The US Separation From Europe And NATO Is Long Overdue

401(k) Hardship Withdrawals Hit Record High The AI bubble and data center buildout have helped catapult equity markets to new highs (pre-Middle East conflict), minting a record number of 401(k) millionaires. However, beneath the surface, hardship withdrawals from 401(k) plans have also climbed to a record, reinforcing the view that the K-shaped economy is becoming more entrenched. Vanguard's How America Saves 2025 report shows that hardship withdrawal activity "increased to a new high" of 6% in 2025, up from 4.8% in 2024 and about 2% before the pandemic. The increase marks the...

Compute Costs More Than Talent In AI For leading AI companies, the biggest expense is not talent. It is compute. This chart from Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo, uses Epoch AI data to compare spending at Anthropic, Minimax, and Z.ai across R&D compute, inference compute, and staff plus other costs. In every case, compute accounts for the majority of total spending, underscoring how capital-intensive it has become to build and serve frontier AI models. How AI Company Costs Break Down Despite differences in scale, all three companies allocate the largest share of their budgets to a...

Futures Fall To Start Now Quarter With Warsh Sintra Comments On Deck US equity futures point to a softer start to the third quarter as investors await a fresh batch of economic data and the first major overseas appearance by Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. As of 8:20am ET, S&P futures are down 0.2%, off session lows, while Nasdaq futures are down 0.6: techs lags following NDX’s 3.9% gain over the last 2 days; in premarket trading, chipmakers, which did much of the heavy lifting as investors piled into AI beneficiaries, were weaker with...