Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood talent agent and sports tycoon, has raised almost $3bn from investors for a new events venture in a bet that artificial intelligence will shrink the working week and give people more free time. 

The world could be “down to four-day work weeks” in the coming years, he told the Financial Times. This could go “down to three with AI” as more people use the technology to expedite everyday tasks, he said. “There’s going to be more free time.” 

MARI, Emanuel’s new company, will house the Madrid and Miami tennis Opens, as well as the Frieze art fairs, which Emanuel bought out of Endeavor, the sports and entertainment group he co-founded. The company announced on Wednesday that it had also agreed to acquire Barrett-Jackson, the collector car auction company, from Endeavor.

Read it all.

Ari Emanuel bets AI will boost leisure time with three-day working week https://t.co/tkaSMs2V7c

— Financial Times (@FT) October 8, 2025

Online sports betting is not legal in Minnesota, but that hasn’t stopped Ian White from trading money on the outcomes of N.F.L. games. Mr. White, a special education paraprofessional, said he downloaded Kalshi, a “prediction market” app, after seeing an ad on TikTok. He buys contracts worth $10 a game and has made about $130.

“I do consider Kalshi betting,” he said, “but I love how they get around it by selling futures.”

Kalshi can “get around” state gambling laws because on paper it is not a sports gambling app, like FanDuel or DraftKings. Those kinds of online sportsbooks are banned in 20 states, including Minnesota, California and Texas. Instead, Kalshi is an exchange selling financial products tied to the outcome of sporting events — and, with the tacit approval of the Trump administration, is currently available everywhere in the country.

If you wanted to, for example, wager $100 on a Dallas Cowboys victory this weekend, your experience on FanDuel and Kalshi would look remarkably similar….

Read it all.

"… Kalshi, once known for offering wagers on elections, are now in the multibillion-dollar sports betting business and outside the reach of state regulations and taxes"

Is Sports Betting Illegal in Your State? Not if You Call It a ‘Prediction Market.’https://t.co/FSpVln6jtH

— Alfonso Straffon 🇨🇷🇺🇸🇲🇽 (@astraffon) October 5, 2025

Meta will use conversations people have with its chatbots to personalize advertising and content across its platforms, in a sign of how tech companies plan to make money from artificial intelligence.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Wednesday said it would use the content of chats with its Meta AI to create advertising recommendations across its suite of apps.

“People will already expect that their Meta AI interactions are being used for these personalization purposes,” said Christy Harris, privacy and data policy manager at Meta….

Big Tech groups and AI labs have invested billions of dollars in developing and running popular chatbots, but have only recently started to indicate how they will monetise the technology.

Read it all.

Meta to mine AI interactions to help target advertising https://t.co/xtjXT3Hh8X

— FT Technology News (@fttechnews) October 1, 2025

Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills.

The Maryland city is well over an hour’s drive from the northern Virginia region known as Data Center Alley. But Kevin Stanley, a 57-year-old who survives on disability payments, says his energy bills are about 80% higher than they were about three years ago. “They’re going up and up,” he said. “You wonder, ‘What is your breaking point?’”

It’s an increasingly dramatic ripple effect of the AI boom as energy-hungry data centers send power costs to records in much of the US, pulling everyday households into paying for the digital economy.

The power needs of the massive complexes are rapidly driving up electricity bills — piling onto the rising prices for food, housing and other essentials already straining consumers. That’s starting to have economic and political reverberations across the country as utilities and local officials wrestle over how to divvy up the costs. Yet those same facilities are a linchpin of US leadership in the global AI race.

A Bloomberg News analysis of wholesale electricity prices for tens of thousands of locations across the country reveals the effects of the AI boom on the power market with unprecedented granularity. The locations and prices were tracked and aggregated monthly by Grid Status, an energy data analytics platform. Bloomberg analyzed this data in relation to data center locations, from DC Byte, and found that electricity now costs as much as 267% more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas located near significant data center activity.

Read it all.

