0.54% That's your Nasdaq return under Trump. 1.9% is your S&P return under Trump. Why did we have to hear from Bloomberg and CNBC how good everything was? What was their motivation to lie to us. To search for any silver lining....
that might be the April surprise. I also hear that Taiwan will cut a trade deal with China to produce chips exclusively for the mainland.
How pathetic. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency complete access to the federal payment system late on Friday, The New York Times reported Saturday, citing three people familiar with the matter. Earlier this week, Musk had reportedly clashed with top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official David Lebryk over access to a system that pays out over $6 trillion per year in Social Security and Medicare benefits, government contracts, tax refunds and federal salaries. Lebryk was put on leave and suddenly retired on Friday following the dispute, the report said. It is not yet clear if DOGE has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system, the report said. The system could allow the Trump administration to unilaterally to stop payment of funds approved for certain purposed by Congress, the report added. Bessent granted access to the payment system to a few staff members associated with DOGE, including Tom Krause, the chief executive of Cloud Software Group, the report said. The report stated that Lebryk had opposed calls from the DOGE team for access to the payment system last month. After Trump took office, the White House indicated that Lebryk should be removed from his position, while Bessent suggested putting him on leave. /////// Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to "go it alone" as an entrepreneur. But what about scaling that one-person business into something meatier — an enterprise of unicorn proportions? Historically, this would have been an unfathomably tough task, due to the skills and resources required, not only to scale a product but also to grow and maintain a sufficiently bountiful customer base. But AI agents could unshackle the would-be solo-preneurs of the world. AI agents are all about embedding human workflows into software, freeing the human to do more in less time. Agents can be assigned tasks, and they can make decisions with varying degrees of autonomy. Multiple AI agents could even collaborate on complementary tasks, paving the way for getting some real work done entirely autonomously. In an interview last year with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, OpenAI's Sam Altman predicted this exact scenario. “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company,” Altman said. “Which would have been unimaginable without AI — and now [it] will happen." In a discussion at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos last week, a panel of entrepreneurs and investors also discussed the prospect of the single-person billion-dollar enterprise — and, more importantly, what this might mean for the future of employment. In humans we trust Recent history reveals a slew of svelte billion-dollar companies. Microsoft doled out $2.5 billion for Minecraft maker Mojang, which had a reported 40 employees. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion when the messaging app maker had just 55 employees. Two years before that, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion with just 13 employees in its ranks. This proves that internet technology has already generated huge companies with minimal headcount. But this isn't the same as a one-person unicorn. Kanjun Qiu, CEO of AI research labI mbue, which is building agents capable of reasoning and coding, reckons that the kind of one-person businesses that AI will most likely help hit the big time are those where the product is largely self-serve. ....as in Professional Wet T-shirt Darts
Anyone who understands inflation knows how bad this fact is: The Conference Board’s latest monthly survey shows that consumers expect inflation, currently 2.9%, to jump to 5.3% a year from now. That’s in line with University of Michigan surveys showing consumers expect Trump’s tariffs to raise prices. The Conference Board survey also showed that confidence dropped to the lowest level in four months, with Americans also worried about a tightening job market.
OMG What Happened To US exceptionalism? As Trump Tariffs Near, World Braces for Stock Market Spillover
“The tariffs on Mexico and Canada is actually the worst possible news for US equities and the US economy,” said Thomas Brenier, head of equities at Lazard Freres Gestion. “It’s bad news for the US industrial complex and will severely raise costs for carmakers and disrupt supply chains.”