Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Elon Musk promised that DOGE would be the Silicon Valley style fix for Washington bloat, a skunkworks inside the federal government that could slash costs with the same ferocity he brought to his companies. Instead, the project has become a case study in how not to run a reform campaign, with a former Republican strategist…
President Donald Trump is leaning directly into Hollywood’s business, pressing Paramount to revive the kind of hard-edged, crowd-pleasing action comedies that dominated multiplexes in the late 1980s and 1990s. At the center of that push is a reported demand to fast-track a new Rush Hour sequel and restore what he sees as a tougher, less…
President Donald Trump is arguing that the real payoff from his tariff strategy has yet to show up in the data, even as critics point to higher prices and political backlash at home. He is casting the policy as a long game, insisting that the headline numbers understate what he calls a coming windfall for…
Bitcoin’s latest slide has been sharp enough to rattle even seasoned traders, with the price down about 21% in November and wiping out a chunk of this year’s gains. Yet the core narrative that draws many buyers into the asset, the idea of long-term growth potential, still looms large over the short-term pain. I see…
For years, getting into an Ivy League school has been shorthand for the pinnacle of selectivity. Now the labor market has quietly stolen that crown. It is statistically more realistic to win a spot at Harvard than to emerge from a stack of hundreds of résumés with a job offer, and that inversion says as…
Tech’s biggest employers have shed more than 65,000 roles in a little over a year, even as they tout artificial intelligence as the next trillion‑dollar growth engine. The timing has invited a convenient narrative that AI is already automating away white‑collar work, but the pattern of cuts, the internal memos, and the financials point to…
Investors are bracing for another bout of price pressure, and the easy political story is to blame tariffs. Jason Bessent is pushing back on that narrative, arguing that the latest inflation flare-up is rooted in deeper forces inside the economy rather than in the White House’s trade brinkmanship. I see his argument as a test…
Amazon’s newest generation of warehouse robots is no longer a side experiment tucked into a few pilot facilities. The company now relies on automated systems across dozens of fulfillment and sortation centers, and internal figures show that labor costs at those sites have fallen by roughly one quarter as machines take over more of the…
Elon Musk is racing to secure the hardware that will power the next generation of artificial intelligence, turning AI chips into the strategic backbone of his technology empire. His push is not just about keeping up with rivals, it is about locking down enough cutting edge silicon to give his companies a durable advantage in…
The headline numbers on growth and unemployment still look reassuring, but the surface strength of the U.S. economy hides pockets of outright decline. Several key industries tied to goods, trade, and housing are already shrinking, even as aggregate data suggest resilience. Taken together, these contractions show how a “rolling” downturn can coexist with overall expansion,…
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