AI data centers are sending US power bills soaring, Bloomberg analysis shows
🇺🇸⚡📈

Wholesale prices more than doubled since 2020 in some markets, but those increases arent equal

Of the nodes where prices rose, over 70% are within 50 miles of significant data center activity pic.twitter.com/CwhudAlEcU

— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) September 30, 2025

Big Pharma has a big headache: Donald Trump. Lately drugmakers have had to contend with the American president’s pronouncements on everything from vaccines to paracetamol. In the coming days the pain is set to intensify. Intent on lowering prices, Mr Trump has given leading pharma firms until September 29th to comply with an executive order to peg their prices to the lowest charged in other rich countries—a rule he calls “most favoured nation” (MFN) pricing. If they do not, he thundered, they will face “every tool in our arsenal” against “abusive drug pricing”.

At the same time, the president wants to encourage homegrown manufacturing. He plans to impose a 100% tariff on branded drugs from October 1st, unless their makers are building factories in America. His administration is also pondering additional duties under a law allowing imports to be restricted on national-security grounds.

As is often the case, the Trumpian diagnosis contains a kernel of truth. Drug prices are indeed higher in America than elsewhere in the rich world. But the president’s two-point prescription upends a model that has long underpinned the highly globalised pharma industry, which could have unintended effects. It could leave Americans with fewer medicines but not cheaper ones, while in other countries drugs could be fewer and dearer. David Ricks of Eli Lilly, the world’s most valuable drugmaker, has warned that MFN pricing risks “the worst of two worlds”, importing Europe’s sluggish innovation while keeping American prices high.

Read it all.

America’s drug prices were more than three times the average in other rich countries in 2022. As a consequence, it coughs up around 70% of global pharmaceutical profits from about half of global sales. This is partly because of how the market is organised https://t.co/eyJHSfPEB3

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) September 29, 2025

The windswept town of Ellendale, N.D., population 1,100, has two motels, a Dollar General, a Pentecostal Bible college—and a half-built AI factory bigger than 10 Home Depots.

Its more than $15 billion price tag is equivalent to a quarter of the state’s annual economic output.

The artificial-intelligence boom has ushered in one of the costliest building sprees in world history. Over the past three years, leading tech firms have committed more toward AI data centers like the one in Ellendale, plus chips and energy, than it cost to build the interstate highway system over four decades, when adjusted for inflation. AI proponents liken the effort to the Industrial Revolution.

A big problem: No one is sure how they will get their investment back—or when. 

The building rush is effectively a mega-speculative bet that the technology will rapidly improve, transform the economy and start producing steady profits. “I hope we don’t take 50 years,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a May conference with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, referring to the initially slow adoption of electricity.

“Yeah, well, we’re all investing as if it’s not going to take 50 years,” replied Zuckerberg, who surmised at a recent White House dinner the company’s U.S. spending through 2028 was “probably going to be something like” $600 billion.

Read it all.

Media: "Spending on AI is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off? — There are growing, worrying signs that the optimism about AI won’t pan out. An @MIT report found 95% of organizations surveyed are getting no return on their AI product investments. A @UChicago economics paper… pic.twitter.com/qqE1XpcCs4

— Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) September 26, 2025

At home and abroad, Britain’s economy is in the dog house. Inflation is sticky, debts and deficits are high, and productivity growth is low. Yields on long-term government debt are above those in any other big rich economy. Four in five Britons say the government is mismanaging the economy; Ray Dalio, a hedge-fund manager, says the country is in a “debt doom loop”. As we report, the infrastructure and housing projects that were supposed to be the engine of growth are turning out to be a sorry disappointment.

Some of the doomsaying is overdone. Britain is not in a recession. Critics say the government crushed the private sector with tax increases in 2024, but the economy grew faster in the first half of 2025 than any other in the G7 group of big rich countries. Retail sales have been solid; unemployment remains low; and the service sector is strong. Britain’s structural strengths—its best universities, the City of London and the English language—are enduring. In many ways, including its birth rate and artificial-intelligence research, Britain can look to continental Europe and count its blessings.

Except, that is, for the public finances. Britain’s net public debts have risen from 35% of GDP in 2005 to 95%. Financial crises and the pandemic caused much of the increase but even today, when there is no emergency, the government is borrowing over 4% of GDP a year. America and France also have big debts and deficits, but borrow in deep currency blocs. Britain is alone, with higher interest rates and a rising welfare bill.

Read it all.

At home and abroad, Britain’s economy is in the dog house. Even with a huge majority and plenty of time, Labour is drifting towards a fiscal crisis https://t.co/YfTB1sIFvg pic.twitter.com/XNyeUYuqOw

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) September 25, 2025

US debt investors have raised the alarm over lax lending standards in credit markets after the unravelling of two companies that just weeks ago were deemed to be in strong health.

