Tootfinder

Stoller: Why This Economy Feels Weird and Scary:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-thi

Why This Economy Feels Weird and Scary
American households are in a much more financially fragile state than we were in the 1980s. It's a Chinese finger trap economy, dependent on the stock market and more inequality to keep going.

Stagflation: 5 Signs That Economy's Worst-Case Scenario Is Inching Closer - Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/stagflation-job-market-us-economy-recession-inflation-outlook-warning-signs-2025-9

Regulating Ride-Sourcing Markets: Can Minimum Wage Regulation Protect Drivers Without Disrupting the Market?
Farnoud Ghasemi, Arjan de Ruijter, Rafal Kucharski, Oded Cats
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11845

Regulating Ride-Sourcing Markets: Can Minimum Wage Regulation Protect Drivers Without Disrupting the Market?
Ride-sourcing platforms such as Uber and Lyft are prime examples of the gig economy, recruiting drivers as independent contractors, thereby avoiding legal and fiscal obligations. Although platforms offer flexibility in choosing work shifts and areas, many drivers experience low income and poor working conditions, leading to widespread strikes and protests. Minimum wage regulation is adopted to improve drivers welfare. However, the impacts of this regulation on drivers as well as on travelers an…

🪨 The Shadow Economy of Critical Mineral Exports
#trade

The Shadow Economy of Critical Mineral Exports
Chinese traders are circumventing China's export ban on critical minerals like antimony, gallium, and germanium by rerouting shipments through third countries like Thailand and Mexico to reach the US market.

Trump’s nominee to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics told Fox News Digital on Monday that the agency should suspend monthly jobs reports
-- a change that could leave businesses and policymakers at least temporarily without the data they’ve used for decades to gauge the state of the labor market and broader economy.

E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation,
whom Trump nominated Monday to lead the federal statistical agency,
has repeatedl…

Trump’s pick for BLS commissioner endorses suspending monthly jobs reports
“The BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports,” E.J. Antoni, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the federal statistical agency, said on Fox News Digital.

Capitalism / market economy in the US.... "In a highly unusual arrangement with President Trump, the companies are expected to kick 15 percent of what they make in China to the U.S. government."
https://www.

U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China
In a highly unusual arrangement with President Trump, the companies are expected to kick 15 percent of what they make in China to the U.S. government.

Propagation of carbon price shocks through the value chain: the mean-field game of defaults
Zorana Grbac, Simone Pavarana, Thorsten Schmidt, Peter Tankov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11353

Propagation of carbon price shocks through the value chain: the mean-field game of defaults
We introduce a new mean-field game framework to analyze the impact of carbon pricing in a multi-sector economy with defaultable firms. Each sector produces a homogeneous good, with its price endogenously determined through market clearing. Firms act as price takers and maximize profits by choosing an optimal allocation of inputs-including labor, emissions, and intermediate goods from other sectors-while interacting through the endogenous sectoral price. Firms also choose their default timing to…

Vers un cadre ontologique pour la gestion des comp{\'e}tences : {\`a} des fins de formation, de recrutement, de m{\'e}tier, ou de recherches associ{\'e}es
Ngoc Luyen Le (Heudiasyc), Marie-H\'el\`ene Abel (Heudiasyc), Bertrand Laforge (LPNHE)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05767…

Vers un cadre ontologique pour la gestion des comp{é}tences : {à} des fins de formation, de recrutement, de m{é}tier, ou de recherches associ{é}es
The rapid transformation of the labor market, driven by technological advancements and the digital economy, requires continuous competence development and constant adaptation. In this context, traditional competence management systems lack interoperability, adaptability, and semantic understanding, making it difficult to align individual competencies with labor market needs and training programs. This paper proposes an ontology-based framework for competence management, enabling a structured re…

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

"It seemed tariffs were already boosting inflation and dampening growth at the margin, albeit not to a sufficient degree to tip the economy into recession," writes Josh Barro.
"Now the jobs numbers are also showing significant weakness, even though they're not yet showing the bottom falling out of the labor market.
The last remaining bullish economic indicator is the stock market.
Like Furman, I can't explain why stocks are doing so well in spite o…

Well, This Jobs Report Clarifies Some Things
Trump will get his rate cut, but there's little other good news for the president.

“The release of a second consecutive poor #JobsReport confirmed the reality that Mr. Trump has been trying to avoid. The labor market is stalling [as a result] of his agenda. The data showed the first net loss of jobs since [2020], when the pandemic was raging.”

A Second Weak Jobs Report Challenges Trump’s Claim the Economy Is Booming
After a bad employment report in August, President Trump fired the official in charge of the numbers. This month’s data was just as disappointing.

