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Category: Economics/Business

Saudi crown prince promises massive investment in the U.S. but is running low on cash

Saudi crown prince promises massive investment in the U.S. but is running low on cash

The New York Times reports: The visit by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia to Washington this week painted a familiar tableau: the head of an oil-rich nation cozying up to President Trump and titans of American industry. That appearance of wealth is core to Saudi Arabia’s power and image in the United States and at home, where the Saudi government has vowed no less than an economic transformation for its young populace. In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Crown…

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Trump calls it ‘the greatest economy in history’ but many Americans are struggling to pay their bills

Trump calls it ‘the greatest economy in history’ but many Americans are struggling to pay their bills

The Associated Press reports: More people are falling behind on paying their bills to keep on the lights and heat their homes, according to a new analysis of consumer data — a warning sign for the U.S. economy and another political headache for President Donald Trump. Past due balances to utility companies jumped 9.7% annually to $789 between the April-June periods of 2024 and 2025, said The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, and the advocacy group Protect Borrowers. The…

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‘Big Short’ investor betting $1 billion against the AI bubble says Meta and Oracle’s accounting is hiding the brutal truth

‘Big Short’ investor betting $1 billion against the AI bubble says Meta and Oracle’s accounting is hiding the brutal truth

Fortune reports: “It’ll happen slowly, and then all at once.” That’s how Jim Morrow, founder and chief investment officer of Callodine Capital, describes the eventual – inevitable – unwinding of what he calls “the most crowded trade in history.” Of course, he isn’t just paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway—he’s talking about the AI race, and the trillion-dollar deals so overstretched they’re better described as knots than trades. And he’s not alone in sounding alarms. Michael Burry—the investor of Big Short fame who…

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Scott Galloway warns of ‘nowhere to hide’ in markets if the OpenAI story unravels

Scott Galloway warns of ‘nowhere to hide’ in markets if the OpenAI story unravels

  Fortune reports: Tech analyst and professor Scott Galloway has issued a stark warning regarding the highly inflated valuations of the Magnificent 10 mega-cap companies, asserting a financial collapse at generative AI leader OpenAI would trigger a systemic shock leaving “nowhere to hide” for investors across the global markets. Galloway, speaking on his Prof G Markets podcast, characterized the current market reliance on AI as precarious, noting AI has been responsible for 80% of the stock market returns since the…

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Trump is pushing us toward a financial crash. It could be 1929 all over again

Trump is pushing us toward a financial crash. It could be 1929 all over again

William A. Birdthistle writes: President Trump’s Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, set to the theme of “The Great Gatsby,” re-enacted the decadence of that story’s licentious era: befeathered flappers shimmying in the crowd; gilded and onyx décor; scantily clad women posing in an enormous champagne coupe. The revelatory moment says so much about where we stand today — and what we could be lurching into next. Published a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” captured the culture of an…

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ICE detention and surveillance are a bonanza for private companies getting hundreds of millions revenue

ICE detention and surveillance are a bonanza for private companies getting hundreds of millions revenue

NOTUS reports: Business is booming for the private prison companies that operate much of President Donald Trump’s immigrant detention apparatus. Private prison giant Geo Group announced this week that it has seen its largest amount of new business ever in 2025. The company’s executives expect it to translate into $3 billion in revenue next year. Geo Group’s detention occupancy level — 26,000 people — is at an all-time high, according to its latest quarterly report. “We’ve never seen anything like…

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ICE is sending a chill through the construction industry

ICE is sending a chill through the construction industry

NPR reports: As cars and trucks zoom by, Rurick Palomino points to the underside of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge that spans the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., where his crew of about 30 workers is doing demolition work and pouring concrete as part of a $128 million federally-funded refurbishment. A Peruvian immigrant who came to the United States 25 years ago, Palomino — a U.S. citizen — built his construction firm from scratch after earning an engineering degree and learning…

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Tesla shareholders approve $1 trillion pay package for part-time CEO, Elon Musk