The failure of subprime auto lender Tricolor Holdings at the start of this month followed by the exploration of bankruptcy proceedings by car parts supplier First Brands Group have wrongfooted investors. Tricolor had won pristine triple-A ratings as it borrowed in credit markets, while First Brands may have amassed as much as $10bn in debt and off-balance sheet financing and was close to raising even more last month.

Investors were ready to dismiss each as one-off incidents, but taken together, the two offer signs of cracks within credit markets, which have become a critical source of funding for consumers and businesses as traditional banks have retreated since the financial crisis.

Read it all.

US debt investors have raised the alarm over lax lending standards in credit markets after the unravelling of subprime auto lender Tricolor Holdings and car parts supplier First Brands Group that just weeks ago were deemed to be in strong health. https://t.co/42lt425W6Y pic.twitter.com/MIgeF7QhsF

— Financial Times (@FT) September 24, 2025

Sean Wittmeyer would seem to be highly employable. He has more than a decade of experience in architecture and product design, impressive coding chops and two master’s degrees. His skills make him an asset in two industries, technology and construction, which helped power the economy’s growth over the last 15 years.

But construction activity has faltered since 2023, after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, and many tech companies began layoffs around the same time.

That helps explain why Mr. Wittmeyer, 37, has been unemployed for a year and a half, since he lost his job in business development for a company that makes software to help with real estate projects. He has been so eager to earn income that he has applied for positions befitting an intern, only to be told he was overqualified. “I can’t even work at the little board game store down the street,” he said.

When the federal government released its August employment numbers on Sept. 5, the overall unemployment rate was still relatively low, at just over 4 percent. But underneath was a concerning statistic: The portion of unemployed people who have been out of work for more than six months, which is considered “long-term,” rose to its highest share in over three years — to nearly 26 percent.

Read it all.

A decade ago about 20% of the long-term unemployed were college grads. Today it's about 1/3. And the long-term unemployment rate for college grads has been rising pretty quickly the last two years. https://t.co/PDZfBhUB73 pic.twitter.com/cLFXsQrUpb

— Noam Scheiber (@noamscheiber) September 15, 2025

Joel Eisiminger was racing to save homes in Northern California from a fast-spreading wildfire when a crewmate noticed that one side of his face was suddenly drooping so much that his mouth hung open.

In his six years fighting fires, Joel had tumbled down burning hills, endured full-body rashes from poison oak and inhaled plumes of smoke that left him gasping for weeks. But he had never felt as bad as he did on this morning in July 2024. He didn’t want to let down his crew, so he kept working deep in the forest until a medic told him to get to a hospital. He might have had a stroke.

As the doctors ran tests, Joel grew sicker. Within days, he was too exhausted to walk. On the eve of his 25th birthday, he received a diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive, often fatal blood cancer that usually strikes people more than twice his age. Joel told the doctors he was not a regular smoker and had no family history of blood cancers. But he did have one risk factor: his job.

Read it all.

‘If I Live to 25, I’ve Lived a Good Life’ Risks to wildland firefighters are real. https://t.co/GW3VXtnOXM via @NYTimes

— TJ Kennedy (@TJPublicSafety) September 7, 2025

Americans are more positive toward capitalism than socialism, but the 54% viewing capitalism favorably is down from 60% in 2021 and near that level in most prior years. Americans remain more negative (57%) than positive (39%) toward socialism, with little movement in these attitudes over time.

Gallup first measured Americans’ opinions of various economic systems or aspects of the U.S. economy in 2010 and has repeated the question six times since then, including in an Aug 1-20 survey.

Democrats and independents view capitalism less positively this year, each showing eight-percentage-point declines since 2021. For the first time, less than half of Democrats (42%) view capitalism positively, while a slight majority of independents (51%) still do. Republicans’ views are essentially unchanged, with three-quarters holding a positive opinion.

Read it all.

Americans are more positive toward capitalism than socialism, but the 54% viewing capitalism favorably is down from 60% in 2021 and near that level in most prior years. pic.twitter.com/ZAZuJlbdCI

— Gallup (@Gallup) September 8, 2025

American companies are once again beating profit expectations, but this time around they aren’t banking on blockbuster consumer spending to make it happen.

