Sweden announced last week that it will increase military spending by about 30 percent in 2024 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, stating that it now faces its “most serious security situation” since WWII.
ECONOMIC UPDATE – MARKET OVERVIEW
The Street is surprised, but Trends Journal subscribers aren’t. Ready for this “shocking” Bloomberg headline? “Canada inflation quickens to 4 percent, driven by higher gas prices.”
THE GLOBAL DEBT MARKET IS NOW FLASHING RED
Last week Bloomberg reported this: “The Bond Market Has Not Flashed a Warning Sign for This Long in Over Six Decades.”
MONEY MARKET FUNDS UP $1 TRILLION THIS YEAR
Money market funds’ assets have grown by $1 trillion so far this year, the Financial Times reported, and are poised to end this year with an additional $1.5 trillion if the current pace of deposits continues.
TECHNIQUES BEING USED TO TRAIN AI WILL BE USED TO TRAIN—AND LIMIT—HUMANS
For years, scientists have been developing, with increasing success, AI that can self-learn in more sophisticated ways.
Neural net learning, modeled on the way human brains process and hold onto or discard information, is one of the most advanced ways AI systems “self-learn.”
ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS LEAD TO INCREASED RISK OF HEART DISEASE
A new study conducted in France found that certain additives in ultra-processed foods could elevate the risk of heart disease in the general population.
NATO HEAD: GET READY FOR A LONG WAR IN UKRAINE
Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, told a German news outlet on Sunday that the Western countries supporting Ukraine should prepare for a “long war” because most conflicts stretch longer than first thought.
Economy
SPOTLIGHT: BIGS GETTING BIGGER
As we had long forecast, the higher central banks raise interest rates, the lower the Merger and Acquisition trend… which hit record highs at the height of the COVID War in 2021 when interest rates sank and governments pumped in countless trillions to artificially prop up sinking economies.
CHINA’S ECONOMY PERKS UP IN AUGUST
Last month, economic activity picked up in China’s retail and travel industries as well as at computer chip and smartphone factories, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has reported.
U.K. ECONOMY SHRANK IN JULY AT FASTEST PACE THIS YEAR
In July, Britain’s economy contracted most sharply since December, with GDP puckering by 0.5 percent compared to July and busting analysts’ expectations of a 0.2-percent slide.
Geopolitics
DUMBFUKISTAN: MOST AMERICANS HAVE NO CLUE ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION, THEIR RIGHTS
How can the Biden administration continue to send Ukraine billions to fight a war that is no threat to America without any public debate?
BLINKEN: OLD WORLD ORDER DEAD…UP NEXT, A FIGHT TO THE FINISH
Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, gave a speech last week at Washington D.C.’s Johns Hopkins University and told the audience what everyone seems to already know: the post-Cold War World Order has come to an end, and will give way to a fight-to-the-death among superpowers.
UKRAINE’S COUNTEROFFENSIVE COLLAPSE FOLLOWED BY U.S.’s G20 COLLAPSE
The best the U.S. could muster from the G20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month was what has been called a “watered-down” declaration that critics noted did not even identify Russia as the aggressor.
Trends in AI
GOOGLE ENTERS AI CLOUD CONTEST
Google has finally begun selling PALM-2, its most powerful AI technology, to the general public in an attempt to make up for time lost to Amazon and Microsoft, which have been offering similar tools broadly for months.
IRS ENLISTS AI TO TRACK DOWN TAX CHEATS
The IRS is using some of its $80-million windfall from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to bring AI to bear in tracking down taxes not paid by hedge funds, real estate investors, limited liability partnerships, and wealthy individuals, The New York Times reported.
PENTAGON PLANS AI-POWERED AUTOMATED FORCE
The U.S. military plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build thousands of AI-enlivened drones, surveillance craft, and other nimble machines that are “small, smart, and cheap,” deputy defense secretary Katherine Hicks revealed in a 6 September speech to a defense industry conference in Virginia.
Hi-Tech Science
TESLA’S NEW WAY TO MAKE CARS SLASHES MANUFACTURING COSTS
Tesla has invented a car-making technique called “gigacasting” that could cut manufacturing costs in half and help Elon Musk achieve his dream of profitably supplying the world with millions of cheap electric vehicles.
PIG EMBRYOS GROW HUMAN KIDNEY CELLS
Pigs have long been seen as possible incubators of human organs to use in transplants. Experiments at California’s Altos Labs have moved science closer to that goal.
CAN WE DRILL FOR HYDROGEN THE SAME WAY WE DRILL FOR OIL?
Hydrogen, a growing factor in the global green-energy transition, is usually distilled industrially from natural gas. Now the U.S. energy department is going to test a controversial theory that we can suck hydrogen out of the ground the way we do oil and gas.