Browsed by
Category: Economics/Business

‘Thin air,’ real money: Trump’s crypto products have left investors at least $4.7 billion underwater

‘Thin air,’ real money: Trump’s crypto products have left investors at least $4.7 billion underwater

Public Citizen reports: “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” President Donald Trump tweeted in July 2019. “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” Seven years later, Trump has become the world’s foremost crypto salesperson, hawking nonfungible tokens, meme coins, governance tokens, stablecoins, and shares in a digital-asset treasury. What changed? The president realized there…

Read More Read More

Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace thousands of Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded

Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace thousands of Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded

Reuters reports: In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants gathered for their annual leadership retreat at his Hawaii compound. There they hatched a radical plan to reimagine work at the social-media giant in the age of artificial intelligence. Code-named Project OT – short for Organization Transformation – the plan envisioned an “AI native” future for the owner of Facebook and Instagram. AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees. Virtual…

Read More Read More

Trump’s trade war on Canada has virtually no support

Trump’s trade war on Canada has virtually no support

Zack Beauchamp reports: President Donald Trump seems dead set on escalating his trade war with Canada. And no one is really sure why. On Monday, Trump threatened another round of 50 percent tariffs on top of the ones he just implemented — this one targeting Canada’s auto industry, which is so deeply integrated with its American counterpart that large duties would do major damage on both sides of the border. By Tuesday morning, he had begun musing about renaming Lake…

Read More Read More

Canada has one important edge in the North American trade war: unity

Canada has one important edge in the North American trade war: unity

Politico reports: President Donald Trump is threatening Canada with economic destruction amid an escalating trade war. He’s not factoring in one key U.S. disadvantage. Americans are not nearly as gung-ho for a tariff stand-off as their northern neighbors, who have been seething for months over Trump’s rhetoric against their country. “The U.S.A. will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada,” Trump wrote in a second Truth Social post. “Someone should get these clowns to ‘fall in line’ or,…

Read More Read More

Carney will not allow Canada to be turned into a North American Belarus

Carney will not allow Canada to be turned into a North American Belarus

Toronto Star‘s Allan Woods writes: Trump has yet to publicly comment on the breakdown in trade talks, but U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters that Canada was offered “the best treatment of any major exporter to our market.” Without going into detail, he said Canadian negotiators made “new demands and walkbacks of other commitments” that had “upended the careful balance reached in the past days.” Doing a deal under the conditions Carney described would clearly have undermined Canada’s pivot…

Read More Read More

Canada should be ready to cut electricity, critical minerals as trade woes worsen, says Ontario’s premier

Canada should be ready to cut electricity, critical minerals as trade woes worsen, says Ontario’s premier

The Associated Press reports: Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Monday that Ronald Reagan would be “throwing up” over President Donald Trump’s trade policies and threatened to cut off electricity and critical minerals to the United States as Trump escalated the trade fight. Ford, speaking in an interview with The Associated Press, said Trump has underestimated Canadians’ willingness to endure economic pain rather than give in to U.S. pressure. “He underestimates Canada. We’re all in,” Ford said. “Up here, we’re at…

Read More Read More

How Trump is trying to crush California’s environmental policies

How Trump is trying to crush California’s environmental policies

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has taken a series of extraordinary steps to attack California’s position as a national leader in environmental protection, enlisting at least a half-dozen federal agencies to undermine the state’s efforts to pivot away from fossil fuels. The stakes are high. Because of its market muscle as the world’s fourth largest economy, California’s environmental regulations have influenced the manufacturers of automobiles and other consumer goods. And its green policies have spread to some…

Read More Read More

Trump declares war on Canada because he’s a peevish, perverse, enraged child

Trump declares war on Canada because he’s a peevish, perverse, enraged child

Robert Reich writes: Not exactly a war, but a trade war — which will impose huge costs on both American consumers and on Canada. As I said, Trump is now completely and utterly out of his mind. The very idea of a trade war with Canada — our neighbor, our ally, our closest friend, a nation that’s peaceful and whose people have a reputation for kindness — is absurd. But Trump is doing it anyway. He’s imposing a 50 percent…

Read More Read More

The rise of the Nerd Reich

The rise of the Nerd Reich

  In part one of a series on the rise and power of the tech oligarchs, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz speak up with Gil Duran, author of “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” on the origins of techno-authoritarianism, its hallucinatory fascist theorists, the central role of Peter Thiel and his PayPal Mafia, and how they merge with Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

The Nerd Reich in power

The Nerd Reich in power

  In part two of a series on the rise and power of the tech oligarchs, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz interview Gil Duran, author of “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” on how Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the tech oligarchs came to power under Donald Trump, how they control key parts of his administration, and how they created JD Vance, made him vice president and plan to make him president.

By purchasing Israeli weapons, foreign states sustain the infrastructure it needs to wage its next war

By purchasing Israeli weapons, foreign states sustain the infrastructure it needs to wage its next war

+972 reports: In recent years, more and more governments have begun to recognize that words alone will not hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinians. One of the clearest responses to this realization has been a growing push to restrict military trade with Israel — a demand that has also been a central slogan of pro-Palestine protests around the world. Images of bombs bearing U.S. serial numbers, German-made tank engines, and European-manufactured components recovered from the sites of massacres…

Read More Read More

Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Record corporate spending on the 2026 midterms driven by crypto, AI and betting firms

Reuters reports: A handful of billionaires and companies are driving corporate spending in U.S. midterm elections this year, and they aren’t the usual power brokers who have sat atop the political food chain in Washington in previous decades. Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political…

Read More Read More

‘There is no breaking point’: The problem with Trump’s plan to economically strangle Iran

‘There is no breaking point’: The problem with Trump’s plan to economically strangle Iran

Politico reports: President Donald Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure. Tehran may be willing to wait even longer. Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation “never seen before,” former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to relinquish its desire to toll ships passing through the State of Hormuz and make the other concessions Trump is demanding…

Read More Read More

Russians pull billions from banks, amid fears the Kremlin will seize deposits for war in Ukraine

Russians pull billions from banks, amid fears the Kremlin will seize deposits for war in Ukraine

The Washington Post reports: Russians are pulling billions from the country’s banking system ― a record cash outflow amid intensifying Ukrainian drone attacks and rising fear that the Kremlin could start seizing deposits to finance its war. Nearly $3.4 billion (286.4 billion rubles) was withdrawn in the first two weeks of August, on top of the $7.3 billion withdrawn in July and more than $4.5 billion in June, according to Russian Central Bank data. Total withdrawals this year could nearly…

Read More Read More

‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

Fortune reports: The long-term impact of AI is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts every job will be transformed—and likely lead to a four-day workweek. Other tech titans go even further: Bill Gates says humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” and Elon Musk believes most humans won’t have to work at all in “less than 20 years.” While those predictions might sound extreme, they’re not just plausible, they’re…

Read More Read More

Ukraine disables 7 of 10 of Russia’s largest logistics centers for Wildberries online retailer

Ukraine disables 7 of 10 of Russia’s largest logistics centers for Wildberries online retailer

🔥 The largest Wildberries logistics hub in all of Russia has been finally destroyed.Koledino, Moscow. Wildberries appears to have made a conscious choice not to empty this warehouse despite knowing Ukraine will destroy it like all others.Expect $1.5+ billion in damages. pic.twitter.com/SISsou9uU2 — Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) August 16, 2026 Kyiv Post reports: The Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced on Sunday, Aug. 16, that recent operations have disabled seven of the ten largest logistics centers belonging to the Russian e-commerce company Wildberries….

Read More Read More