Instead, the latest batch of quarterly earnings is getting a lift from managers who are squeezing out costs, boosting productivity and turning to new technologies. Companies from Monster Beverage to Estée Lauder said they are holding down hiring, often while finding new ways to get employees to work more efficiently. And they are raising prices when they can.

“The processes are human-light now,” Damon Lee, chief financial officer of C.H. Robinson Worldwide , said last month as he told investors about an initiative that includes automation upgrades. The global logistics company reported higher profit margins in the second quarter despite a nearly 8% drop in revenue, which it attributed to a prolonged freight recession. It said it had increased productivity 35% since 2022.

“The outcome of those transformations means less head count, more productivity,” he said.

More broadly, the gains enjoyed by companies and their investors aren’t softening the unease consumers and employees feel—and might be obscuring signals that ordinary Americans are putting their anxiety into action.

Read it all.

For retailers, price increases have generated most of the growth in sales since 2021, with volumes largely flat. Meanwhile, companies are cutting staff on the margins and relying on new technologies to fill gaps. “The processes are human-light now." https://t.co/61FEHkzBCa pic.twitter.com/nprY1Qo2Mg

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) September 3, 2025

espite all the drama about the weakening jobs numbers, the US labor market is actually doing OK. There is one major exception, however: if you happen to be a young man.

While the overall unemployment rate was still a respectable 4.2% in July, for young men aged 20 to 24, it was 8.3%, which is near recession levels — and for recent college graduates, the annual rate is 5.3%. Both of these numbers are about double the comparable figures for young women. During the pandemic, the economy was so bad for working women that it inspired the term “she-cession.” Could the US now be headed for a “he-cession”?

Men have dominated the labor market for most of the modern era, and still earn more than women, but the jobs market has not been kind to men for the last few decades. Many men, even in the prime of their lives, aren’t working. And going to college is no longer an automatic way to improve your job prospects.

Read it all.

The US jobs market is showing signs of a ‘he-cession’https://t.co/vpJRNkKuLv

— Economic Times (@EconomicTimes) August 5, 2025

Nearly 10 million American children are living in poverty, the most since 2018, according to the latest Census Bureau figures from 2023. 

Tens of millions more—like the Meazler kids—are precariously close. Their families have been pushed to the edge by a storm of economic factors, including the expiration of Covid-era relief programs and the impacts of inflation on food and housing. 

The strain is expected to be worsened by cuts to federal spending on aid programs, including food benefits and Medicaid. President Trump on July 4 signed legislation passed by Congress that reduces funding and tightens work requirements for government assistance, and will likely result in less food aid and millions losing health coverage.

Even before the new cuts, several markers show that households with children are falling behind, though statistics around poverty have been complicated by the upheaval the pandemic brought to jobs and living arrangements, and the unprecedented federal aid distributed in response.

The share of families with children living in poverty jumped to 12.9% in 2023, the most recent year available, after plummeting to a record low of 5.6% in 2021, driven down by temporary pandemic programs like the expanded Child Tax Credit and extra unemployment insurance, according to census data compiled by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. 

Poverty for all ages has inched up, but no other age demographic has seen a sharper rise in poverty between 2021 and 2023 than children, data compiled by the center show. 

Read it all.

Earning More but in Worse Shape: Hardship Overwhelms Many American Families

Nearly half of kids in the U.S. live in households below the middle class as inflation and the end of Covid relief hit working parentshttps://t.co/MmvB2XmIdG via @WSJ

— Lindsay Wise (@lindsaywise) August 5, 2025

President Donald Trump wants lower interest rates. Achieving that objective will require overcoming bigger obstacles than Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

There are structural forces that drive the cost of borrowing, and right now they’re pointing up. Governments and businesses are piling on debt to pay for tax cuts, military spending, and AI investments — which means more demand for credit. As the Baby Boomers retire and China decouples from the US, the pool of saving to finance those loans is drying up.

Attacks on Fed independence risk shrinking the pool further. Investors don’t want to see the value of their hard-earned cash inflated away by a central bank under political control.

Add all of this together and it points to a world where 4.5% may be the new normal for ten-year Treasuries — the crucial rate for mortgages and corporate bonds, and the one Trump’s team says it wants to bring down. In fact, Bloomberg Economics analysis shows it’s more likely to trend above that figure than below it. For the world’s biggest economy, that means a wrenching transition.

