January 24, 2025 | Read Online

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"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."

— Isaac Asimov

Friday macrodata-refining charts

Last week, incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicted a "new economic golden age," and this week President Trump predicted a "thrilling new era of national success."

To make it happen, the president will "demand that interest rates drop immediately," so as he told an assembly of plutocrats at Davos.

"I'm also going to ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down the cost of oil," Trump added.

I'm not sure how either of those things will go, but it can't hurt to ask!

President Trump had previously asked some tech moguls for $100 billion of investment in the US and this week they overdelivered with $500 billion — sort of.

Funding for the joint venture, dubbed Stargate, is not yet secured, but they promised to raise it.

I'm not sure how that will go either, in part because the man who is tasked with raising it — SoftBank's Masayoshi Son — is also the man who famously told Adam Neuman he wasn't crazy enough, and we know how that turned out.

Stargate's plan to build data centers for OpenAI also feels a bit crazy to me — because why is it volunteering to build data centers for OpenAI???

If successful, this would make Sam Altman the Tom Sawyer of Silicon Valley — convincing his fellow tech moguls that the job of building data centers is so much fun they should do it for him, and for free!

Regardless, you have to admire the ambition: Adjusted for inflation, Stargate's $500 billion investment would be more than twice as much than what the US spent to put a man on the Moon and nearly as much as the cost of building the Interstate Higher System (that spend was spread over 36 years, however, vs. just four years for Stargate).

The effect could be similarly consequential for the US: The Stargate project expects its investments will "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs."

Of course, lots of people worry that the opposite will happen — that rapid investment in AI will only push forward the time where humans have nothing left to do other than make-work jobs like the "macrodata-refining" that keeps the main characters of Severance occupied.

There's already some real-world evidence of that.

Just this week, for example, we learned that Foxconn will start using humanoid robots to assemble iPhones in China, with a target of reducing the need for humans by 50%.

In a more hopeful example, however, AI is not replacing call center employees but making them more efficient.

Although this too might be a mixed blessing: "The co-pilot is helpful," one call center employee said. "But I have to please the AI…it's like we've become the robots."

There were, however, also numerous counterexamples this week of AI serving humans.

OpenAI demo'd its new AI agent, Operator, which will save humans like yourself a lot of clicking around on the internet since it can book a table at a restaurant for you or order your groceries (that is, assuming you're subscribed to OpenAI's $200/month pro plan).

AIs are also doing research for us: Alphabet said this week that the first AI-developed drugs will be in trials by the end of the year.

One of those drugs may keep us alive longer: This week, Retro Biosciences announced it raised $1 billion to support its mission of creating an AI model capable of designing proteins to reverse the aging process, potentially adding a decade to our lifespans (assuming we want that).

Also this week, a new study showed amazing results in AI-assisted learning: Students in Nigeria using GPT-4 compressed two years of learning gains into just six weeks by being tutored by AI.

There should be much more of this kind of thing if Masayoshi Son really can scrape up $500 billion to build data centers — and Stargate is of course not the only one working on it: Microsoft also announced this week its intention to spend $80 billion on data centers this year (helpfully, it actually has the money).

However fast it all happens, though, I'm hopeful that human intuition will remain irreplaceable, as it is even in the dystopian world of Severance.

"We know you may be curious about what the numbers mean," the Lumon employee handbook tells new joiners. "However, knowing the true meaning behind the numbers could inhibit your natural intuition."

So we've still got that going for us.

Let's see what we can intuit from this week's charts.

Hopeful jobs news:

The journalist @chrisbriem charted the last half-century of unemployment in Pittsburgh and finds that "basically, all months of unemployment under 4% have occurred in just the last two years."

Hopeful inflation news:

The new tenant rent index from the Cleveland Fed shows that rent for new tenants was 2.4% lower in Q4 than it was a year earlier. New tenant rents should be a leading indicator for the all-important shelter component of CPI.

Not so eggcellent news:

Egg prices have been surging in the US due to an outbreak of bird flu. The latest Fed data has egg prices at $4 a dozen but the New York Times (and anyone who's been to a grocery store this week) reports that prices are up to $7 now, and heading higher.

Stock prices are actually pretty normal:

Stocks are expensive, but history suggests they will continue to do well if the Fed continues to cut — the green line above is how stocks typically do when the Fed is "normalizing" rates (i.e., cutting rates, but not because of recession). The red line is how stocks do when the Fed is cutting rates because there is a recession.

We have a 78% chance of following the green line:

A WSJ survey of economists finds that there's a 78% chance of the US staying out of recession in 2025 (assuming they know what they're talking about).

Who's afraid of tariffs?

The Canadian dollar is unchanged against the US dollar over the past month, which suggests that the market is not taking President Trump at his word regarding his intention to raise $1.5 trillion of revenue from tariffs.

Should Mars be worried though?

Perhaps Canada is feeling sanguine about tariffs because it got fewer mentions than Mars in President Trump's inaugural address.

Also not following the Trump playbook:

President Trump said on Monday he expects interest rates to fall "everywhere," but the BoJ raised them yesterday as inflation has stayed above 2% and even wages are starting to rise — a state of affairs unheard of in Japan.

Even more unheard of:

European stocks made new all-time highs this week. An unusual state of affairs, but they still have a lot of catching up to do: The US accounts for 70% of the global stock market capitalization despite having just 4% of the world's population.

Stocks up in Europe, wages up in Japan, and Mars in the president's crosshairs?

Not even Severance can match that for weird — and I doubt an AI could make sense of it.

Have a great weekend, intuitive readers.

— Byron Gilliam

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