JD Vance Better Pack a Flashlight Pakistan’s widespread blackouts are a visual reminder of what’s at stake during the vice president’s second attempt at negotiations with Iran.

Is JD Vance heading to Pakistan or what? The vice president's travel plans are changing as fast as Washington's aims in Iran

Has the Global Expansion Weathered Too Many Hits? At what point will the five-year-old expansion be dealt one punch too many? It may well make it through this latest scrape — and emerge in weaker shape. Top economic officials will earn their pay.

The world economy has shown remarkable resilience. It will need to draw on that to make it through this latest scrape

Struggling to Understand Sanaenomics? A New Book Helps Sanaenomics, as some have dubbed Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s economic plans, can be a bit of a mouthful. Even harder than saying it has been grasping what it means.

Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi's economic program isn't Abenomics 2.0. But what is it? A new book seeks to explain

Rick Perry’s Fermi Is Undermining the AI Energy Thesis The Fermi Paradox asks why, given the vastness of the universe, there is no hard evidence of aliens. The Fermi Inc. paradox asks why, given seemingly insatiable demand from hyperscalers for electricity, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s AI-energy firm hasn’t obtained a hard power contract from said hyperscalers.

The struggles of Rick Perry’s AI-energy firm, based in Texas, is an alarm bell for the entire sector's overhyped forecasts and valuations

The SEC Can’t Find Victims Disgorgement, private credit cyclicality, time value of hedge fund managers, pre-tax alpha and an SEC podcast.

If you do fraud in the stock market, in some intuitive sense the victim of the fraud is the stock market.

California is booming: Its economy is now bigger than Japan’s.

These data show why 🎥

Meta is set to overtake Google on digital ad revenue -- largely thanks to smart AI content recommendations. But my @opinion.bloomberg.com column today argues this the last hurrah of Meta's Web 2.0 legacy business -- not a sign of strength for the AI era.

Why MAGA Takes the Evangelical Vote for Granted White evangelical Christians helped bring President Donald Trump to power. They remain among his most ardent supporters. This, even as the president seemingly has gone out of his way to mock Christianity and its first commandment.

We seem to live in an era when political blasphemy is worse than the regular kind

Meta’s Victory Lap Over Google on Ads Will Be Short There will be a changing of the guard by the end of the year: Meta Platforms Inc. will for the first time surpass Alphabet Inc.’s Google for total digital advertising revenue, both globally and in the US. It will be a “watershed” moment and “major upset,” according to analysts at Emarketer, the market research firm that made the projection.

Meta is poised to surpass Google for total digital advertising revenue, but to accomplish that, Mark Zuckerberg has all but eliminated what made his apps' useful in the first place

Cheap Weight-Loss Drugs Are Great — When They're Legal Telehealth company Hims & Hers Health Inc. has an audacious proposal for American consumers. “The rich have health care that comes to them,” says one of the company’s ads, a dizzying montage of pills, potions and cosmetic procedures that keep the uberwealthy taut and tanned. “They get the best of everything. So why don’t you?”

Offering cheaper drugs is an admirable goal. That’s all the more reason to support compounders who play by the rules

A Wartime Economy Would Be Different This Time I recently heard a terrifying prediction: Advances in defense technology will change the way war is waged today as much as industrialization did in World War I. If true — and I don’t know one way or another, my area of expertise is economics — then we could be facing casualties on an unimaginable scale, just as the mechanization of weaponry produced in the early 20th century.

Just as technology is changing the way war is waged, so it is changing how war affects the economy

Africa’s oil shock from the Iran war was preventable.

Justice Malala explains why 🎥

Why Are Workers Stuck? Not Enough Employers America is not, according to the official definition, in a recession. And yet the American labor market is so weak that it raises an obvious question: What’s the difference? More precisely, how is today’s labor market different from the labor market during a recession?

If you lost your job, would you want there to be one employer in your city, or 1,000?

The New Global Order Is an Assault on Prosperity When nothing can be taken for granted, what’s an economic forecaster to do? Last week the International Monetary Fund suspended its practice of preparing global economic forecasts for discussion at its spring meetings. Instead it offered a “reference forecast” — in effect, a muddle-through scenario that assumed things would soon get back to sort of normal — alongside alternative projections ranging from not quite so bad to very much worse.

America's shift to unilateralism will make it and its former allies poorer and less safe

Netflix’s Hastings Was Always Ahead of the Curve Reed Hastings, the chairman of Netflix Inc., caught the market off guard last week when he announced that he would step down in June from the board of the company he co-founded nearly 30 years ago.

Reed Hastings of Netflix transformed not only the media and entertainment landscape but the rules of corporate culture

GUBU Is the Perfect Acronym for Britain's Political Circus During his recent trip to the Persian Gulf, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer predicted that the Iran war would define his time in office, as much as the 2007/8 global financial crisis had for Gordon Brown and the pandemic for Boris Johnson. Unless Starmer puts on a convincing performance in the House of Commons on Monday and in days to come, his time in office may be defined instead by his worst self-inflicted error: the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the US.

GUBU - or "Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, and Unprecedented” - was coined by Conor Cruise O’Brien to describe Irish scandal in the 80s. It applies pretty well to the UK's Epstein agonies too

Logic Demands an Iran Deal. Will Trump’s Fantasies Allow One? In the logical world that markets seem to believe will prevail in the Middle East, this war will end — and soon — because there’s little realistic prospect of either side winning a decisive victory by restarting the conflict. The costs of trying, meanwhile, range from punitive to ruinous.

