Crypto News: Weekend Edition: When does AI show up in GDP?

Welcome to the weekend, and to February.

This week brought us several different flavors of chaos, from the panic about DeepSeek's cheaper AI model to the frenzied 48 hours of a federal funding freeze. But as the dust settles and markets broadly recover their losses, we're left wondering: what difference will it make, if any? It's time to step back and think in decades rather than days or years.

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Economic Impact

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics," wrote Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow in 1987, when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were sprinting to bring personal computers onto desks around the world. It would be another decade before Fed Chair Alan Greenspan found evidence of the boom in the GDP numbers. DeepSeek has made us wonder, when does it happen for AI?

Weekend Essay | The Big Take

AI Has Rocked the Stock Market, But What Will It Do for the Economy?

For all the excitement, evidence of a boost to productivity is still thin on the ground

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DeepSeek has also catapulted China's economy back into the conversation. A lot has happened since 2020, when Bloomberg's Chief Economist Tom Orlik published a book calling the country, "The Bubble That Never Pops." The real estate sector collapsed, and Beijing cracked down on its tech and financial sectors, kneecapping growth. But even as market sentiment remains near rock bottom, there are signs that the strategy is starting to pay off.

Next Chapter

Why The China Bubble Still Hasn't Popped

Changes in the Chinese economy signal evolution, not collapse.

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Who gets to have the most influence over an economy, and how? President Donald Trump isn't the only one with doubts about central bank independence. Political theorist Leah Downey has written a book arguing the small-d democratic case for oversight. She thinks the due diligence that lawmakers would have to conduct around money creation would improve their policymaking — and help restore the trust of their electorate.

Review

Who Should Have the Final Say Over Central Banks?

A political theorist's case against Fed independence.

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After the Wildfires

"No city is more in need of its next incarnation than LA"

Dana Cuff

Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Director of cityLAB at UCLA

Greater Los Angeles, a region of 18.5 million people, is not totally over, writes Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles. But the present moment is pivotal, and the fires have exposed a reality many would prefer to ignore: This is an unstable city in the truest sense of the word.

Photographer: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images/Getty Images

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Dispatches

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
The world's biggest art show is in...an airport. The 2025 Islamic Arts Biennale is now on view in Jeddah's Hajj terminal, through which millions of pilgrims traveling to Mecca will pass. For many, this will be their first experience of MBS's new Saudi Arabia, but unlike rock concerts and sporting events, this show is directed squarely at them, rather than Western liberal audiences.

London, UK
Martin Gill is a UK-based criminologist who deploys secret shoplifters for in-store "penetration tests." Gill used to be an academic before he started a consultancy on retail crime; today he has three shoplifters working for him, who enter stores on assignments often unknown to even the store's manager. "They've lived their life stealing," Gill says. "In some ways that has more resonance with retailers than does a professor of criminology."