Today Nvidia has just reached the market value of $5Trillion. Both Microsoft and Apple have the market value of $4T. Gold return just above the mark of $4000/ounce.
On October 29, 2025, the Federal Reserve lowered its benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percentage points, bringing the target range to 3.75% - 4.00%. This marks the second rate cut of the year, following a similar reduction in September.
Economic Conditions: The Fed cited moderate economic expansion but noted that job gains have slowed and the unemployment rate has slightly increased.
Inflation Concerns: Inflation has risen since earlier in the year and remains elevated, complicating the Fed’s dual mandate to maximize employment while controlling inflation.
Labor Market Risks: There are increasing concerns about downside risks to employment, prompting the need for a rate cut to stimulate the economy.
The Bank of Canada (BoC) just cut its interest rate by 25 basis points, bringing it down from 2.50% to 2.25%. This is the second consecutive cut from the central bank as it cut its rate by 25 basis points in September.
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without. ― Immanuel Kant
Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for. ― Immanuel Kant
Book: Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, 2023
As a response to the combined effect of the privatisation of the internet on the one hand, and the nearly no-strings-attached way with which states have injected eye-wateringly large sums of money into banks and large businesses after the 2008 financial crisis on the other, rent has supplanted profit as the main driver of the global economy.
The reference to feudalism is quite literal: capitalists, according to Varoufakis, are still doing very well, but they are no longer running the show. They have turned into (very well-off) vassals, who have to pay their dues to techno-feudal lords (Amazon; Google; Apple; Meta) – say, in order to selling and/or advertise on such platforms. The reason why this is the case is that rent-based capital has, just like under pre-industrial feudalism, supplanted profit-based capital as the driver of the economy. The fundamental system is no longer one where the capitalist extracts value from workers to generate as much profit as possible and be competitive in the market; re-invests in new machineries, technologies, etc., in order to make profit extraction ever more efficient; and thereby generates growth and innovation. It has rather become one where big tech bosses act like feudal lords – rentiers who own digital, rather than natural, “land” and can extract value (albeit in slightly different ways) from everyone who want or need to use their platforms. Like medieval lords, their power and wealth comes from sheer rent – for which, in a certain sense, they do not need to “do” anything.
Yet the idea that fighting it requires grappling with how to escape collectively from “carefully curated isolation” remains a crucial insight. If only we knew how.