Stocks

Tuesday

Maximillian Garely

Trump Accounts are good economics

The most interesting piece of economic policy from the Trump White House is not a tariff, nor is it an AI export restriction. It’s a brokerage account for babies. Under the new Trump Accounts program, eligible American children born between 2025 and 2028 will receive $1,000 from the Treasury, to be invested in a broad index of American companies. Parents, employers, and other benefactors can contribute up to $5,000 more annually. Before these children can walk or speak, they will own their slice of corporate America.  At first glance, this seems uncharacteristically left wing – as if a fever dream from Andrew Yang’s presidential platform had escaped and somehow convinced the Trump administration of its merits.

Tuesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Comparing the sentences of Sam Bankman-Fried and Tom Hayes

From our US edition

Compare these two sentences, as tests used to say. First, Sam Bankman-Fried, the thirty-two-year-old American founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, who has been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for a fraud that cost customers and investors $11 billion and for which, according to the New York judge, he uttered “never a word of remorse.” The jail term may look long but experts say he could be out in eighteen and at least Bankman-Fried has a prospect of sunshine before he’s old — unlike other US fraudsters such as Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi-scheme operator Allan Stanford, whose century-plus sentences ensured they would never be out at all.

bankman-fried

Friday

Jasper Spires

Internet users are the new surrealists, and they keep changing the world

As 2021 continues to progress at a dizzying rate, one of the recurring social phenomenon we’re seeing is the surreal eruption of online activism in the real world. From the recent explosion of GameStop share prices – hiked up by amateur investors co-ordinating online – to the large-scale protests and riots in Washington following the 2020 Presidential election, the communities in cyberspace continue to spill out into the real world. The question is: why are these kinds of actions becoming an increasingly unsettling occurrence in the usual running of society? In the lexicon of web-design, the term UX, user experience, is often used to describe how an individual may interact with a product, specifically a webpage.