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Oxford Economics is a global research and consulting firm providing macroeconomic forecasting and analysis for businesses, governments, and institutions.
Diesel averaged $6.30 a gallon on Wednesday, about 68% above its level before the Iran war, according to AAA. Fed district reports describe surcharges spreading, with some firms able to reprice and others absorbing the cost.
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President Trump is keeping his tariffs even as more than 64% of US adults say he has gone too far, up from 58% in January. Importers deciding whether to absorb the duties until the Nov. 3 midterms have little in the record to suggest relief follows the vote.
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S&P 500's bull market turns four on October 12 with a 117% gain, the sixth-best since World War Two. Its next leg depends on whether a few AI-heavy companies, now a far larger share of the index, can show their data-center spending pays.
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America's trade deficit widened 13.7% to $105.6 billion in August, its largest since March 2025. Imports this year still run above 2025's, so the narrower year-to-date gap has come from faster export growth while US buying abroad keeps rising.
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Telstra has switched on the Perth-Sydney route of its Aura fibre network, its longest leg, with 9,000km of a planned 14,000km now built. WA operators placing AI and cloud workloads now have a second east-west path to bring into this quarter's capacity and redundancy reviews.
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Sanae Takaichi is due to address Japan's parliament with a 370 trillion yen, 14-year investment plan whose public share her government has not specified. The speech tests the fiscal part of a bond selloff that also runs on war-driven energy costs and rate hikes.
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Euro-area firms are paying for AI without new debt, ECB survey data shows, while the five largest US tech firms carry $3 trillion in debt. That keeps European balance sheets out of a cooling AI bond market, but the compute gap with the US still has to be closed some other way.
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IBM and Oxford Economics found that 60% of 8,800 full-time employees worried AI was eroding their skills. The closest controlled test, a 52-developer Anthropic experiment, supports building practice into AI-assisted work and is too small to blame the tools for skill loss.
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Commerce Department figures put US second-quarter growth at 2.2%, up from a 1.5% estimate, as consumer spending rose at a 3.8% pace. Chip imports cut that total, so an AI pullback would hit hardest through the stock gains funding wealthy households' spending.
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IBM's survey of 1,500 CFOs finds 62% say their roles now cover technology or AI strategy, while 6% call their own finance teams transformation-ready. The case that AI budgets now sit with finance rests on CFOs describing their own authority.
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Both governments drew $20bn lists at rates up to 50%, which holds the collectable duty near $10bn a year; the item with no price tag is the Keystone reopening Canada withdrew when the metals deal died.
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Only a quarter of more than 3,000 executives told Deloitte they have moved 40% or more of their AI pilots into production. The explanation on offer for the other three quarters is one consultant's account of his own project reviews.
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Analysts expect a rise in the base rate when the FOMC concludes on Wednesday, against a White House that has lobbied hard for looser conditions. UBS's Paul Donovan says a surprise is what adds a bond risk premium.
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Fortune attributes the US goods deficit with Canada to oil bought cheap for Midwest refineries. Washington's answer so far is a 50% tariff on $20 billion of Canadian products and an import ban on whey, alcohol and mopeds.
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A twelve-week countdown for Black Friday 2026 sizes the load target from sessions per hour and average session length, then pushes a journey-level test past that target until the response-time tail bends.
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Cognizant published its AI exposure research and its graduate hiring plan on the same day. Read together, they show whose exposure number comes with a caveat attached and whose gets quoted straight.
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PwC's Oxford Economics modelling puts $31.6 trillion into AI infrastructure by 2050 and raises equipment to 93% of data centre capex, which is the figure that decides how any of these sites get financed.
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AI made production cheap and pushed the bill downstream onto review and integration work the buyer already pays for, which is where Webb expects the correction even as Bain finds 90% of budgets still rising.
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The ONS widened what counts as digital infrastructure to include data centres, hardware and spectrum. The bigger total went backwards in its first year.
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Oxford Economics has US corporate AI spending up 40% and the euro area up 12% by end-2027. Compound both and the divergence is under four points a year. The BIS warning is about four companies.
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Invest · August 17, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers