Joseph Belbruno Blog

  Essay | The Trade War Couldn’t Change China’s Economy Oct. 31, 2025 9:00 pm  ET Trump and Xi shake hands after leaving trade talks on Oct. 30, their first face-to-face meeting in six years.  andrew caballero-reynolds/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have walked back from the ledge—again. But even as the world’s two superpowers deescalate a trade fight that had threatened to destabilize the global economy, a new reality is setting in—that Washington may finally have to give up on its long-standing aim of pushing Beijing to restructure its economy. For years and through successive U.S. administrations, senior officials in Washington had hoped that bringing China into the global trading system would open up the country’s political system. In the decades since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, those hopes of political liberalization have largely been dashed. The sense of disappointment has only grown as...

  Come l'America ha «regalato» alla Cina la sua arma di ricatto: le terre rare che Xi usa contro Trump 31 ottobre 2025, 08:57 - Aggiornata il 31 ottobre 2025 , 09:34 Un tempo gli Stati Uniti detenevano il primato nella filiera che porta dall'estrazione delle terre rare alla produzione di magneti ad alta tecnologia. Come è stato possibile perdere quella posizione a favore della Cina? Cosa rischia l'Occidente - e che cosa può fare per rimediare? È  l’arma di ricatto più efficace  che  Xi Jinping  ha potuto sfoderare nel corso della  trattativa commerciale con Donald Trump : il monopolio quasi totale che la Cina ha sulle  terre rare , essenziali soprattutto per produrre magneti dagli svariati usi industriali.  Questo dominio cinese è  un problema perfino superiore per l’Europa , ancora meno provvista di filiere di approvvigionamento autonome. Gli ottimisti pensano che questo ricatto cinese sia destinato a esaurirsi nel tempo: una volta usato al ...

  Big Tech Is Spending More Than Ever on AI and It’s Still Not Enough says it is still running up against capacity constraints as it tries to train new AI models and power its existing products at the same time.  Microsoft   MSFT  -1.51% says it is seeing so much customer demand for its data-center-driven services that it plans to double its data-center footprint in the next two years. And  Amazon.com   AMZN  9.58% says it is racing to bring more cloud capacity online as soon as it can. “We’ve been short [on computing power] now for many quarters. I thought we were going to catch up. We are not. Demand is increasing,” said Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer. “When you see these kinds of demand signals and we know we’re behind, we do need to spend.” , Microsoft and Amazon have all told investors over the past 48 hours that they will increase spending in 2026. Investors gave their blessing to plans laid out by Google and Amazon, with some worr...

  School Cellphone Bans Work for Children Florida was the first state to implement a statewide ban in May 2023. Researchers David Figlio from the University of Rochester and Umut Özek from Rand Corporation looked at results over the two years after the ban took effect in a school district that is one of the country’s largest. The unnamed district, they said, implemented an even stricter rule than required by law: Students couldn’t pull out their phones at any time of day. It seems to be working. Students improved their rankings on standardized tests by 1.1 percentile points overall between the spring before the ban took effect and the spring two years later. Those improvements were more substantial for black students (1.2) and boys (1.4), and for middle and high schoolers (1.3). Florida tests three times a year, and the effect was more modest—0.6 points of improvement on average—across all tests. But the spring tests are higher stakes because they’re used for school and student acc...

  Big Tech’s market dominance is becoming ever more extreme In a week when Nvidia’s value reached $5tn, investors in even the broadest index of global companies are now heavily exposed to the AI boom AI optimism on Wall Street is ubiquitous but the rally relies on the biggest stocks such as Amazon, Meta, Nvidia and Microsoft steadily generating unprecedented amounts of cash long into the future © FT montage/Getty Images Published an hour ago US stocks rose to their 36th record high of the year on Tuesday afternoon, but portfolio manager Jacob Sonnenberg was in no mood to celebrate. Propelled by a handful of huge Silicon Valley technology companies tied to the artificial intelligence boom, the S&P 500 ended the session in the green. But this was despite the fact that 397 stocks lost ground. In 35 years, the blue-chip index has never posted a gain on a day when so many of its constituents have sold off, according to the Bespoke Investment Group.  “I understand Nvidia is spit...

  Skip to main content Search Account Explore content About  the journal Publish  with us nature     news feature     article NEWS FEATURE 29 October 2025 7 basic science discoveries that changed the world Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government. By   Michael Marshall Twitter   Facebook   Email Illustration: Ibrahim Arafath You have full access to this article via your institution. Download PDF Under President Donald Trump, the US government is  gutting scientific research . The National Institutes of Health  has cut almost US$2 billion of grants  that were already approved, and the National Science Foundation has  terminated more than 1,400 grants . And the president has even bigger plans to eviscerate science. His proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut non-defence-related research an...