Logic says there should be a peace deal in Iran. But we're not living in a world of logic

Microsoft Isn’t Actually the Savior of Carbon Removal The carbon market was the subject of drama last week after climate-focused publication Heatmap News reported that Microsoft Corp. was “pausing future purchases” of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits. The tech company quickly disputed the idea that it was abandoning CDR, saying it “may adjust the pace or volume” of its efforts, but that any such adjustments do not indicate “a change in ambition.”

Yes, Microsoft is a big player in the carbon removal. But it isn't the market's only hope

Markets Get in Tune to the Strait and Narrow Earnings hopes counter the volatile lack of message discipline by the US and Iran.

More diplomacy is on the cards, but the Strait of Hormuz isn't a faucet to be turned on and off

Goldman, BlackRock Calm Private Credit Panic, Blue Owl Less So Panic over for private credit? Not quite. Things are calmer after banks and fund managers have made reassuring noises on quarterly earnings calls this month, but a shakeout is still underway. Many individual investors want their money back even as big institutions including insurers and pension funds are happy to keep investing. The trouble isn’t over for firms that rely more on wealthy people as clients — and that to my mind is a good thing.

Private credit's current shakeout is a useful reminder that its lack of liquidity is precisely what makes it useful — and why it’s unsuitable for retail investors

SoftBank Is Going All In on OpenAI, But at What Cost? Would you buy OpenAI’s shares even though the transaction might expose you to a liquidity crunch? SoftBank Group Corp.’s founder Masayoshi Son did just that.

Going all in on OpenAI puts SoftBank way out on a limb. What is Masayoshi Son thinking?

Pakistan Is Juggling Blackouts and Iran Diplomacy This isn’t the first time that Pakistanis are unsure whether they should celebrate their government’s achievements or berate it for its failures. The country seems to be at the center of attempts to bring peace to West Asia, and is likely to host another round of talks between the US and Iran this week. But it’s also sweltering under hours of power cuts — driven in large part by a shortage of liquefied natural gas from the Gulf, but also because of poor decision-making by officials.

For a change, Pakistan’s leaders are bargaining to end other people’s wars. Now, if only they could keep the lights on

China’s Pharma Dominance Is Just Beginning The old pharmaceutical order anchored around cutting-edge advances from the West has quietly disappeared. What we have now is a bipolar industry centered on the US and China — with implications for patients and policymakers worldwide.

The world needs to find ways of channeling China's drug Ru0026D to improve access to effective treatments

A Devil's Bargain Cripples Korea's Energy Security In the 2025 film KPop Demon Hunters, a slick South Korean boy band acts as cover for a diabolical plot to feed humanity to a ravenous, fiery, subterranean monster. Believe it or not, that’s a decent way of thinking about its energy policy.

In the 2025 film KPop Demon Hunters, a slick South Korean boy band acts as cover for a diabolical plot to feed humanity to a ravenous, fiery, subterranean monster. Believe it or not, that’s a decent way of thinking about its energy policy.

Populism vs. the Pope Is No Contest As Trump mistakes the pope’s pleas for peace as a declaration of war, Europe’s populist wave is breaking.

When it comes to a fight with Pope Leo XIV, do the president and his minions have a prayer?

Tom Steyer’s Bet on ‘Billionaire Populism’ Might Pay Off When Democratic activist Tom Steyer launched his campaign for governor of California six months ago, he did so as a billionaire populist promising to fight other billionaires on behalf of the working class. Given the eat-the-rich mood of the Democratic Party, most political observers dismissed him as an imperfect messenger and an unserious candidate — doomed to waste his money self-funding a bid to succeed Gavin Newsom.

Can you be a billionaire and fight for the working class? With California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer rising in the polls, there are signs Democratic voters think so

The NBA Has a Victor Wembanyama Problem to Solve What stands out most about San Antonio Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama in his National Basketball Association playoff debut on Sunday night might not be how he plays, but who has to stay up to watch. Tipoff will land in prime time, at 8 p.m. CDT, for American viewers. In France, where he’s a national icon, that’s 3 a.m. Monday, forcing his most devoted fans to work around a schedule built for Texas.

The NBA thought about Victor Wembanyama fans in San Antonio. The ones in Paris? Not so much

Is Cuba the Next White House Misadventure? America’s armed forces are heavily committed in the Middle East, but there are whispers around the White House that they have been warned to stand by for a new intervention against Cuba. As usual with this president, no final decision has been taken. But Donald Trump sees a window of opportunity to act in the Caribbean, where the 67-year-old Castro regime is tottering under the weight of US sanctions, the cut-off of Venezuelan oil and its own awesome incompetence.

The danger of a US-led putsch in Cuba is that if unchecked capitalism follows, the people there would find themselves in just as bad a place

The Live Nation Fight Is Over Yesterday’s Technology Frustrated concertgoers may feel vindicated by a jury’s finding that Live Nation acted as a monopoly. Coverage of the verdict has focused on potential structural changes, including whether a judge might force the company to divest Ticketmaster. But the bigger story might be that here, once again, antitrust law is chasing yesterday’s technology.

Regardless of what the courts decide with Live Nation, AI is likely to reshape how consumers buy tickets

The DOJ Is Normalizing Vigilantism Officials at the DOJ delivered a politically convenient one-two punch to the work of their predecessors this week.

The DOJ’s recent moves not only attempt to rewrite history. They make all Americans less safe