Would you like fries with that? McDonald’s is growing like crazy and opening new restaurants in the USA for the first time since 2014. It is also cutting staff, so the staff per unit sale metric continues to fall with automation. As an economic microcosm, McDonald’s has always been excellent. Not least the Big Mac

Asimov “Changes will take place and perhaps what you are doing will have no meaning in 10 years” That is Isaac Asimov explaining change. More importantly he pointed out that everyone understands change but they do not understand the pace of change. 100 years ago, change was slow, taking longer than a generation. So changes

A visitor It is August 2022. A young man comes to visit our office to talk about bitcoin mining. He has a job in finance but also appears to have deep knowledge of the economics of bitcoin. I categorise bitcoin knowledge like this: The visitor understands the energy link and I consider myself in that

A compressed file It would seem the world is ending, thanks to artificial intelligence. Time Magazine and many others recently called for its complete shut-down before it’s “too late”. Others have suggested large AI data centres should be bombed (seriously). The essence of the complaint runs like this: AI is intelligent, and once it learns

AI exam results GPT-4 is very good at exams. It smashed the bar exam straight into the 90th percentile. It is also outstanding at mathematics, which is more than could be said for its predecessor 3.5, which was good but not brilliant. Since these results came out, GPT-4 has also participated in the Maths Olympiad.

Genius Hello Larry, can you help us? I mean, that is the only job banks have. They take deposits, at call, and make longer-term loans like mortgages. Then they hope like hell everyone doesn’t ask for their money at once. I wish it was more complicated. Sure, there is complication and regulation and capital ratio

The safest asset in the world Let’s be honest. You had never heard of Silicon Valley Bank and neither had I. This week, and for a few more no doubt, they will be one of the best-known banks in the world. The subject of opprobrium because not only did they go bust but their CEO

P Marca From Mr ‘Code will Eat the World’, Marc Andreessen, a take on AI. Everywhere the government is involved gets more expensive. Everything with technology involved gets cheaper. As he puts it: The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are

End of the Empires US government interest payments on debt are now approaching $900 billion annually; they exceed the $722 billion defence budget by about 20% and are growing far more rapidly. Some weeks ago we covered the amount of US government debt that will need to be refinanced in the next 18 months, all

Shadowy coders Back in 2021, an American Senator complained in her submission to Congress that cryptocurrency put the financial system in the hands of ‘shadowy super coders’. In so doing, she coined a phrase that was then adopted by thousands of enthusiasts across the globe, many of whom added ‘shadowy coder’ to their profiles on