Economists warn of flaws in US inflation report

12/18/25 / Financial Times

CPI came in at 2.7% YoY vs. expected 3.1%. Core at 2.6% vs. 3%. Looks great—except a 43-day government shutdown wrecked data collection. BLS couldn’t collect October data. Their fix was to carry forward September prices, assume zero October inflation. Housing—a third of the index—shows shelter basically flat. At some point, question should be asked - why even publish this number?

The twist: Trueflation independently shows 2.5-2.7%. Nearly identical.

Two possibilities:

1. Lucky guess. BLS’s statistical duct tape happened to land close. Back to reality when real collection resumes.
2. BLS methodology is fundamentally broken. If guesses match reality better than their normal surveys, that’s a problem. But admitting it would tank markets.

Markets are ignoring the report (I think), Fed cut rates anyway. We need to wait until January for an update.

And if someone is interested in why Trueflation exists—BLS uses survey methods from the 1950s. People manually collecting prices, taking monthly samples. This all takes time and data showing up in their reports is stale. Trueflation scrapes real-time transaction data and online prices.

The Art Market’s $13.2 Billion Comeback]

12/17/25 / WSJ

Rich people are buying expensive art again

When monied collectors start competing for $236M Klimt portraits and $31M hippo-shaped bar carts, it’s worth paying attention. Art spending often signals risk-on sentiment—and after a two-year slump, the auction market just woke up.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s combined for $13.2B in 2025, up from $11.7B last year. Trophy art ($10M+) climbed 19%. US buyers increased spending 15%. Sellers finally lowered asking prices, which unstuck the market.

The demographic shift is interesting too. Under-40 buyers now make up 25-33% of the customer base. First-timers who returned spent double what they did initially.

Still below the 2022 peak of $16.4B, but the direction changed. People stopped worrying about inflation and started spending again.

Uber CEO says AI is turning his engineers into ‘superhumans’

12/19/25 / Business Insider

Khosrowshahi’s productivity take is the opposite of most CEOs. Standard playbook says AI makes engineers 20-30% more productive, so cut 20-30% of headcount. He’s hiring more instead—if each engineer is now a superhuman, why would you want fewer of them?

This aligns with how I think about it. If you get a significant productivity boost while salary stays the same, the value of your workers just jumped dramatically. You don’t let go of employees who just got much better at their jobs. You give them a raise and hire more like them.

The obvious counter: corporations needing cash right now don’t think long term, so a sudden productivity boost means layoffs. Fine, but that’s the edge case, not the default.

Look at AI/ML engineer salaries—stratospheric. Companies clearly will pay for talent. They just need different talent, or at least talent that can learn and catch up fast.

How Lina Khan Killed iRobot

12/19/25 / WSJ

“Regulators trusted Chinese firms more than they do Amazon.” — Andy Jassy

It is a sad day when a great American company fails. Not just sad—tragic. Think Greek drama.

Here is the short version: iRobot, founded by MIT roboticists Colin Angle, Helen Greiner, and Rodney Brooks in 1990, started out building robots for DARPA and NASA before pivoting to autonomous vacuum cleaners with the Roomba in 2002. After 35 years of growing their brand and selling over 50 million robots, Amazon agreed to acquire them. However, this deal was slowly killed by Khan’s FTC to protect Chinese manufacturers (there was no real American competition at that time). Eventually, iRobot’s share price cratered to about 50 cents from its January 2021 peak of nearly $200. In December 2025, the company filed for bankruptcy. It will now be acquired by Picea—its Chinese contract manufacturer.

Khan’s FTC also lost Microsoft/Activision and Meta/Within in court. Those companies survived. iRobot didn’t have that luck—it was small enough to bleed out while waiting for regulators to see reason. Next time, the lucky stars might not align for one of the giants either.

I don’t want to pontificate. But we’ve collectively ignored the fact that a great injustice has been served here. An American company, born at MIT, building robots for NASA and the military before bringing them into our homes—killed by its own government in the name of protecting competition that didn’t exist.

And the final irony? Warren warned that Amazon would use Roombas to peek into our private lives. Now it’s Beijing doing the peeking.

Amazon Caught North Korean IT Worker By Tracing Keystroke Data

12/19/25 / Bloomberg

Putting a spotlight on this for all my friends who do personal things on their work laptops. If Amazon is measuring the length of your keystrokes, imagine what else they track.

Related: I remember when working at Amazon (back when we still had desk phones) I would get strange calls almost every day. Robocalls—but the weird part was that the second you picked up the headset, they’d blast a message in Chinese. Someone helped me translate it. Turned out to be a solicitation for information about Amazon. Back then it sounded silly. Now we know.