Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone co-founder whose fortune sits at roughly $47.4 billion, has spent the past decade channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into institutions designed to study, shape, and govern artificial intelligence. His giving pattern reveals a deliberate strategy: fund the technical infrastructure to build AI responsibly, then fund the ethical frameworks to keep…
When New York City and Seattle set out to guarantee higher hourly pay for DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub couriers, the policies were framed as worker-protection victories. Yet the mechanics of those mandates, built on per-minute floors, expense reimbursements, and annual inflation escalators, are now colliding with the same supply-and-demand dynamics that any introductory economics…
California’s proposed one-time wealth tax on billionaires has triggered an intense political battle and a real-world scramble among the state’s wealthiest residents to hedge their exposure. The ballot initiative, which would impose a 5% levy on individuals with a net worth exceeding $1.1 billion, has already prompted several prominent tech figures to establish footholds in…
The Trump administration’s campaign to keep aging coal plants running has produced a paper trail of executive orders, emergency directives, and federal spending commitments that, taken together, reveal a cost structure designed to land squarely on electricity ratepayers and federal taxpayers. The strategy bypasses normal market signals by invoking national security and grid reliability as…
Tech billionaires are directing millions of dollars into California’s state and local elections, with ballot measures, gubernatorial campaigns, and city races increasingly becoming high-stakes contests between concentrated wealth and organized labor, according to recent reporting and campaign-finance filings. The fight centers on a proposed one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires, but the money flows far…
The January 2026 Consumer Price Index landed at 2.4% year-over-year, a number that has prompted fresh questions about how quickly tariffs show up in consumer prices. Modeling from early 2025 had projected that a sweeping reciprocal tariff policy could push the U.S. effective tariff rate up by 13 percentage points, the steepest jump since 1937,…
Three high-yield dividend ETFs built on quality U.S. payers and backed by transparent regulatory filings are drawing fresh attention from income-focused investors heading into 2026. With many active managers struggling to consistently outperform their benchmarks over time, the case for low-cost, dividend-focused index funds remains compelling. I see the iShares Core High Dividend ETF (HDV),…
Jim Cramer, the outspoken CNBC host, recently praised General Motors CEO Mary Barra for what he called an absolutely nailed call on the automaker’s direction. The praise arrived alongside GM’s release of its 2025 financial results and 2026 forward guidance, a package that paired strong operating performance with aggressive shareholder returns. What makes the moment…
The Congressional Budget Office just released a fiscal forecast that should alarm anyone with a stake in the American economy. Federal deficits and debt are on track to worsen sharply over the next decade, driven by rising program spending and ballooning interest costs on existing borrowing. If current policy trajectories hold, the United States could…
California drivers are absorbing a roughly $0.40 per gallon increase in gasoline prices over just two weeks, a pace that far outstrips the national average and has turned routine fill-ups into a source of genuine frustration. The speed of this jump, confirmed by federal energy data, raises hard questions about whether the state’s refining capacity…