After falling to 6.2 percent in September, the average national interest rate on a fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage climbed back to 6.93 percent last week, its highest since July, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. reported.
Category: 14 January 2025
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U.S. JOBS IN DECEMBER UP, TYPES OF JOBS LOW
Last month, the U.S. economy created an estimated 256,000 nonfarm jobs, the most since March 2024 and far more than the 120,000 to 200,000 that analysts had predicted. Unemployment ticked down from 4.2 percent to 4.1 percent.
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ISRAEL INTENSIFIES STRIKES ACROSS LEBANON, EVEN AS HAMAS CEASEFIRE APPEARS CLOSE
The IDF carried out strikes across Lebanon on Monday on what it identified as Hezbollah targets even as the tenuous ceasefire with the Lebanese group held, and a new truce with Gaza’s Hamas seemed close.
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AI IN BRIEF
Headline start-up firms including Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI coaxed a record $97 billion from venture capital funds in 2024, PitchBook reported, about a third more than the year before.
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FINDING EUROPE’S PLACE IN THE AI REVOLUTION
The dominant AI models might be made by U.S. companies such as Google and OpenAI, but Europe can create an AI industry around tailoring apps based on those platforms for specific industries and companies, Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström said in a Financial Times interview.
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NVIDIA AS VENTURE CAPITALIST
Nvidia passed a $3-trillion market cap in June on its ownership of an estimated 80 percent or more of the market in graphics processing units, the chips that make AI work.
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GAZA DEATH TOLL
The death toll in Gaza reached 46,645 on Tuesday as mediators say a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is closer than ever.
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AI WILL SPARK MERGER SPREE IN DEFENSE INDUSTRIES, ANALYSTS SAY
After servicing wars in Ukraine and the Mideast and supplying various other nations with weapons, in 2026 the world’s 15 largest defense contractors will be sitting on about $50 billion in cash, analysts forecast, about twice as much as at the end of 2021.
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OIL COMPANY COMBINES AI AND SUPERCOMPUTER TO FIND NEW RESERVES
Eni, Italy’s national oil company, has married AI and the world’s most powerful supercomputer outside of the U.S. to find new oil and gas deposits.
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ANOTHER INDUSTRY ENDANGERED BY AI
The online education industry—tutoring, exam prep, and similar services—was flooded with $17.3 billion in investments during the COVID War as students were locked down at home.