Read it all.

"Trump’s Interest Rate Obstacle Is Bigger Than Powell" https://t.co/CcNXpiVOuR pic.twitter.com/MLa29IeB2h

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) August 4, 2025

President Trump’s extensive tariffs have already started to generate a significant amount of money for the federal government, a new source of revenue for a heavily indebted nation that American policymakers may start to rely on.

As part of his quest to reorder the global trading system, Mr. Trump has imposed steep tariffs on America’s trading partners, with the bulk of those set to go into effect on Aug. 7. Even before the latest tariffs kick in, revenue from taxes collected on imported goods has grown dramatically so far this year. Customs duties, along with some excise taxes, generated $152 billion through July, roughly double the $78 billion netted over the same time period last fiscal year, according to Treasury data.

Indeed, Mr. Trump has routinely cited the tariff revenue as evidence that his trade approach, which has sowed uncertainty and begun to increase prices for consumers, is a win for the United States. Members of his administration have argued that the money from the tariffs would help plug the hole created by the broad tax cuts Congress passed last month, which are expected to cost the government at least $3.4 trillion.

Read it all.

Trump’s Tariffs Are Making Money. That May Make Them Hard to Quit. https://t.co/0IaBKVoYff

— tony romm (@TonyRomm) August 3, 2025

The U.S. economy is growing again, helped by trade swings and American consumers who keep spending. There are also signs of caution.

The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—rose at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 3% annual rate in the second quarter. That is up from a 0.5% contraction in the first quarter.

Taken together, the two quarters show an economy that is growing, but more slowly. GDP grew at an average annual rate of 1.2% in the first six months this year, a step down from the 2.5% average pace in 2024.

Both quarters this year were heavily influenced by swings in trade as businesses tried to navigate tariff threats and trade deals from the White House.

“Businesses are very cautious—they don’t know the road map and so they’re driving in the right lane very slowly,” said U.S. Bank chief economist Beth Ann Bovino.

Read it all.

US economy rebounds a surprisingly strong 3% in the second quarter https://t.co/vJqYzkFiUY

— O.C. Register (@ocregister) July 30, 2025

Some obese Americans on Medicare and Medicaid could get access to expensive weight loss drugs under a five-year experiment being planned by the Trump administration.

Under the proposed plan, state Medicaid programs and Medicare Part D insurance plans will be able to voluntarily choose to cover Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound for patients for “weight management” purposes, according to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services documents obtained by The Washington Post.

It’s a strong signal that the administration is open to more broadly covering GLP-1 drugs — lauded by many as a miracle solution to Americans’ long-standing struggle with weight — through government insurance programs. Medicare covers the drugs mainly for patients with Type 2 diabetes, even as some private insurance plans cover them for patients with obesity.

Read it all.

Medicare, Medicaid Plans To Experiment With Covering Weight Loss Drugs – @washingtonpost https://t.co/ctAu2B9pX5

— LiveSquawk (@LiveSquawk) August 1, 2025

Six months ago, few people would have anticipated that the United States would place a 15 percent tariff on exports from Japan, one of America’s closest and most longstanding allies. President Trump had campaigned on the idea of a 10 percent universal base-line tariff, plus a higher levy on China, but it was not clear whether he would follow through.

But on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump announced a trade deal that included a 15 percent tariff on Japanese products — the highest rate those goods have faced in decades — there was a palpable sense of relief. Stock markets in Asia and Europe rose. The Japanese Nikkei 225 surged by over 3.5 percent, while shares of Japanese automakers, which will also be charged a 15 percent tariff on their exports to the United States, jumped more than 10 percent. The reaction is a testament to just how quickly and completely Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s expectations regarding tariffs.

Read it all.

Trump’s Tariffs Are the Highest in a Century. But After His Threats, They Seem Like a Relief. https://t.co/eevtXIQ4cC via @NYTimes

— ISMAIL (@iamaniku) July 23, 2025

For decades, the prices Medicare pays doctors for different medical services have been largely decided not by Medicare itself, but by a powerful industry group, the American Medical Association.

An A.M.A. committee meets in secret to determine the difficulty and time demands of each type of medical visit, test and procedure, and then recommends to Medicare how much doctors should be paid for performing them.

