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US debt is now $37trn – should we be worried?

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Simon Jack

BBC business editor

Getty Images Donald Trump waves wearing a baseball cap and suit in front of a huge US flag posterGetty Images

As Donald Trump cheered the passage of his self-styled, and officially named, Big Beautiful Budget Bill through Congress this week, long-sown seeds of doubt about the scale and sustainability of US borrowing from the rest of the world sprouted anew.

Trump’s tax-cutting budget bill is expected to add at least $3 trillion (£2.2 trillion) to the US’s already eye-watering $37tn (£27tn) debt pile. There is no shortage of critics of the plan, not least Trump’s former ally Elon Musk, who has called it a “disgusting abomination”.

The growing debt pile leaves some to wonder whether there is a limit to how much the rest of the world will lend Uncle Sam.

Those doubts have been showing up recently in the weaker value of the dollar and the higher interest rate investors are demanding to lend money to America.

It needs to borrow this money to make up the difference between what it earns and what it spends every year.

Since the beginning of this year, the dollar has fallen 10% against the pound and 15% against the euro.

Although US borrowing costs have been steady overall, the difference between the interest rates paid on longer-term loans versus shorter-term loans – what’s known as the yield curve – has increased, or steepened, signalling increased doubts about the long-term sustainability of US borrowing.

And that is despite the fact that the US has lowered interest rates more slowly than the EU and the UK, which would normally make the dollar stronger because investors can get higher interest rates on bank deposits.

The founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Ray Dalio, believes that US borrowing is at a crossroads.

On its current trajectory he estimates the US will soon be spending $10tn a year in loan and interest repayments.

“I am confident that the [US] government’s financial condition is at an inflection point because, if this is not dealt with now, the debts will build up to levels where they can’t be managed without great trauma,” he says.

So what might that trauma look like?

The first option is a drastic reduction in government spending, a big increase in taxes or both.

Ray Dalio suggests that cutting the budget deficit from its current 6% to 3% soon could head off trouble in the future.

Trump’s new budget bill did cut some spending, but it also cut taxes more, and so the current political trajectory is going the other way.

Secondly, as in previous crises, the US central bank could print more money and use it to buy up government debt – as we saw after the great financial crisis of 2008.

But that can end up fuelling inflation and inequality as the owners of assets like houses and shares do much better than those who rely on the value of labour.

The third is a straightforward US default. Can’t pay won’t pay. Given that the “full faith and credit of the US Treasury” underpins the entire global financial system, that would make the great financial crisis look like a picnic.

‘Cleanest dirty shirt’

So how likely is any of this?

Right now, mercifully, not very.

But the reasons why are not actually that comforting. The fact is, whether we like it or not, the world has few alternatives to the dollar.

Economist and former bond supremo Mohamed El-Erian told the BBC that many are trying to reduce dollar holdings, “the dollar is overweight and the world knows it, which is why we have seen a rise in gold, the euro and the pound, but it’s hard to move at scale so there’s really very few places to go”.

“The dollar is like your cleanest dirty shirt, you have to keep wearing it.”

Nevertheless, the future of the dollar and the world’s benchmark asset – US government bonds – is being discussed at the highest levels.

The governor of the Bank of England recently told the BBC that the levels of US debt and the status of the dollar is “very much on [US Treasury] Secretary Bessent’s mind. I don’t think the dollar is fundamentally under threat at the moment but he is very aware of these issues and I don’t think it is something that he underestimates.”

Debt of $37tn is an unfathomable number. If you saved a million dollars every day, it would take you 100,000 years to save up that much.

The sensible way to look at debt is as a percentage of a country’s income. The US economy produces income of around $25tn a year.

While its debt to income level is much higher than many, it’s not as high as Japan or Italy, and it has the benefit of the world’s most innovative and wealth creating economy behind it.

At home I have a book called Death of the Dollar by William F Rickenbacker in which he warns of the risks to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. It was written in 1968. Mr Rickenbacker is no longer with us – the dollar is.

But it doesn’t mean that its status and value is a divine right.



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Can AI run a successful vending business? An AI startup tested it out

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Because AI isn’t (yet) able to physically restock the machine, the AI model could email company employees who handled such tasks. Beyond that, however, the AI model, dubbed Claudius for the experiment, was tasked with many of the responsibilities of a traditional operator, including selecting and maintaining inventory, setting prices and maximizing profit.

The upshot: “If Anthropic were deciding today to expand into the in-office vending market, we would not hire Claudius,” the company wrote in its blog.

The experiment showed that while the AI model was effective at tasks such as identifying suppliers, adapting to users’ requests and “jailbreak resistance,” as Anthropic employees tried to trick Claudius into stock sensitive items, Claudius failed as a convenience service operator because it ignored profitable opportunities, instructed customers to make payments at a Venmo address it had imagined (instead of the one created), sold products at a loss, offered excessive discounts and mismanaged inventory.

Although version one of Project Vend wasn’t successful at the bottom line, Anthropic predicts that AI middle managers will come to pass. “It’s worth remembering that the AI won’t have to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost in some cases,” the company wrote in its blog.

