Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Agentic AI is moving from hype to infrastructure, and commerce is where the shift is most visible. By aligning Google’s search-scale reach with Shopify’s merchant network, the new Universal Commerce Protocol promises to let software agents shop, compare, and check out across the open web as easily as a human in a single app. If…
Amazon is heading toward what could become the most consequential online price-gouging trial in U.S. history, with consumers alleging that the company allowed markups as high as 1,800 percent on basic goods during the early COVID shortages. The case cuts to the heart of how a dominant marketplace should behave when demand spikes and supply…
Google is turning artificial intelligence into a new kind of checkout layer, collapsing search, recommendation and payment into a single conversational flow that sits on top of retail apps and websites. Big names like Walmart, Kroger and Papa John are already wiring their storefronts into this system, betting that shoppers will increasingly let AI do…
Nvidia is turning its AI firepower toward the hardest problems in medicine, striking multibillion-dollar alliances with pharmaceutical and biotech heavyweights to rewire how drugs are discovered and manufactured. The company is not just selling chips into healthcare, it is embedding its platforms inside labs and data centers so that model training, simulation, and physical experimentation…
Meta is turning its AI ambitions into a concrete, industrial-scale buildout. With Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now formally unveiling Meta Compute as a new top-level organization, the company is signaling that control over compute, power and data centers is as strategic as its apps and algorithms. The move wraps together huge capital spending, nuclear-scale infrastructure…
President Donald Trump’s second term is being bankrolled by a new class of political investors, a mix of artificial intelligence executives, tech power brokers and families entangled in serious criminal cases. Their checks are large, their interests are specific and their proximity to federal power raises sharper questions than in his first run. I see…
President Donald Trump has turned Cuba into the next test case of his hard-edged energy diplomacy, telling Havana to make a deal with Washington “before it’s too late” and tying the island’s economic survival to decisions made in Caracas. His message is blunt: with a key ally in Venezuela shaken, Cuba must choose between accommodation…
Greenland looks like a frozen blank on most maps, yet beneath its ice lies a resource story that could reshape global energy and technology. From oil and gas to rare earths and graphite, estimates of what the island might hold routinely stretch into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some analysts argue the long…
Oil’s next big move may not be another spike, but a slide that catches producers, investors, and even drivers off guard. Charles Schwab strategist Liz Ann Sonders is now flagging the risk that crude could tumble in late 2026 and into 2027, a view that lines up with increasingly bearish forecasts from major banks and…
America’s middle class is not just feeling squeezed, it is objectively shrinking and losing ground in the national economy. The share of adults who once sat comfortably between poverty and affluence has eroded, while costs for basics like housing, health care and child care have raced ahead of paychecks. The numbers now show a country…