And for decades, critics have complained that this process unfairly rewards surgeons and other specialists, at the expense of primary care physicians and other generalists.

Medicare officials have been loath to change it because it has spared them from needing their own staff and budget to make such pricing decisions, along with the unpleasant politics of adjudicating conflicts between competing groups of physicians.

Read it all.

“Under the new proposal, Medicare would pay 2.5 % less for every procedure, operation & medical test in 2026, based on data suggesting there have been improvements in “efficiency” over the years.”https://t.co/vZDu3kwjC4

— Howard Liu, MD MBA (@DrHowardLiu) July 21, 2025

When President Trump slapped tariffs on nations across the globe this spring, many economists feared higher prices and spending cuts would flatten the economy.

Consumer sentiment collapsed. The S&P 500 stock index fell by 19% between February and April. The world held its breath and waited for the bottom to drop out.

But that didn’t happen. Now businesses and consumers are regaining their swagger, and evidence is mounting that those who held back are starting to splurge again.

The stock market is reaching record highs. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index, which tumbled in April to its lowest reading in almost three years, has begun climbing again. Retail sales are up more than economists had forecast, and sky-high inflation hasn’t materialized—at least not yet.

“We’ve been surprised again and again by consumers,” said Jonathan Millar, senior U.S. economist at Barclays. In April, Millar predicted that the U.S. economy would likely go into recession this year. He now expects it to keep growing, albeit at a slow pace.

When President Trump slapped tariffs on nations across the globe, many economists feared the economy would flatten. That didn’t happen—and now businesses and consumers are regaining their swagger. https://t.co/WIBgPogfQv

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 21, 2025

Jamie Mains showed up for her checkup so high that there was no point in pretending otherwise. At least she wasn’t shooting fentanyl again; medication was suppressing those cravings. Now it was methamphetamine that manacled her, keeping her from eating, sleeping, thinking straight. Still, she could not stop injecting.

“Give me something that’s going to help me with this,” she begged her doctor.

“There is nothing,” the doctor replied.

Overcoming meth addiction has become one of the biggest challenges of the national drug crisis. Fentanyl deaths have been dropping, in part because of medications that can reverse overdoses and curb the urge to use opioids. But no such prescriptions exist for meth, which works differently on the brain.

In recent years, meth, a highly addictive stimulant, has been spreading aggressively across the country, rattling communities and increasingly involved in overdoses. Lacking a medical treatment, a growing number of clinics are trying a startlingly different strategy: To induce patients to stop using meth, they pay them.

The approach has been around for decades, but most clinics were uneasy about adopting it because of its bluntly transactional nature. 

Read it all.

Meth use is surging, but unlike opioids, there’s no approved medication to ease cravings. In response, clinics across the country are offering small financial rewards to help patients. It’s a behavioral intervention that’s showing real results. Read more: https://t.co/eaDcMOJu87

— Addiction Policy Forum (@AddictionPolicy) July 17, 2025

Another reason companies hire consultants is to cover their *&^. As the old saying goes, “Nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey”; even if the project goes poorly, the CEO can blame the consultant instead of management.

But it’s becoming much more difficult for consulting firms to stick with their old tactics, and their old business model. The industry is being disrupted by two powerful forces. The first is the Trump administration’s crackdown on consulting for the federal government. According to the General Services Administration, the top 10 contractors alone were set to be paid $65 billion by the government in 2025—and the administration is adamant that that number be substantially reduced. It is voiding contracts that it does not believe are “mission critical.” And it is insisting that government consultants find significant savings—or else.

In a pointed letter to procurement officials throughout the government, acting GSA head Stephen Ehikian, complaining about the amount the government was spending on consultants, wrote: “This needs to, and must, change.”

The second factor is the arrival of artificial intelligence as a dominant force in American business. Although the big consulting firms are hoping to make money providing AI services to clients, the clients have figured out that AI can often provide an analysis in 10 minutes that used to take a team of junior consultants weeks or months to do. “It used to take two weeks to do a SWOT analysis with all the people engaged in doing research,” said Soren Kaplan, an innovation expert who has predicted for years that AI would upend the consulting business. (“SWOT” stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.) “Now it takes two minutes with AI. It is going to change the economics in a huge way, making everything cheaper and faster. And this is going to come into play in consulting in a huge way.” Ten minutes of work versus two weeks means a lot less money for the consultants.

