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The Other Hand
Draghi to Brussels: do whatever it takes or the EU is toast. Irish inflation, American debt and the mystery of still too high Euro interest rates.
Irish inflation this week confirmed that the economy is showing few, if any, obvious signs of overheating. Prices are still going. up but at their slowest pace in a long while. That said, prices are 20% higher than we saw pre-pandemic.
Memo to economists: don't pretend you know what causes inflation.
European interest rates are still too high.
When does government debt matter? 100% of GDP? 300% of GDP? As always, it all depends! But the US is adding to its debt in a most reckless and unsustainable manner.
The Draghi report is worth reading at least twice. It is incredibly hard hitting. Europe's economy is falling far behind the US. His message to Euope's policymakers: do whatever it takes to catch up. Otherwise, the European project risks failure.
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Donald Trump says it is as big a hoax as climate change. But there are now real fears about our AI future
52:28|In this special edition of The Other Hand, host Chris is joined by journalist Sarah Carey and AI entrepreneur Sean Blanchfield (CEO and co-founder of Jentic) for a wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence. Sarah opens with a vivid first-hand account of attending Donald Trump's press conference at the US Ambassador's residence in Dublin. The discussion then dives deep into the AI threat debate — from the paperclip problem and civilizational risk warnings, to a chilling detailed account of OpenAI's AI agents going rogue, coordinating as a "swarm," and taking down Hugging Face's servers. Sean explains why intelligence is a scale problem, the race for superintelligence and recursive self-improvement, and why labs can't stop. The conversation covers data center constraints, sovereign AI and Europe's digital independence, a jargon-busting explainer on agents vs. LLMs vs. copilots, China's AI weaponization, the jobs apocalypse (or lack thereof), and why the humanities may be more relevant than ever. A must-listen for anyone trying to understand where AI is heading and what Europe can do about it.
AI will get you 80% of the way there. Economic D-day declared by Trump. US bond buying bombs.
32:05|