Hi Quartz members! Ever since the United Auto Workers (UAW) went on strike in the middle of September, the labor problems of auto manufacturers have looked bleaker and bleaker. After a week spent negotiating with Stellantis and General Motors, and…

Innovation starts with ideas but often comes down to financing. As the first-ever chief innovation officer at the University of California, Berkeley, Rich Lyons has overseen a program that comes up with new ways of funding innovative startups and…

Officials at the US Federal Reserve predicted that the rate of average annual inflation will come down to 2% in 2026, as the central bank’s monetary policy committee left rates unchanged in September. The officials also forecasted that they’ll cut…

US Department of Defense officials often face intense scrutiny from Congress, specifically because their agency has never been able to pass an audit. In 2022, the DoD had its fifth self-led audit in the department’s entire history, and 1,600 auditors…

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) warned financial markets that hedge funds could disrupt the all-important US Treasury market because of massive size of their leveraged bets against it. In total, hedge funds hold a $600 billion short…

Wary investors having been looking to public offerings by Arm and Instacart for signals that the doomer stock market is behind them. So far, their optimism has been validated. Shares of Arm, the UK-based chip designer, jumped 25% in their first day…

Although not yet in an official recession, China’s economy is in trouble. The country’s real estate sector is in crisis and makes up an outsized share of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Not only did China build too much housing, but…

Whenever the annual Consumer Price Index (CPI) rises, there are always headlines about how inflation has increased. This may sound like the Federal Reserve’s efforts are being undone and that inflation is reaccelerating, but the 12-month average of…

Instacart will go public next week, giving its venture capital investors the exit they’ve been looking for. The company has a small user base with high margins on fees, grocery enterprise software, and advertising, but investors are going to look for…

One of the key features of the US stock market is the ability to invest in securities using borrowed money. Anyone can secure a loan using the stocks in their existing portfolio as collateral and then use those borrowed funds to invest in more…

As infrastructure money flows in, the innovation chief for Anchorage, Alaska, shares his priorities Brendan Babb has been the chief innovation officer for the city of Anchorage, Alaska, for the past seven years. At the time he came on board, Babb…

Russia’s economy is weak, and the West has used that as an opportunity to diminish the Russian war machine through tougher sanctions. But president Vladimir Putin is trying to develop a Hail Mary option, according to analysts Ananya Kumar and Charles…

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has brought its first enforcement action against a company for a non-fungible token (NFT) project. The violator in question is a Los Angeles-based media company called Impact Theory, which the federal…

If there's a "neutral interest rate" for the central bank, Fed chair Jerome Powell won't name it In a closely watched speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in Wyoming on Friday, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell refused to name a so-called…

Saving. Spending. Planning for the future. There are plenty of competing ideas about how to optimize financial wellbeing, and some of them require real discipline. But if we can adjust our actions to account for what we know about human behavior,…

Although the World Health Organization has ended the covid-19 public health emergency, people around the world still die from covid and lose hours at work because of the disease. On Wall Street too, covid remains an issue that companies going public…

Full employment and price stability are beginning to be equally weighted by US monetary policymakers Everything about the Federal Reserve’s actions in the past year and a half have suggested that monetary policy officials at the central bank who set…

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s running estimate of US economic growth is on the rise. The regional Fed branch’s real-time model for gross domestic product (GDP) moved up its third-quarter GDP prediction from 4% to nearly 6% in a matter of…

Last week, US President Joe Biden called China a “ticking time bomb” after consumer prices fell there for the first time in two years, and gave an ominous warning about the potential for China to do “bad things” during difficult economic times.…

US inflation moved up by 0.2% from June to July, a moderate pace that economists had expected. On a 12-month basis, the consumer price index moved up by 3.2% versus 3% the month prior, according to data from the US Labor Department. Inflation in July…