UK Voters Call For Lower Taxes & Energy Bills As Economic Concerns Grow

European Wildfires, Net-Zero Stagnation, & The Great Industry Displacement Authored by Daniel Lacalle, Europe’s wildfire crisis has also exposed the failure of public spending rhetoric unsupported by effective land and forest management. EU governments spent 40.6 billion euros on fire protection services in 2023. In 2022, the total expenditure stood at EUR 37.4 billion. The European Court of Auditors discovered that spending oversight was incomplete, result monitoring was weak, and there was no assurance that the most impactful actions received financing. At the same time, the average annual burnt area in...

Chinese Chipmakers Buy 3-Year Sanctions Buffer As Huawei Spearheads Domestic Juggernaut Right now, Chinese open-weight AI models are on the cusp of dominating closed-weight US frontier models in both price and performance. All ten of the top open-weight models on Artificial Analysis’s spring Intelligence Index came from China-based labs, and the best sat just six points behind the leading closed model; Chinese models also passed American ones in token share on OpenRouter in early June. All of this - despite asymmetrical lack of access to bleeding-edge hardware vs. their US competition,...

Adidas Shares Crash After World Cup Spending Fuels Earnings Miss Adidas shares crashed the most on record in Europe after outsized World Cup marketing spending weighed on second-quarter operating profit, overshadowing stronger-than-expected tournament-related sales. Profit totaled 574 million euros for the quarter ending in June, missing the 616 million euro estimate of analysts tracked by Bloomberg, as an additional 212 million euros in spending offset strong sales growth and disappointed investors seeking better margin expansion. The German sportswear maker generated 1.5 billion euros in sales, with jersey sales quadrupling and ball sales...