Read the full story here.



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Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

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Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

PR Newswire

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025


  • Globant is partnering with Suntory Global Spirits to build a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent
  • With the Agent, Suntory Global Spirits employees can access data insights and self-service intelligence, speeding up decision-making across product development, marketing, sales and strategy

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Globant (NYSE: GLOB), a digitally native company focused on reinventing businesses through innovative technology solutions, today announced a reinvention partnership with Suntory Global Spirits, the world leader in premium spirits, to build and deploy a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent. By compressing days of work into seconds and supporting real-time decision-making for sales, marketing, and strategy, Globant’s Commercial Insights Agent is transforming operations for the beverage company.



The AI-powered agent can interpret complex business questions across dashboards, reports, and unstructured documentation for Suntory Global Spirits, eliminating the need for manual insight requests. By automating insight retrieval, the Commercial Insights Agent reduces operating costs tied to traditional business intelligence workflows and significantly reduces time-to-action. What once required multiple cycles of back-and-forth between business and analytics teams can now be executed on demand, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value strategic tasks.

“Our work with Suntory Global Spirits exemplifies how visionary companies can harness the power of agentic and generative AI to fundamentally transform the way they operate,” said Santiago Noziglia, Retail, CPG and Automotive AI Studio CEO at Globant. “The Commercial Insights Agent is more than a productivity tool; it’s a strategic enabler that redefines how teams access knowledge, make decisions, and unlock growth. Together, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when building an AI-powered enterprise.”

Additional benefits of the Commercial Insights Agent include:

  • Self-serve decision support at scale: Teams at Suntory Global Spirits, especially across marketing, sales and product management, can independently access data insights, ask questions, or generate reports without bottlenecks or dependencies on other teams.
  • Contextual recommendations powered by GenAI: The Commercial Insights Agent is trained on internal data to provide contextual GenAI recommendations that speed up decision-making.
  • AI Agent foundation: The Commercial Insights Agent is just the beginning for Suntory Global Spirits, which can now use the agent as a template for new use cases across brand planning, commercial forecasting and innovation pipelines.

To learn more about Globant’s AI-powered tools, visit https://www.globant.com/enterprise-ai.

About Globant

At Globant, we create the digitally-native products that people love. We bridge the gap between businesses and consumers through technology and creativity, leveraging our expertise in AI. We dare to digitally transform organizations and strive to delight their customers.

  • We have more than 31,100 employees and are present in 36 countries across 5 continents, working for companies like Google, Electronic Arts, and Santander, among others.
  • We were named a Worldwide Leader in AI Services (2023) and a Worldwide Leader in Media Consultation, Integration, and Business Operations Cloud Service Providers (2024) by IDC MarketScape report.
  • We are the fastest-growing IT brand and the 5th strongest IT brand globally (2024), according to Brand Finance.
  • We were featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.
  • We are active members of The Green Software Foundation (GSF) and the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.

Contact: pr@globant.com
Sign up to get first dibs on press news and updates.
For more information, visit www.globant.com.



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AI Company Buys Bitcoin Miner in $9 Billion Deal to Expand Data Power

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AI cloud provider CoreWeave announced it will acquire bitcoin mining firm Core Scientific in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $9 billion, according to Reuters.

As AI workloads continue to surge, energy-hungry data centers have become a crucial asset. Firms like CoreWeave, which began as a crypto miner and later transitioned into AI infrastructure, are aggressively expanding their access to power and physical computing capacity. Per Reuters, the acquisition will give CoreWeave control of Core Scientific’s 1.3 gigawatts of contracted power and its development pipeline, a major boost in the race to scale AI operations.

Under the terms of the deal, Core Scientific shareholders will receive 0.1235 shares of newly issued CoreWeave stock for each Core Scientific share they hold. The offer values Core Scientific at $20.40 per share—a 66% premium over the stock’s price before deal discussions became public in late June, Reuters noted.

Despite the premium, Core Scientific’s stock dropped 22% in early trading Monday, while CoreWeave, which is backed by Nvidia, saw its shares decline 4.5%.

Related: Binance Advises Governments on Crypto Rules and Digital Asset Reserves

The acquisition is expected to help CoreWeave reduce more than $10 billion in projected future lease expenses tied to current site agreements over the next 12 years. The move not only expands CoreWeave’s energy footprint but also signals a broader trend of bitcoin miners diversifying into AI to remain viable in a rapidly shifting tech landscape.

“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC (high-performance computing) workloads at scale,” said CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator, in a statement released alongside the announcement.

Industry analysts see the transaction as a potential inflection point. Gautam Chhugani of Bernstein told Reuters the deal could become a blueprint for other miners looking to reposition themselves in the AI economy. Power access, he emphasized, remains the chief bottleneck for the expansion of AI-focused data centers.

Founded in 2017 as an Ethereum mining operation, CoreWeave exited the crypto mining business following Ethereum’s 2022 shift to a proof-of-stake model, which dramatically reduced miner incentives. Since then, the company has grown rapidly, with revenue surging more than eightfold last year, per its IPO filing.

Source: Reuters



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