For the first time since the COVID War, hedge funds, insurance companies, money market funds, mutual funds, private equity firms, and other financial institutions that are not banks hold more than half of the world’s financial assets, according to the intergovernmental Financial Stability Board (FSB).
This winter heating season, Americans will pay about 9.2 percent more for the electricity and natural gas that heat more than 90 percent of U.S. homes, bringing the cost of keeping warm this winter to about $1,000 per household, The New York Times reported.
By the end of this year’s second quarter, the U.S. trade deficit stood at 3.3 percent of GDP, close to its level a year earlier, according to an analysis by the Financial Times.
Last month, sales of existing U.S. homes edged up 0.5 percent from October’s total but fell 1 percent short of the figure in November 2024, the National Association of Realtors reported.
The U.S. Consumer Price Index increased by 2.7 percent in November, down from 3.0 percent in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported.
The economic landscape has presented an array of challenges that have profoundly affected the business community this year.
As AI continues to take over human jobs, 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. this year were attributed to AI, according to job placement and consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week scrubbed its website of any reference to the agency being “independent” after Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, testified in front of a Senate committee that “formally speaking, the FCC isn’t independent.”
On 28 January 2025, The Trends Journal alerted subscribers about this little-known Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek, that sent a bolt across the AI-driven stock market’s bow when it announced that it trained a free AI assistant for $6 million instead of the $100-million-plus that Open AI and other Western tech companies had to spend on their products.
Bari Weiss, the newly appointed head of CBS News, faced criticism on Sunday after it was revealed that she told “60 Minutes” not to run a story about the abuses that deportees have faced during the Trump administration after the piece’s reporter said the decision was based on “politics.”