Read it all.

The Consulting Crash Is Coming, argues Joe Nocera (@opinion_joe) in @TheFP

"Bloated, overpaid, and outpaced by AI—big firms confront a future they can’t outsource."https://t.co/NTrGqpgGBI pic.twitter.com/j4KNBWR3TK

— Stephen Landry (@landryst) July 11, 2025

Oyakhilome taught his members to make declarative statements such as “Debt has no hold over me! I operate in financial liberty, owing no man anything except love. I have more than enough to fund my dreams, support my family, and be a blessing to others.” Caleb argued that this strong belief leads to victory.

The prosperity gospel capitalizes on half-truths: Yes, we must believe in God to be blessed by him. But the Bible never tells us that the strength of our faith will magically procure all our needs.

Biblical faith is a deep trust in God. We trust him because of his character and promises, no matter what happens—good or bad, riches or poverty. We know that God is faithful and works all things for our good (Rom. 8:28). But the prosperity gospel creates a transactional relationship with God. As with a slot machine, you hope to get what you want. The prosperity gospel creates a God who serves our purposes rather than recognizing the true God, who created us for himself. True faith is focused on God, not on self.

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The prosperity gospel is a false gospel because of its faulty view of the relationship between God and man. Simply put, if the prosperity gospel is true, grace is obsolete, God is irrelevant, and man is the measure of all things. https://t.co/VLz5aq8G9w

— The Gospel Coalition (@TGC) April 20, 2018

The emergence of a new form of capitalism—call it the teflon economy—may be behind these shifts. On one side of the equation, firms are better than ever at dealing with shocks, meaning that markets continue to function even at a time when politics breaks down. On the other side, governments offer their economies unprecedented levels of protection.

Start with supply chains, which have received a number of shocks in recent years. The conventional narrative that they are prone to “failure” is largely wrong. During the pandemic some commodities became a lot more expensive—but this was a consequence of an enormous surge in demand, rather than falling supply. Semiconductors are a classic example. In 2021 chipmakers shipped 1.2trn units, some 15% more than the year before. The industry did not really suffer a “supply crunch”. Rather, it responded efficiently to an extreme surge in demand.

According to the New York Fed’s supply-chain pressure index, bottlenecks have remained in line with the long-run average, even in the face of Mr Trump’s trade war. We find similar results in our analysis of 33,000 commodities that America imported from 1989 to 2024. For each year, we counted the number where imports declined from the previous year by more than 20%, even as the price of those imports rose by more than 20%. This hints at situations where a supply chain genuinely “fails”. We calculate that the failure rate has been trending down over time. 

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Foreign-policy types talk of an age of unprecedented disorder—and markets barely notice https://t.co/eUWlhOsi7G

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 15, 2025

After Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center on the edge of Newton County, Ga., the water taps in Beverly and Jeff Morris’s home went dry.

The couple’s house, which uses well water, is 1,000 feet from Meta’s new data center. Months after construction began in 2018, the Morrises’ dishwasher, ice maker, washing machine and toilet all stopped working, said Beverly Morris, now 71. Within a year, the water pressure had slowed to a trickle. Soon, nothing came out of the bathroom and kitchen taps.

Jeff Morris, 67, eventually traced the issues to the buildup of sediment in the water. He said he suspected the cause was Meta’s construction, which could have added sediment to the groundwater and affected their well. The couple replaced most of their appliances in 2019, and then again in 2021 and 2024. Residue now gathers at the bottom of their backyard pool. The taps in one of their two bathrooms still do not work….

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"As tech giants like Meta build data centers in the area, local wells have been damaged, the cost of municipal water has soared and the county’s water commission may face a shortage of the vital resource."https://t.co/hLr6i31S5z

— Pat_Garofalo (@Pat_Garofalo) July 14, 2025

…[America] lags behind Russia and China in manufacturing drones, training soldiers to use them and defending against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen U.S. military officials and drone industry experts….

Drones have become a weapon of choice on modern battlefields. In the early days of the war in Ukraine, soldiers beat back the Russian invasion by adding deadly modifications to the Mavic, a drone sold to hobbyists by DJI, a Chinese company that is the world’s largest drone manufacturer. Versions of the Mavic cost between $300 and $5,000, according to online retailers.