Tesla shareholders approve $1 trillion pay package for part-time CEO, Elon Musk

electrek reports: Tesla shareholders have voted once again to approve an absurd, biggest-in-history pay package for Tesla’s part-time CEO, Elon Musk. In doing so, they’ve voted to relinquish any control they could have had over the company, and instead to put it deeper into the hands of its largest saboteur. Tesla’s shareholder meeting is happening today, with several consequential proposals which shareholders have been voting on in the last several weeks. In that time, Tesla has been campaigning hard and…

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The rise of a new American oligarchy: Top 10 billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year

The rise of a new American oligarchy: Top 10 billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year

The Guardian reports: The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide. The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap. Using Federal Reserve data from 1989 to 2022, researchers also calculated that the top…

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Zohran Mamdani has a point about rent control

Zohran Mamdani has a point about rent control

Rogé Karma writes: Few policies disgust academic economists quite like rent control. In the 1970s, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously described it as the “most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.” In a 2012 poll of prominent economists, just 2 percent said that rent-control laws have had “a positive impact” on the “amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them.” (The Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler sarcastically proposed a…

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Trump and GOP join Big Oil’s all-out push to shut down climate liability efforts

Trump and GOP join Big Oil’s all-out push to shut down climate liability efforts

Inside Climate News reports: As efforts continue to hold some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations liable for destructive and deadly climate impacts, backlash from the politically powerful oil and gas industry and its allies in government is on the rise, bolstered by the Trump administration’s allegiance to fossil fuels. From lobbying Congress for liability protection to suing states over their climate liability laws and lawsuits, attempts to shield Big Oil from potential liability and to shut down climate…

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It’s Trump’s casino economy now and you will probably lose

It’s Trump’s casino economy now and you will probably lose

Kyla Scanlon writes: Step into the casino that now passes for the American economy. Donald Trump campaigned on bringing back American manufacturing and rebuilding what America once was — factories, workers in hard hats — from the ground up. But the investment needed to get there, in both the factories and the workers, hasn’t happened. What he has ushered in instead is a casino economy, built on speculation and risk. Across markets and policy, wagers on the future are being…

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As U.S. cattle ranchers struggle, Trump wants to Make Argentina Great Again

As U.S. cattle ranchers struggle, Trump wants to Make Argentina Great Again

The Hill reports: President Trump is breaking from his “America First” trade agenda and feuding with some of his most loyal supporters in a fight over U.S. beef prices. Trump has centered his economic agenda on reducing the U.S.’s reliance on cheaper foreign products and boosting domestic production of goods and food. But the president’s plan to boost imports of Argentinian beef while urging American suppliers to lower their prices marks a sharp departure from his platform. The dispute is…

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U.S. hits $38 trillion in debt, after the fastest accumulation of $1 trillion outside of the pandemic

U.S. hits $38 trillion in debt, after the fastest accumulation of $1 trillion outside of the pandemic

The Associated Press reports: In the midst of a federal government shutdown, the U.S. government’s gross national debt surpassed $38 trillion Wednesday, a record number that highlights the accelerating accumulation of debt on America’s balance sheet. It’s also the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19 pandemic — the U.S. hit $37 trillion in gross national debt in August this year. The $38 trillion update is found in the latest Treasury Department report, which logs…

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Will AI avoid the ‘enshittification’ trap?

Will AI avoid the ‘enshittification’ trap?

Steven Levy writes: As companies like OpenAI get more powerful, and as they try to pay back their investors, will AI be prone to the erosion of value that seems endemic to the tech apps we use today? Writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow calls that erosion “enshittification.” His premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and TikTok start out aiming to please users, but once the companies vanquish competitors, they intentionally become less useful to reap bigger profits….

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Sequoia Capital COO resigns because of partner Shaun Maguire’s Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani

Sequoia Capital COO resigns because of partner Shaun Maguire’s Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani

Middle East Eye reports: Sumaiya Balbale, the chief operating officer at Sequoia Capital, resigned from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm in August, after partner Shaun Maguire wrote posts about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani that she reportedly viewed as Islamophobic, the Financial Times revealed on Wednesday. Maguire, an American venture capitalist with close ties to X owner Elon Musk, wrote in a July post on the platform: “Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s…

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