1. New research has identified 17 overlapping factors that affect your risk of stroke, dementia and late-life depression, suggesting that a number of lifestyle changes could simultaneously lower the risk of all three. Though they may appear unrelated, people who have dementia or depression or who experience a stroke also often end up having one or both of the other conditions, said Dr. Sanjula Singh, a principal investigator at the Brain Care Labs at Massachusetts General Hospital and the lead author of the study. That’s because they may share underlying damage to small blood vessels in the brain, experts said. Some of the risk factors common to the three brain diseases, including high blood pressure and diabetes, appear to cause this kind of damage. Research suggests that at least 60 percent of strokes, 40 percent of dementia cases and 35 percent of late-life depression cases could be prevented or slowed by controlling risk factors. (Sources: nytimes.com, jnnp.bmj.com, advances.umw.edu, thelancet.com)
2. Artificial intelligence is hungry for power at a scale that defies belief. Last week, OpenAI and Nvidia said they would work together to develop 10 gigawatts of data center capacity over an unspecified period. Inside OpenAI, Sam Altman floated an even more staggering number: 250 GW of compute in total by 2033, roughly one-third of the peak power consumption in the entire U.S.! Let that sink in for a minute. A large data center used to mean 10 to 50 megawatts of power. Now, developers are pitching single campuses in the multigigawatt range—on par with the energy draw of entire cities—all to power clusters of AI chips. (Source: theinformation.com)
3. Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills. The Maryland city is well over an hour’s drive from the northern Virginia region known as Data Center Alley. But Kevin Stanley, a 57-year-old who survives on disability payments, says his energy bills are about 80% higher than they were about three years ago. “They’re going up and up,” he said. “You wonder, ‘What is your breaking point?’” It’s an increasingly dramatic ripple effect of the AI boom as energy-hungry data centers send power costs to records in much of the US, pulling everyday households into paying for the digital economy. The power needs of the massive complexes are rapidly driving up electricity bills — piling onto the rising prices for food, housing and other essentials already straining consumers. That’s starting to have economic and political reverberations across the country as utilities and local officials wrestle over how to divvy up the costs. Yet those same facilities are a linchpin of US leadership in the global AI race. A Bloomberg News analysis of wholesale electricity prices for tens of thousands of locations across the country reveals the effects of the AI boom on the power market with unprecedented granularity. Electricity now costs as much as 267% more for a single month than it did five years ago in areas located near significant data center activity. (Source: bloomberg.com)
4. Adam Josephson:
I’ve written extensively about mushrooming bank lending to nondepository financial institutions (NDFIs) such as broker-dealers, hedge funds, private equity and credit funds, securitization vehicles and subprime auto lenders. Such lending to the financial sector has helped fuel record-high leverage among hedge funds, decade-high leverage among primary dealers, record-high and rising margin debt, and record-high and rising repurchase agreement (repo) lending to hedge funds and others, which in turn has helped fuel record-high asset prices in many cases (link).
We already knew NDFI lending was booming: it had grown from $300 billion in 2016 to $1.4 trillion as of June 30, 2025 per call report data, accounting for nearly 11% of total loans. But it’s even bigger than that. Much bigger. In yesterday’s H.8 release (Assets and Liabilities of Commercial Banks in the United States), the Federal Reserve made substantial revisions to historical loan data, resulting in ~$340 billion higher NDFI loans and equivalent lower loans in other categories (including ~$170 billion lower commercial and industrial (C&I) loans and ~$150 billion lower consumer loans). As a result, bank lending other than to NDFIs has in fact declined this year (by 0.4%), and NDFI loans now account for 13% of all loans and are nearly two-thirds the size of C&I loans.
It’s no wonder, then, why the asset/financial economy is booming and the real economy is doing much the opposite. (Source: adamjosephson.substack.com)
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