Philippa Kaur

Andrew Odlyzko, a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota, has a side hustle: he has become one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of speculative bubbles. Part of his time is spent at the Bank of England, where he photographs pages from thousands of handwritten ledgers which he later scours for clues about earlier episodes of excess. He hopes that generative artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take the drudgery out of the task. It is not lost on him that the latest speculative mania revolves around the technology itself. More

THE MARKET reaction was brutal. On August 1st Intel released a dismal set of results. The semiconductor giant’s sales were down by 1%, year on year, and the company declared a net loss of $1.6bn, compared with a profit of $1.5bn in the same period in 2023. “Our costs are too high, our margins are too low,” wrote Pat Gelsinger, its chief executive, in a note to employees. As a consequence, Intel plans to slash 15,000 jobs and to suspend dividends, which it has paid since 1992. Since the results were published its share price has plunged by nearly 30%. More

Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s most valuable company, is the archetype of vertical integration. The smartphones and other consumer electronics it is best known for accounted for about half of its revenue and a quarter of its operating profit in the period from April to June. The rest came from the components that go into such devices—including the semiconductors that run them. More

It is hard to imagine life without a smartphone these days. Leave yours at home and you may find yourself lost, moneyless and severed from social contact. Nine in ten American adults own one, according to Pew Research Centre. They spend 3 hours and 45 minutes on them a day, on average, reckons GWI, a firm of analysts. New versions souped up with artificial intelligence may be even harder to put down. More

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Two-wheeled vehicles are an integral part of life in India. They whizz over the country’s broken, clogged roads, carrying families and loads that would fill a small lorry. India manufactures about 20m of them each year, making it one of the world’s leading producers. It is fitting, then, that the country’s largest initial public offering (IPO) so far this year is for an electric-scooter company. On August 2nd Ola Electric plans to sell around $730m of shares at a price that will value the firm at roughly $4bn. More

Near Schumpeter’s home in Los Angeles are two fast-food restaurants almost kitty-corner to each other, as Americans quaintly put it. In different ways, both help explain one of the biggest puzzles in today’s business environment: the state of the American consumer. One is Chipotle Mexican Grill, a canteen-like restaurant famous for its burritos and bowls of chicken, the cheapest of which comes with rice, beans, salsa and various other toppings, and which costs $10.60. The other is McDonald’s, home of the hamburger. Its cheapest meal deal is $5. It comes with a burger, nuggets, fries and such generous quantities of salt it is a blessing that there is a fizzy drink to wash it down with. More

“The risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing,” said Sundar Pichai, the boss of Alphabet, on an earnings call last week. He, like lots of executives nowadays, was talking about artificial intelligence (AI). More specifically, he was talking about building more AI data centres to serve the customers of the tech giant’s cloud-computing arm. The sums involved are eye-popping. Alphabet’s capital spending is expected to grow by about half this year, to $48bn. Much of that will be spent on AI-related gear. More