Author: GT

Bank of America on Friday raised its average gold price forecast for the next six years by 6% to $3,049 per ounce, citing President Donald Trump’s threats to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence among other factors. The Wall Street investment bank said it remains bullish on gold, “with a short-/medium-term target of US$4,000/oz.” The bank left its near-term forecasts unchanged with gold forecast to hit $3,356 this year and $3,659 next year. Gold is viewed by investors as a safe-haven asset in times of financial and geopolitical instability. And Trump’s repeated attacks on the Federal Reserve are raising concern in…

Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban thinks America’s healthcare industry is broken, and he’s not mincing words about it. “No one looks at the financial side of healthcare and says, ‘This is the way it should work,’” Cuban said on this week’s episode of the Equity podcast. “When you go to the doctor and you get a prescription . . . you have no idea what the cost to you is going to be. You don’t know if you can afford it or not.” The former “Shark Tank” host and minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team explained the…

Affirm stock popped 12% Friday after the buy now, pay later firm beat Wall Street’s expectations across the board in its fiscal fourth-quarter results. The stock was already up 31% this year heading into the report, outpacing the Nasdaq’s 12% gain.CEO Max Levchin told CNBC on “Money Movers” Friday that the company is “firing on all pistons.”Earnings came in at 20 cents a share and nearly doubled analyst expectations, with revenue also topping estimates at $876 million, up 33% from a year earlier.Net income was $69.2 million for the quarter, compared with a loss of $45.1 million in the same…

Framer, a no-code website builder that claims over half a million monthly active users, has reached a $2 billion valuation after raising a $100 million Series D funding round led by existing investors Meritech and Atomico. This double-unicorn milestone comes at a time of hype for website builders — including direct competitors like Figma, Squarespace, and Wix, as well as rising “vibe coding” platforms such as Cursor and Lovable.  In 2023, Framer raised a $27 million Series C led by Meritech at an undisclosed valuation. “With this funding, we’re doubling down on enterprise growth and AI, so any company can…

Wind turbines in Rio Vista, California, US, on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025.David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesThe Department of Transportation on Friday canceled $679 million in federal funding for a dozen offshore wind projects in the U.S., the latest attack in President Donald Trump’s campaign to kill wind power in the U.S.”Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.The Department of Transportation said the funding will be repurposed to upgrade ports and other infrastructure in the U.S. where possible.Funds for the following projects…

Key PointsAlibaba is developing a new chip designed for artificial intelligence applications, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC. The chip is specifically for inferencing rather than training but Alibaba will still use semiconductors from other vendors like Nvidia.Chinese technology firms have focused on developing homegrown chips over the last few years amid rising geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. Alibaba is developing a new chip designed for artificial intelligence applications, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC, as Chinese tech firms look to ramp up development of homegrown semiconductors. Alibaba’s semiconductor is designed for inferencing, which…

As AI becomes more prevalent in the classroom — where students use it to complete assignments and teachers are uncertain about how to address it — an AI platform called MathGPT.ai launched last year with the goal of providing an “anti-cheating” tutor to college students and a teaching assistant to professors. Following a successful pilot program at 30 colleges and universities in the U.S., MathGPT.ai is preparing to nearly double its availability this fall, with hundreds of instructors planning to incorporate the tool. Schools implementing MathGPT.ai in their classrooms include Penn State University, Tufts University, and Liberty University, among others. …

Threads is testing a new feature that makes it easy to share long-form text on the social network, Meta confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature lets users attach a block of text to a post instead of creating a thread of several different posts when looking to share more in-depth thoughts and ideas. App researcher Radu Oncescu first spotted the new “text attachment” feature on iOS and shared a screenshot of it. According to the app’s description of the new feature, it’s designed to allow users to “attach longer text and get creative with styling tools to share deeper…

In Google’s sleek Singapore office at Block 80, Level 3, Mark Johnston stood before a room of technology journalists at 1:30 PM with a startling admission: after five decades of cybersecurity evolution, defenders are still losing the war. “In 69% of incidents in Japan and Asia Pacific, organisations were notified of their own breaches by external entities,” the Director of Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO for Asia Pacific revealed, his presentation slide showing a damning statistic – most companies can’t even detect when they’ve been breached.What unfolded during the hour-long “Cybersecurity in the AI Era” roundtable was an honest…

More clean tech manufacturing investments were canceled in the U.S. in the second quarter than were announced, according to a new study from the Rhodium Group and MIT. Companies canceled $5 billion worth of projects, while only $4 billion in new investments was announced.  Actual clean tech manufacturing investments, not just announcements, declined by 15%, as well. The pullback comes in the wake of the GOP’s reconciliation bill, which erased key portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, a piece of legislation that spurred a tidal wave of manufacturing investments in the United States. Last quarter’s cancellations are second only to…