Big Finance is having its doubts about AI

For me the noteworthy thing is that even Wall Street, which is generally pretty gullible about The Next Big Thing, is displaying at least a measure of rational skepticism about artificial "intelligence."

For tech’s biggest players, this earnings season is starting to feel like a scene from the movie Jerry Maguire— and the “show me the money” demands aren’t working out any better than they did for Tom Cruise. Some analysts are even dubbing this the “show me the money” quarter, as Wall Street’s patience with massive AI spending begins to wear thin...

Almost two years after ChatGPT kicked off Silicon Valley’s AI gold rush, this week’s tech earnings revealed both the promise and the staggering price tag of the AI revolution. While companies reported significant gains from AI initiatives —Meta’s ad prices up 11%, Google Cloud revenue surging 35% to $11.4 billion, Amazon’s AWS growing 19% to $27.5 billion — their warnings about future spending sparked a broad market retreat…

Tech executives’ unwavering faith in AI’s potential stands in stark contrast to investors’ growing anxiety about the costs. - Quartz

The U.S. is the worst financial secrecy enabler of all

Because the greedhead plutocrats want it this way.

A global index published Tuesday ranks the United States as the world's leading perpetrator of financial secrecy, citing the country's refusal to share key information with the tax authorities of other nations and its status as a generous tax haven for foreign oligarchs, rich executives, and other elites.

The ranking comes despite U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign-trail pledge to "bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies." - Common Dreams

Look who's saying raising the minimum wage would be good

This may be a sign that it's pretty much inevitable, if people keep plugging away. May be.

Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would deliver sizable benefits to low-wage workers and lift millions of people in the U.S. out of poverty while having little impact—positive or negative—on employment levels.

So says a new report assembled not by a progressive advocacy organization or a left-leaning think tank, but Wall Street titan Morgan Stanley, which found in a 75-page analysis that—contrary to the GOP's branding of the proposed $15-an-hour federal minimum wage as a job-killer—"the wealth of research points to no definitive conclusion on the impact higher wages have on employment."

"However," the report adds, "it is evident that the impact to employment... would be minimal, while the social benefits to lifting real wages of lower-income earners and millions out of poverty are substantial." - Common Dreams

Ending Big Finance's hold on farm communities

I know that most of what I post about farming these days isn’t very positive. This has some ideas.

Yet both the narrative that subsidies flow from “coastal elites” to farmers and the fatalism about rural economic decline indicate a profound misunderstanding of what’s actually going on. Farmers have as much reason to be angry, if not more, because of the larger, less visible financial flows heading in the other direction, sucked out of their pockets and funneled to the big money centers, often into offshore tax havens. This is part of a broader phenomenon affecting the entire economy, which I call the finance curse. The good news is that this can be decisively reversed without turning the clock back on progress—and with transformative economic and political results. - The Nation