Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, on the use of AI: “We’re just in an incredible new environment, and the technology is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and every company understands because they’re using these AI models at home or personally, but now we can really show how they’re going to get value for their companies.”

Paula Campbell Roberts, KKR chief investment strategist for global wealth, shares key investment themes in the firm’s recently published Q3 2024 Global Wealth Investment Playbook. According to Roberts, as interest rates decline and growth slows, investors are looking to shift tilts to favor equity-based strategies, increase duration within credit to lock in yields, and mitigate volatility. Read the report here.

Faced with a complex patchwork of state and federal regulations, the senior housing and care industry is closely watching the aftermath of a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 28, the court overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine, a 40-year-old legal precedent that required courts to defer to regulatory agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. The decision means that the power to interpret regulatory questions lies with the courts, not the government agencies that impose the rules.

Demand for data center capacity will remain strong for at least the next five years, predicts a July 23 report from Moody’s Ratings, helping REITs Digital Realty Trust and Equinix to grow their portfolios and uphold key credit metrics.

Property managers have begun offering concessions in a bid to attract new tenants. Why? A multifamily construction boom (more apartment units were completed in June than in any month in nearly 50 years) has caused the rental market to cool, though rent growth is only marginally softer than 2023. That’s the word from Zillow, the web-based real estate marketplace. The concessions being offered to would-be tenants are short-term in nature and include perks such as ...

Stephen Hall had a catchphrase he repeatedly impressed upon his son Greg: “Everything is sales.” The senior Hall learned that lesson as a lifelong seller of medical devices before building his own business manufacturing signage and marketing products. For a number of years, father’s catchphrase left his son cold. Greg Hall recalls: “He would tell me, ‘No matter what you do, no matter what your job is, you need to be able to sell — whether you’re selling an idea or product.’ I resented it at first,” he admits, “because I equated sales with some degree of artifice.”

The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, has surged. The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand.

Despite the turbulence the airline industry has faced in recent years — from pandemic shutdowns to winter storms to rising fuel prices — the winds may finally be shifting in the industry’s favor, according to a new report from Bank of America (BofA). With fuel costs easing and pricing power returning, there are several reasons to believe now could be an ideal time to reconsider the sector.

About one-third of the global population, around 3 billion people, doesn’t have access to the internet or has poor connections because of infrastructure limitations, economic disparities and geographic isolation. Today’s satellites and ground-based networks leave communications gaps where, because of geography, setting up traditional ground-based communications equipment would be too expensive.

Summer 2024’s record heat is creating problems for transportation infrastructure, from roads to rails. New York’s Third Avenue Bridge, which swings open for ship traffic on the Harlem River, was stuck for hours after its metal expanded in the heat and it couldn’t close. Roads have buckled on hot days in several states, including Washington and Wisconsin. Amtrak warned passengers to prepare for heat-related problems hours before a daylong outage between New York and New Jersey; the risks to power lines and rails during high temperatures are a growing source of delays for the train system.

Most finance market observers know of bitcoin, the prominent digital currency accepted by many as “real money.” But anybody who wants to understand more than the basics is battered with a confusing blizzard of words, such as “blockchain technology” and “distributed ledgers.”

There has been a wave of lengthy extensions to the lifespans of numerous nuclear power plants in the United States and around the world, as well as prospective conversions of retired coal-fired power plants into advanced reactor facilities. Though more than a dozen U.S. reactors have shut since 2013, U.S. energy companies may be on the verge of reviving several of the plants that were idled.

Every month we receive hundreds of press releases, most of which are issued by public relations firms representing their investment manager clients. The last paragraph in each of those press releases is almost always reserved for a few sentences describing the nature of the firm for whom the press release is being released, and in nine out of 10 cases — perhaps more — the first sentence says something such as, “XYZ Corp. is a leading investment management firm …”

The world’s unrelenting thirst for energy is a story as old as the industrial revolution itself. From the coal-fired factories of 19th-century Britain to the modern semiconductor fabs of Silicon Valley, access to abundant and affordable energy has been the catalyst for economic progress throughout the ages.

As I write this, gold continues to trade above $2,500 an ounce after surging past the psychologically important level for the first time ever in mid-August. For seasoned gold-mining investors, this should be a moment of validation. After all, the yellow metal has long been seen as the ultimate hedge against economic uncertainty. And yet, despite the bull run, gold stocks — those companies that mine, process and sell the metal — are trading at historically low valuations relative to the market.

Space is an unnatural environment for humans. We can’t survive unprotected in a pure vacuum for more than two minutes. Getting to space involves being strapped to a barely contained chemical explosion. Since 1961, fewer than 700 people have been into space. Private space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin hope to boost that number to many thousands, and SpaceX is already taking bookings for flights to Earth orbit.

A question-and-answer session with Tricia Peterson, managing partner and COO at Accord Group.