better world.Andy ShallalSince, of course, October 7th opened up a whole new thing for activists and really exposed in a very stark way the myth of “Western civilization,” the idea of how obvious the lies and the deceit that's been happening, and the power of the military industrial complex that we've been warned about over the years I think [a new understanding is] taking shape right now, and we're starting to understand it more and more. And as I think we are trying to free Gaza and free Palestine, at the same time I think Gaza and Palestine are freeing us to be able to understand our system better.Andy ShallalOne of the things that I find is necessary for movements to be sustained is to have joy. You've got to have opportunities for joy. You got to have opportunities for people to actually have fun together, really feel like they're part of a community. Because a lot of times, the work we do isn't—well, it's soul-sucking work, you know, and you need to have those opportunities to be able to refuel and re-energize.Andy ShallalBennett Freeman is principal of Bennett Freeman Associates, where he advises multinational corporations, international institutions, and NGOs on policy and strategy related to human rights and labour rights. Mr. Freeman was founding chair of the advisory board for Global Witness (an investigative, campaigning organisation that challenges the power of climate-wrecking companies). He was also founding trustee of the Institute for Human Rights and Business, co-founder of the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark, and co-founder of the Global Network Initiative. He served on the governing board of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, as well as the board of Oxfam America. Mr. Freeman was the lead author of “Shared Space Under Pressure: Business Support for Civic Freedoms and Human Rights Defenders.”[Ralph,] you correctly characterize the silence and obeisance of much of corporate America (not least the tech CEOs) so far this year. I would use another pair of words as well to characterize their stance, which I think during the campaign last year in 2024 was: complacency, [and] I think the complacency now has become complicity in a dramatic, historic, democratic backsliding in the United States with the erosion of rule of law and our constitutional democracy.Bennett FreemanAt the end of the day, I'm much more interested in democratic governance based on rule of law and fair elections than I am in what corporate America has to say. But they have a stake now. And I think that those of us who have tried to promote corporate responsibility (and in Ralph's case and many others, to impose corporate accountability) have to continue this work. And we've got to engage corporate America without illusions, but with still aspirations to try to get them back to support—in a nonpartisan or bipartisan way—the fundamentals of what our country is supposed to be about.Bennett FreemanNews 10/10/25* Two polls came out this past week which reveal key data points about Americans' views on Israel. First, a Washington Post poll of American Jews, published October 6th and covering September 2-9th, shows that 61% say Israel has committed “war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.” This nearly two-thirds majority should put the lie to the canard that American Jews monolithically support Israel's actions in Gaza. They don't. Furthermore, 39% say Israel has committed “Genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” Some contend these numbers might be higher if the question was worded slightly differently, for example asking in the present tense whether Israel is committing genocide, rather than in the past tense. Regardless, while this result is slightly less than a majority, it certainly proves that a substantial share of American Jews do believe that Isreal is guilty of the crime of genocide. Astute politicians should take note.* Another survey that shrewd pols should consider is the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project (IMEU) poll released October 3rd. In this poll, 43% of respondents identified “U.S. foreign policy and relations with Israel” as an issue that will play a role in their 2026 Democratic primary vote. As for more ambitious Democrats, 71% said they would be more likely to vote for “A candidate for president who voted to withhold weapons to Israel,” compared to just 10% who said the same about “A candidate who voted against withholding weapons to Israel.” The numbers are cut and dried.* Last week, CBS confirmed that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “directly approved military operations on two vessels,” in the Global Sumud Flotilla carrying aid to Gaza. According to this report, Netanyahu ordered Israeli forces to “[launch] drones from a submarine and [drop] incendiary devices onto the boats that were moored outside the Tunisian port of Sidi Bou Said.” As this report notes, “Under international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict, the use of incendiary weapons against a civilian population or civilian objects is prohibited in all circumstances.” Put simply, this attack amounted to a war crime. In a statement, the Global Sumud Flotilla wrote “Confirmation of Israeli involvement…simply lay[s] bare a pattern of arrogance and impunity so grotesque that it cannot escape eventual reckoning.” The flotilla was intercepted off the coast of Gaza last week and over 400 activists were detained in Israeli custody. Many have alleged mistreatment, with Turkish activist Ersin Çelik claiming guards “dragged [Greta Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag.”* Unfortunately, this is the last news critical of Israel we can expect to see from CBS for a long time. On October 6th, CNN reported that Paramount will officially acquire The Free Press for $150 million and appoint its founder, Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News. This position was created specifically for Weiss. According to Paramount, in this role, Weiss will “shape editorial priorities, champion core values across platforms, and lead innovation in how the organization reports and delivers the news.” In an interview with Democracy Now!, journalist David Klion of the Nation and Jewish Currents, said Weiss, “has presented herself as a champion of free speech…But in reality, she has a 20-year history of suppressing speech that she finds objectionable, especially when it's speech championing the rights of Palestinians and criticizing the state of Israel.”