Prediction: #BCI companies currently focusing on developing an implantable visual prosthesis will soon shift their focus toward more general #neuromodulation use cases to reach economy of scale and recoup investments. #NeuroTech

BCI companies currently focusing on developing an implantable visual prosthesis will soon shift their focus toward more general neuromodulation use cases to reach economy of scale and recoup investments.
The claim that BCI (brain-computer interface) companies specializing in implantable visual prostheses are poised to pivot toward broader neuromodulation applications—for conditions like depression, chronic pain, Parkinson's, or cognitive enhancement—aligns with emerging industry trends. This shift would indeed help achieve economies of scale by targeting larger patient populations and accelerating investment recovery, as visual restoration remains a niche market (affecting an estimated 2.2 …

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
Hamza Belgroun (Sciences Po, UniCA, CNRS, WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS), Franck Michel (Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS, WIMMICS), Fabien Gandon (WIMMICS, Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06453

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture
In our age of digital platforms, human attention has become a scarce and highly valuable resource, rivalrous, tradable, and increasingly subject to market dynamics. This article explores the commodification of attention within the framework of the attention economy, arguing that attention should be understood as a common good threatened by over-exploitation. Drawing from philosophical, economic, and legal perspectives, we first conceptualize attention not only as an individual cognitive process…

Western governments: Industrial policy doesn't work. The government is worse at picking winners than the market.
Chinese government: Our industrial policy is to create a native electric car industry that can beat Western petrol car makers.
Western governments: Hey, no fair!
BBC News - How China made electric vehicles mainstream

Economists have been sounding the alarm about the elevated risks of a recession in 2025,
due both to contemporary economic strains caused by the administration's trade policies and long-term issues such as America's ballooning national debt.
Warning signals have recently surfaced in the form of weak data on consumer confidence,
as well as stagnant job growthand broader lab market difficulties.
Personal income and consumer spending have remained largely stable in…

Recession Probability Surges to 93%: UBS
The global financial services company said "hard data" was pointing to a prolonged period of difficulty for the U.S. economy.

CreditARF: A Framework for Corporate Credit Rating with Annual Report and Financial Feature Integration
Yumeng Shi, Zhongliang Yang, DiYang Lu, Yisi Wang, Yiting Zhou, Linna Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02738

CreditARF: A Framework for Corporate Credit Rating with Annual Report and Financial Feature Integration
Corporate credit rating serves as a crucial intermediary service in the market economy, playing a key role in maintaining economic order. Existing credit rating models rely on financial metrics and deep learning. However, they often overlook insights from non-financial data, such as corporate annual reports. To address this, this paper introduces a corporate credit rating framework that integrates financial data with features extracted from annual reports using FinBERT, aiming to fully leverage…

The U.S. could tumble into recession before seeing Trump’s promised golden age
The labor market has basically stalled since Trump kicked off his “Liberation Day” tariff offensive in April.
Some on Wall Street are mulling the likelihood of a recession.

“The odds are close to 50/50, maybe more,” said Neil Dutta,
head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research in New York.
“The case for a slowdown is pretty compelling.”

Administration officials dismiss …

Analysis | The U.S. could tumble into recession before seeing Trump’s promised golden age
The U.S. economy is at risk of entering a recession before President Trump’s promised golden age, with weak job growth and high inflation blamed on his policies.

EconAgentic in DePIN Markets: A Large Language Model Approach to the Sharing Economy of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure
Yulin Liu, Mocca Schweitzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21368

EconAgentic in DePIN Markets: A Large Language Model Approach to the Sharing Economy of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure
The Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) market is revolutionizing the sharing economy through token-based economics and smart contracts that govern decentralized operations. By 2024, DePIN projects have exceeded \$10 billion in market capitalization, underscoring their rapid growth. However, the unregulated nature of these markets, coupled with the autonomous deployment of AI agents in smart contracts, introduces risks such as inefficiencies and potential misalignment with human value…

Can News Predict the Direction of Oil Price Volatility? A Language Model Approach with SHAP Explanations
Romina Hashamia, Felipe Maldonado
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20707 https…

Can News Predict the Direction of Oil Price Volatility? A Language Model Approach with SHAP Explanations
Financial markets can be highly sensitive to news, investor sentiment, and economic indicators, leading to important asset price fluctuations. In this study we focus on crude oil, due to its crucial role in commodity markets and the global economy. Specifically, we are interested in understanding the directional changes of oil price volatility, and for this purpose we investigate whether news alone -- without incorporating traditional market data -- can effectively predict the direction of oil …

In the hands of someone like Trump,
deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets.
Trump does not like markets,
precisely because they are impersonal and objective.
Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure.
Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete,
they are perfect grist for Trump’s relentless publicity machine,
and a…

FX-constrained growth: Fundamentalists, chartists and the dynamic trade-multiplier
Marwil J. Davila-Fernandez, Serena Sordi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02252 https://

FX-constrained growth: Fundamentalists, chartists and the dynamic trade-multiplier
Behavioural finance offers a valuable framework for examining foreign exchange (FX) market dynamics, including puzzles such as excess volatility and fat-tailed distributions. Yet, when it comes to their interaction with the `real' side of the economy, existing scholarship has overlooked a critical feature of developing countries. They cannot trade in their national currencies and need US dollars to access modern production techniques as well as maintain consumption patterns similar to those of …

While the rare earth market is dominated by China, Canada also has some of the largest reserves in the world.
But new rare earth mining projects have to balance the need for these materials with the environmental impacts that mining has on the land. 
Instead of starting from scratch, the University of Alberta and Calgary-based CVW CleanTech are trying to mine these valuable substances from tailings, a waste product of open-pit oilsands mining.
Previously known as Titanium …

New-age prospectors finding rare earth elements in tailings from Alberta oilsands | CBC News
Rare earth elements are a key part of the transition to a green economy. From magnets in wind turbines to batteries in electric vehicles, they’re needed for technology that is increasingly in demand.