Business

Prices Won’t Stop Falling in China, and Beijing Is Grasping for Solutions. In case you wonder why governments don’t aim for deflation. Japan and now China are dealing with deflation and trying their darnest to get out of the vicious cycle.

How OpenAI Hopes to Sever Its Nonprofit Roots. I feel like OpenAI is being boxed in right now and there doesn’t seem to be any promising solution on the horizon. If there is no way out, the current structure, the need for enormous capital injection and the upcoming debt may severely damage the company’s outlook.

Vanguard economic and market outlook for 2025: beyond the landing. A very interesting research piece by Vanguard. The firm predicts that in 10 years, because of the historic return of US equities in the past decade, the US will underperform international markets. Yet, in the longer term, it will continue to outperform.

Introducing Amazon’s all-new device packaging. It’s fascinating to see companies like Amazon can find significant savings from anywhere in their business. While you are at it, why not leverage it for some PR wins?

How Employees Are Coffee Badging To Avoid Full Days At The Office. I believe that a hybrid mode which includes 3-4 days in the office and the rest of the week remotely is the best model moving forward. I don’t think companies that force people to go back to the office 5 days a week are completely serious about fostering collaboration. It’d be just a cheap way to lay off workers. It will take some time to nudge people to go back to the office. I think what will happen is that companies will put their hammers down for a few months, including tracking time in the office and tracking badge swipes. After that, employees will get used to being in the office that they’ll lose interest in cheating the system.

Other Stuff I Find Interesting

Francois Chollet’s statement on OpenAI o3. “OpenAI’s new o3 model represents a significant leap forward in AI’s ability to adapt to novel tasks. This is not merely incremental improvement, but a genuine breakthrough, marking a qualitative shift in AI capabilities compared to the prior limitations of LLMs. o3 is a system capable of adapting to tasks it has never encountered before, arguably approaching human-level performance in the ARC-AGI domain. Passing ARC-AGI does not equate to achieving AGI, and, as a matter of fact, I don’t think o3 is AGI yet. o3 still fails on some very easy tasks, indicating fundamental differences with human intelligence.”

Why I Don’t Invest in Real Estate

CFPB sues Early Warning Services over Zelle. The banks are united against this lawsuit which I think is an overreach. The government claimed that the banks didn’t do enough to protect end users who lost about $870 million to fraud over the last 7 years. There is always fraud. You can’t eliminate fraud 100% from the financial world. If the banks can show that $870 million is an acceptable loss rate out of the total transaction volume in the last 7 years, they will prevail. Plus, the government has to prove that banks could have done more; which I am not sure how they will do that.

The Fed Cut Rates. Mortgage Costs Went Up. If you wonder why mortgage rates went up even after the Fed cut interest rates, have a read. In my opinion, the latest 25bps cut is not necessary and so far, investors shared the same sentiment.

Stats

The US imported 2.4 billion pounds of avocados from Mexico between July 2023 and June 2024