The article argues that the Federal Reserve’s biggest problem today is not inflation itself but the failure of its communication to reach ordinary households. While actual inflation has fallen to around 2.7%, many Americans still expect much higher inflation and feel pessimistic about the economy, leading them to behave as if inflation is still a crisis. Using an analogy from category theory, Mardoqueo explains that the Fed’s intended communication chain, from Fed announcements to financial markets to household expectations, no longer works for most people because households pay more attention to everyday prices like groceries than to markets or Fed statements. As a result, inflation expectations remain unanchored, weakening the Fed’s credibility at a sensitive political moment. Until the Fed finds a way to fix or adapt to this broken communication channel, the gap between economic reality and public perception is likely to persist.

It's 2026, and as new AI tools seem to emerge every week while unemployment ticks up, some may ask: are we headed toward a Universal Basic Income scheme?

As more and more tasks become automated, from data analytics to summarizing reports and beyond, almost every person I've spoken to lives with a lingering fear that AI could replace their job. Without a job, a person must find an alternative way to pay their living expenses.

Enter the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Under a UBI arrangement, each individual receives a minimum fixed payment, supposedly allowing them to live without earning an income from a job.

On Saturday, my phone didn’t just buzz… it practically tried to achieve orbit!

I had actually managed to fall asleep like a responsible adult who swears they’re “cutting back on news,” and then woke up to an avalanche of alerts about a major geopolitical rupture in Venezuela. You know, the kind of headlines that makes you blink twice and think, “oh, geeze… not again! Not another one!” Somewhere in my brain, the Chris Farley meme was already putting on its awful, brown tie and reporting for duty: “Getting pretty tired of living through historical events.”

That joke may be doing an irresponsible amount of emotional labor right now. And for that, I apologize.

If you have been reading this blog for a bit now, you know we have been skeptical of the “AI Bubble.” Our skepticism, or at least my own, has mostly centered around the economic implementation lagging the hype. We spent the better part of 2025 watching companies buy massive amounts of GPU compute to build smarter chatbots, yet aggregate productivity statistics barely budged. (Yes, we have some data now that shows the effects of AI on productivity but not nearly as much as you would think).

While the market was distracted by the “Brain” trade (LLMs, data centers, and NVIDIA chips), you may have missed the momentum building in the “Body” trade.

Headlines this past week have announced the Fed's recent interest rate cut. Interest rates have now been shifted from a range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent, and not without controversy.

The decision was made amid an economically confusing environment characterized by both high inflation and high unemployment. While most headlines highlight the potential impacts on mortgages, inflation, and overall employment, this article focuses on how lower interest rates could significantly increase employment among recent college graduates.

Most large companies have formal policies, enterprise licenses, internal copilots, or approved tool stacks. In many sectors, AI is already embedded in day-to-day work. If adoption alone were the constraint, we should already see it in the productivity data.

And yet, the aggregate numbers remain underwhelming.

This tension is often framed as disappointment or hype fatigue. I think it is better understood as a timing and measurement problem. In this post, we will suggest a different, slightly more uncomfortable explanation to the fears of an AI bubble.

For context, I am currently staying in New Delhi. And during Putin’s recent visit to India, the city took on a charged, contemplative mood. Conversations among colleagues and clients kept circling back to a familiar question: Is the world finally tilting away from the United States and toward a BRICS bloc? Well, while Putin was in town, I attended a talk hosted by the Chintan Research Foundation that explored the state of India-Russia relations and the shifting dynamics inside a BRICS / Eurasian Economic Union grouping that continues to expand and evolve. The timing made the discussion feel especially immediate.

Sitting there, I understood why so many people ask whether the United States is losing its grip. I hear the fear frequently from colleagues and clients. They see BRICS expanding. They see the headlines about de-dollarization. They watch policymakers spar over sanctions, AI, and global rules. And they wonder whether the world is moving into a new era where the dollar stumbles and a coalition of emerging economies seizes the strategic high ground.

With the pace of technological change, prevalence of job loss, and worsening socioeconomic inequality, individuals face more mental health challenges than ever. In conjunction with the AI boom, the market for AI in mental health is large and growing. On a global scale, it was estimated at $1.13 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $5.08 billion by 2030.

Access to high-quality life advice or therapy matters now more than ever. Many entrepreneurs have spotted an opportunity: creating AI for mental health. Daniela Andrade is one such individual. Daniela graduated from Harvard in 2025 and is Head of Growth at Resolution, a startup that serves primarily young women by providing them with an “AI guardian angel” called Fabio to help them navigate toxic relationships.

I’ve been in the holiday mood since right after Halloween. If you’re like me, holidays also mean thinking about the possibilities of the future. So, after watching Hocus Pocus and switching to Polar Express, I found myself doom-scrolling through economic forecasts.

The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook paints a sober picture. Global growth is expected to slow to just 3.1% in 2026, with the outlook described as “dim prospects” amid persistent downside risks. In plain English: the economic pause many of us felt this year isn’t ending anytime soon.

Michael Burry has a knack for walking into the party right when the music is loudest and asking where the fire exits are.

In 2005, that meant shorting the U.S. housing market while everyone else was busy securitizing granite countertops. Today, it means betting against the AI trade while the rest of us are delighting in auto-drafted emails and AI-polished pitch decks. On paper, he is “short AI.” In practice, his long game is quieter and more elemental: water rights, water-rich farmland, water utilities.

He is betting on scarcity against a story that pretends resources are infinite.

To many people, the economy represents a vast mystery of supply chains, tariffs, and uncertainty. To most professionals, making everyday business decisions regarding pricing, budgeting, or forecasting demand for a product appears an intractable problem. The study of economics attempts to put some structure on these moving pieces.

With the rise in economic uncertainty spurred by recent societal developments, such as AI, it’s worth asking whether AI itself can provide expert-level economic decision-making for individuals and organizations to sort through the noise.

Last week, I attended a gathering of economists and data scientists from major tech companies, all focused on how technology is reshaping business and work. Practitioners swapped insights on everything from labor market trends to AI experiments. The AI revolution promises to upend how we work and this is happening against the current backdrop of the “pause economy” with hiring and investment in a cautious lull. The discussions ranged from the cooling tech job market to cutting-edge methods in causal inference and AI measurement, and deeper questions about whether AI is a substitute for human work or a “bicycle for the mind.”