DJI, of Shenzhen, China, accounts for about 70 percent of all commercial drones sold globally for hobby and industrial use, such as aerial photography, package delivery and weather research. The privately held company sells its equipment to customers in the United States — there’s even an authorized store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — but U.S. law bars the military from buying Chinese drones. The company declined to share market data, but industry experts estimate that DJI’s output far exceeds that of any other drone manufacturer.

“No one even comes close,” said Bobby Sakaki, chief executive of UAS NEXUS, a drone industry consultant. “DJI can make millions of drones per year. That is a hundred times more than anybody in the United States can make.”

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Drones are key to winning wars. But the US hardly makes any. https://t.co/LDPLiCmDnC

— Samuel Bendett (@sambendett) July 13, 2025

America’s broken construction industry is a big problem for Trump–The Empire State Building, finished in 1931, was erected in just 410 days. That same year construction began on the Hoover Dam. It was meant to take seven years, but was built in five. Such feats now seem hard to imagine. Last year half of America’s construction firms reported that commercial projects they were working on had been delayed or abandoned.

In 2008 Californian voters approved a high-speed-rail line connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, to be finished by 2020. It will be at least a decade late. America’s inability to build is a problem for Donald Trump. Although he has again delayed levying “reciprocal” tariffs until August 1st, the president’s commitment to reviving American manufacturing through protectionism is as strong as ever. But can the country build the factories, warehouses and bridges needed to reindustrialize, and do so quickly enough? And if the administration is to achieve its ambition to win the artificial-intelligence race, it will have to ramp up the construction of data centres and electrical infrastructure, too.

Demand for projects is certainly soaring. Turner Construction Company, America’s largest commercial builder, reported that its order backlog rose by a fifth, year on year, in the first quarter of 2025. Yet delays and cost overruns remain inevitable. Productivity has gone from bad to worse. Since 2000, output per worker in the construction industry has fallen by 8%, even as it has risen by 54% for the private sector as a whole. The trouble is not limited to commercial projects. America’s housebuilding companies constructed the same number of dwellings per employee as they did nine decades ago, contributing to widespread shortages and soaring prices. Behind this dismal state of affairs is a combination of fragmentation, overregulation and underinvestment

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America’s broken construction industry is a big problem for Trump (from @TheEconomist) https://t.co/uJ9VRbb1gF #construction #building #housing #infrastructure #design #architecture

— Marshall Leslie (@MarshallLeslie) July 11, 2025

US power providers are seeking to impose big price increases on consumers following booming data centre demand, sparking debate over who should pay for the electricity burden of artificial intelligence.

Utilities have sought regulatory approval for $29bn in rate increases in the first half of 2025, a 142 per cent increase over the same period a year ago, according to a new report by PowerLines, an energy affordability advocacy group.

These increases highlight the question of whether surging electricity costs will be shared among all consumers, or charged directly to the large industrial users driving the new demand. Power consumption is expected to more than double in the next decade because of energy-intensive AI, according to BloombergNEF.

“What we’re . . . seeing is a deer-in-headlights dynamic,” said PowerLines executive director Charles Hua. “A lot of states don’t have a playbook for how they can meet rising [data centre] demand while balancing affordability and utility bills.”

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US utilities plot big rise in electricity rates as data centre demand booms https://t.co/7VXoDXXqKX

— FT Energy (@ftenergy) July 10, 2025

The flattening of the Phillips curve, accelerated by the integration of AI and robotics into the workforce, represents a fundamental disruption of economic orthodoxy. As machines replace human workers across industries, the traditional relationship between unemployment and inflation is eroding, rendering conventional monetary policy tools ineffective.

The implications extend beyond dry economic theory. As automation reshapes the labor market, our very conceptions of work, productivity, and social value are called into question. For example, large swaths of the education system, still largely geared towards preparing workers for a human-dominated job market, faces obsolescence.

These changes are not merely challenging—they are potentially destabilizing. The flattening Phillips curve is a harbinger of profound economic and social upheaval. Our economic frameworks, developed in and for a world where human labor was paramount, are increasingly misaligned with the realities of an automated economy.

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This large study of 187k developers using GitHub Copilot finds AI transforms nature of coding.

Coders focus: more coding & less management. They need to coordinate less, working with fewer people

They experiment more with new languages, which would increase earnings $1,683/year pic.twitter.com/UN62E7Hmem

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) July 10, 2025