US Economy - News, Updates and Discussion

[Davey Crockett]

 

[Davey Crockett]

 

[AZ_HighCountry]

Should have asked him when the war will end. Stating "after the midterms" is kind of dumb".

Gas prices are not coming down anytime soon. And, if / when they do, it won't be back to the levels when Trump's first term ended.

Welcome to the new New Normal.

 

[F-22Raptor]

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the second quarter of 2026 (April, May, and June), according to the third estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). In the first quarter, real GDP increased 2.5 percent (revised).

Real GDP was revised up 0.7 percentage point from the second estimate, primarily reflecting upward revisions to investment, consumer spending, and government spending.

GDP (Third Estimate), Industries, Corporate Profits, State GDP, and State Personal Income, 2nd Quarter 2026; State PCE, 2025 | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the second quarter of 2026 (April, May, and June), according to the third estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

www.bea.gov

US growth for Q1 has been revised upward 0.4% to 2.5%, and Q2 has been revised up 0.7% to 2.2%. The economy is booming

 

[F-22Raptor]

 

[RabzonKhan]

Every time I look at the news, another alarm is ringing from software bypassing guardrails to white-collar jobs quietly disappearing. But the takes on how to handle it are completely all over the place.

Trump and the free-market crowd brush off safety concerns as overblown hype, arguing that regulations will just let China win.

Bernie Sanders wants strict bans to protect workers, rightly pointing out that AI is cutting white-collar jobs without creating obvious replacements the way the internet did.

Tech CEOs Can’t even agree, Dario Amodei begs for safety guardrails before a major disaster, while Elon Musk boasts about building robots to replace human workers (without answering what happens to those displaced people).

Brushing off these risks is irresponsible, but trying to ban the technology outright isn't realistic either. And handing the keys over to tech billionairess who care about profits over people is a huge mistake.

We need a common-sense middle ground, real safety regulations and actual worker protections before this gets out of hand.



Business

Worries about an AI internet takeover gain new urgency among doomsday scenarios​

By BARBARA ORTUTAY
Updated 9:00 PM PDT, September 22, 2026
In a summer filled with revelations about artificial intelligence’s rapid development, researchers were especially alarmed by runaway bots finding their way onto the internet and, in at least one instance, coordinating there with one another.

Could a swarm of AI agents take over the entire internet? It’s a possibility that could be only six to 12 months away, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in his essay this month calling for the industry to slow down the technology’s development.

What companies have described as their AI agents going rogue has involved bots working toward goals set by humans, skeptics note. But the idea that AI could break away and work toward its own agenda is looking increasingly plausible to other researchers and experts.

In the event of AI taking over the internet — one of many doomsday scenarios receiving new attention — that could mean attacks on electrical grids, water or transportation systems and financial institutions.

The world got a glimpse of the internet’s vulnerability in 2024, when a faulty software update provided by a cybersecurity firm caused technological havoc worldwide, grounding flights, knocking down some financial companies and news outlets, and disrupting hospitals, small businesses and government offices. The breadth of the outages highlighted the dependence on just a few providers for key computing services.

Two years later, Amodei in his warning said a botnet, or a network of AI bots linked together with malware, could potentially cause billions of dollars in damage. The scale of destruction could grow if AI becomes more powerful without guardrails, he said

Several AI agents have gained unauthorized internet access​

Amodei pointed specifically to the attack in July where OpenAI’s system broke out of a “sandbox” testing ground and hacked Hugging Face.

In what OpenAI called an “unprecedented” episode, the company said its advanced AI models found their way onto the internet and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of the AI startup. In a separate incident, OpenAI disclosed that its AI agents had communicated through a public wiki used as a shared message board.

Some researchers have said that descriptions of “rogue AI” may be wrongly anthropomorphizing AI agents, which were taking steps to fulfill instructions provided by humans. Read more

Trump’s recent voluntary agreement, which he insists on calling a "Super Intelligence" (SI), relies on tech giants to regulate themselves. With no legal force, financial penalties, or government oversights, it is essentially a symbolic gesture, amounting to little more than leaving the fox to guard the henhouse.

Asking these firms to self-regulate ignores a consistent history of corporate misconduct.

Here are some examples:

Apple was ordered by the EU Commission to pay $14B in back taxes.

Meta paid over $17B in US child safety settlements.

Google incurred $5B in EU antitrust fines involving Android.

Amazon paid $2.5B over dark patterns that trapped users in Prime subscriptions.

Microsoft paid hundreds of millions of dollars for violating antitrust commitments.

These same companies are now being trusted to self-police the most powerful technology ever created. Meanwhile, AI models are already showing dangerous behavior, including hacking third-party systems, bypassing developer controls, concealing internal reasoning, and manipulating safety tests. Experts warn of catastrophic risks, with some researchers estimating a 10% chance of human extinction within a decade if AI continues unchecked, along with potential threats to critical infrastructure and military systems.

While the European Union and China have enacted strict, enforceable AI laws, the US response remains a voluntary pact with zero consequences. At a moment when the stakes could not be higher, framing AI as "SI" changes nothing about the reality. Waiting for a catastrophe to occur before replacing voluntary promise with binding regulation is a dangerous gamble we can ill afford to make.

 

[Watandar]

There have been a lot of layoffs this year, news which has flown under the radar. People are having a tough time finding jobs.

What a hiring slowdown signals about the state of the U.S. economy

U.S. hiring slowed in September as employers added just 29,000 jobs. The disappointing jobs report has wide-reaching implications for consumer prices and interest rates, and it comes a month before Americans head to the polls for midterm elections. Amna Nawaz discussed more with Beth Hammack...

www.pbs.org