The past year’s surge in interest rates has piled record amounts of debt onto poor nations, depriving them of money needed to invest in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and other essential building blocks they need to rise out of poverty, the World Bank said in a report last week.
In advanced economies, business failures are climbing at a double-digit rate compared to last year as governments’ $10-trillion COVID-era support programs end and central banks’ high interest rates continue, the Financial Times reported.
From 2020 through much of this year, residential rents were climbing steeply, in some markets by double digits each year, with potential tenants—sometimes numbering 40 or more—bidding against each other for the same home.
The average retail store is now the smallest since at least 2006, according to data service CoStar. At the same time, demand for retail space is its strongest in 18 years, with the national vacancy rate a scant 4.8 percent in this year’s third quarter, according to retail estate services firm CBRE.
Almost 40 percent of U.S. companies will cut their workforces in the new year, according to a poll of 906 executives by Resumé Builders, with even more imposing a hiring freeze.
At its mid-December meeting, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee not only froze interest rates at their current levels, but also said it expects to make three quarter-point rate cuts next year and drop rates by a full point in 2025.
In the scramble to get hold of enough chips to serve the exploding AI market, companies are falling back on a technology created more than a decade ago.
In a precedent-setting agreement, Open AI, parent of ChatGPT, will pay publisher Axel Springer to use the news company’s content to train its AI models and to draw on the content to respond to users’ prompts and queries.
The New York Times has hired Zach Seward, co-founder of the tech, business, and lifestyle website Quartz, as its first editorial director for artificial intelligence.
Americans aren’t buying EVs at anywhere near the rates that can sustain an industry.