* Meanwhile in Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum called for the immediate repatriation of the six Mexican nationals among the Gaza aid flotilla participants following their detention by Israeli forces, per Mexico News Daily. Following a speech by the Mexican president, the foreign ministry wrote that Mexican Embassy officials had gone to Ashdod, where the activists were being held, to “directly verify the conditions on the ground, request consular access, and ensure that … [the] safety and integrity [of the Mexicans] is respected, in accordance with applicable international law.” Notably, President Trump has made no such moves to publicly demand the return of, or even lawful treatment of, the Americans on board these vessels. Perhaps this is a contributing factor to Sheinbaum's stunning 78% approval in a recent El País poll, which shows her not just overwhelmingly popular among her own party's base but even among those registered to competing parties. According to this poll, 73% of PAN members, 72% of PRI members, 70% of MC members, and 59% of voters with no party preference approve of her performance in office. These numbers are frankly unimaginable in America, but so are the achievements Sheinbaum has delivered in her short time in power.* Turning to Congress, Representatives Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal and Jared Huffman have authored a letter expressing “grave concerns,” regarding President Trump's executive order designating “Antifa” as a Domestic Terrorist Organization, calling for the order and accompanying memorandum, known as NSPM-7 to be “immediately rescinded,” according to the related press release. In the letter, the members warn “the sweeping language and broad authority in these directives pose serious constitutional, statutory, and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest, or ideological speech.” The members also note that the memo “characterizes ‘anti-capitalism' as a hallmark of violent behavior without explaining the term…[allowing] officials to potentially treat Americans as domestic terrorists for something as routine as organizing a local boycott or operating an employee-owned business.” Perhaps most critically, they write “These actions are illegal, and…We stand ready to take legislative action should you fail,” to rescind the order.* In St. Louis, former Congresswoman Cori Bush is running to take back her seat. Bush, who came to prominence as an activist during the 2014 Ferguson protests and eventually primaried 10-term incumbent Congressman Lacy Clay, was ousted in a close 2024 primary by prosecutor Wesley Bell. According to POLITICO, Bell received $8 million dollars from AIPAC during that campaign; the pro-Israel PAC had identified Bush, along with former Congressman Jamaal Bowman, as key targets because of their pro-Palestine positions.* Of course, for the time being, Congressional deadlock is keeping the federal government in a shutdown. One symptom of this shutdown surfaced in Los Angeles this week, when dozens of flights into and out of Hollywood Burbank Airport were delayed or canceled because its air traffic control tower was temporarily unstaffed, the LA Times reports. Staffing shortages also caused delays at Newark Liberty International Airport, Denver International Airport and Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. This report added that the Federal Aviation Administration “warned of more disruption at airports due to staff shortages as a result of the government shutdown.” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said in a joint press conference with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, “We need to bring this shutdown to a close, so that the [FAA] and the committed aviation safety professionals can put this distraction behind us and completely focus on their vital work…We do not have the luxury of time.”* More troubling signs are emerging in the economy as well. For months now, analysts have warned that the U.S. is not just on the brink of a recession, but rather already in one – it is just being masked by the massive speculative bubble of AI. Back in August, Axios reported that “excitement over artificial intelligence…is clouding recessionary signals in more cyclical corners of the market,” citing longer lengths of unemployment and slower hiring. Now, the AI bubble is reaching epic proportions. According to the Financial Times, “AI spending by companies now accounts for a 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year,” while the Financial Post reports AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in U.S. stocks so far in 2025. Given the market's reliance on AI speculation, the economic damage if that bubble bursts whilst the economy is on such unstable footing could be catastrophic.* Finally, for some good news, a new California law is aiming to regulate the noise level of advertisements on streaming services. The Guardian reports the new legislation, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, “forces the powerful streaming platforms to comply with existing regulations that have barred television broadcasters from bombarding the eardrums of viewers with overly loud commercials since 2010.” According to this story, the bill was sponsored by State Senator Tom Umberg, whose newborn child was consistently awoken by overloud ads. As the Guardian notes, “Since so many of the streaming platforms are based in California, the new state bill could set a national standard and lower volumes across the country.” Rest assured industry will strike back at this law somehow, but it remains to be seen how they will argue for their right to blast ads at consumers at outrageous volumes.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe