Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Intel closed its fiscal year 2025 with adjusted free cash flow of negative $1.612 billion, a figure that improved slightly from the prior year but still left the chipmaker burning through more cash than it generated. The gap between what Intel earns from operations and what it spends on factory buildouts tells a clear story:…
The electric vehicle gold rush that defined the last half-decade of automotive strategy is now extracting a steep price. Global automakers collectively face roughly $65 billion in financial damage from write-downs, project cancellations, and forced strategy reversals tied to cooling EV demand and shifting government policy. What looked like an irreversible industry transition has instead…
The cryptocurrency industry’s rapid expansion across the United States has generated enormous wealth, but a peer-reviewed study estimates that the boom in large-scale Bitcoin mining is associated with increased air pollution exposure for people living downwind of the power plants that meet that added demand. Researchers found that the electricity demands of large-scale Bitcoin mining…
China’s generative AI sector experienced a turbulent stretch of rapid model releases colliding with strict regulatory requirements, raising questions about whether the country’s compliance framework is stifling innovation or inadvertently accelerating it. At the center of this tension sits a regulatory regime that demands ideological alignment from every public-facing AI tool, alongside a wave of…
The price Americans pay for a pound of ground roast coffee has climbed to a record high, and the ripple effects are reaching well beyond grocery store aisles. For a nation that treats its morning cup as near-sacred ritual, the surge is forcing a quiet but measurable shift in how households budget, brew, and think…
Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and longtime critic of the Federal Reserve, has spent decades arguing that the U.S. monetary system amounts to a legalized fraud against ordinary savers. His core claim is straightforward: a currency backed by nothing but government promises, paired with relentless debt expansion, quietly destroys the purchasing power of every…
Oklahoma lawmakers are waging a multi-front battle over who should absorb the cost of upgrading the state’s electrical grid as data centers, driven by artificial intelligence demand, race to set up shop across the Southern Plains. At least two separate bills filed in early 2026 take different approaches to the same core problem: the gap…
The federal government now spends more on interest payments than it does on national defense or Medicare, a situation that the Government Accountability Office calls unsustainable. With net interest costs reaching $882 billion in fiscal year 2024, the gap between what the U.S. earns in revenue and what it owes in debt service is widening…
Federal Reserve policymaker Austan Goolsbee is tying any further interest-rate cuts to whether inflation keeps drifting toward the central bank’s 2 percent goal, sharpening the focus on every new price report. His stance matters because it helps set the bar for when the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, will feel comfortable easing more after…
January’s Consumer Price Index report landed with a clear message for bitcoin holders: the inflation story that supported their biggest thesis is weakening. With headline CPI rising just 0.2% month-over-month and the annual rate dropping to 2.4% from December’s 2.7%, the macro environment that once made bitcoin look like a natural hedge is shifting under…