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Artificial Intelligence, Real Misallocation

Authored by Peter C. Earle, Ph.D,

Artificial intelligence may well be the most important technological development of the coming decade-and that is exactly why the current capital surge around it warrants skepticism. History is littered with transformative innovations that were nonetheless disastrously overbuilt and mispriced in their early phases. Austrian Business Cycle Theory was never a children’s story in which every boom ends with clowns, ashes, and worthless machinery; its real claim is subtler and nastier. When the price of time is falsified-when interest rates are pushed below their natural rate-often proxied, however imperfectly, by modern estimates of the neutral rate-entrepreneurs are encouraged to undertake projects that are more roundabout, more capital-intensive, and more time-sensitive than underlying saving and final demand can actually support. The neutral rate is a policy construct; the natural rate is an economic reality. Some of those projects may still embody genuine innovation.

The problem is not that AI must be fake; it is that a very real technological advance can be financed, priced, and physically built in ways that are wildly uneconomic.

That distinction matters because AI is about as roundabout as modern capitalism gets. This is not a boom in apps and slogans alone; it is a boom in data centers, power, cooling, transformers, specialized semiconductors, fiber, land, and the commodities and construction needed to house and feed all of it. Reuters reports that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend more than $630 billion combined on AI-related infrastructure in 2026, up sharply from 2025, while separate Reuters reporting says Amazon alone projects roughly $200 billion of 2026 capex. Analysts also expect the hyperscalers’ debt issuance to keep climbing, with BofA lifting its 2026 forecast to $175 billion after Amazon’s jumbo deal and Reuters noting that these firms issued $121 billion in bonds in 2025 versus a 2020–2024 annual average of just $28 billion. In Austrian terms, this is not consumption drunkenness; it is higher-order production marching deep into the structure of capital with a flamethrower and an Excel model.

Now add the monetary backdrop. The Fed cut the federal funds target range to 0 to 0.25 percent in March 2020 and kept it there until liftoff began in March 2022. By contrast, the New York Fed’s r-star framework defines the natural rate as the real short-term rate consistent with full employment and stable inflation, and its recent research says global and U.S. r-star rose by about 1 percentage point after COVID; the New York Fed’s DSGE model in late 2025 put the short-run U.S. real natural rate around 2.0 percent for 2026. Today the policy rate sits at 3.5 to 3.75 percent, but that is after the incubation period. The relevant Austrian point is that the seedbed for this boom was years of money priced as if capital were infinite, patient, and nearly free: precisely the sort of signal that makes entrepreneurs think the economy has more real savings available for long-gestation projects than it actually does.

That does not prove AI is all, or even mostly, malinvestment. It does, however, establish favorable conditions for it. The most charitable case is that AI is a genuine general-purpose technology whose economics are merely messy in the early innings. OpenAI says ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly users as of late February, and Bloomberg reports OpenAI’s annualized revenue topped $20 billion in 2025 while Anthropic is tracking near that level as well. There are also signs of real productivity gains in narrow use cases, especially coding and selected support tasks. But the bill is arriving much faster than the profits: Bain estimated the industry would need roughly $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030 to support projected compute demand, yet expected a gap of about $800 billion. That is not a business model; that is a promissory note written in GPU ink.

The more worrying Austrian angle is not simply overvaluation in public equities, but miscoordination in the capital structure. If chips depreciate economically faster than accountants admit, if grid interconnections lag by years, if open models compress pricing power, and if customers love AI demos more than they love paying enterprise invoices, then the industry has a classic ABCT problem: complementary capital arrives in the wrong proportions and at the wrong times. And though not easily captured in formal models, technological history is clear: infrastructure-heavy systems rarely stay that way for long, and early capital often pays the price. The New York Fed warns that r-star is an estimate, not an oracle, but the larger point survives that caveat: if market rates were held too low relative to the economy’s true intertemporal balance, then the resulting investment pattern will look profitable only until bottlenecks, replacement cycles, and cost of capital reassert themselves. Bloomberg reports OpenAI has discussed infrastructure commitments above $1.4 trillion, while Anthropic has announced a $50 billion U.S. data-center push; meanwhile, the IEA has warned of grid-connection queues, transformer shortages, and permitting delays for the power build-out data centers require. A boom can survive many indignities, but not all of them at once.

So: does AI constitute malinvestment? The best answer is that AI almost certainly contains both real innovation and a large malinvestment component. The technology is plausibly important enough to reshape production (and possibly upend labor markets) but that does not mean that every dollar spent on it is wisely spent, that every hyperscaler moat is durable, or that every valuation can be rescued by the word “transformational.” Austrian theory would suggest that when cheap money meets prestige competition, fear of missing out, and the intoxicating moral cover of “the future,” capital does not merely flow-it stampedes. AI may yet justify a great deal of what is being built. But prices, debt, and capex have very likely run ahead of demonstrated end-user value, which means the eventual disappointment-if and when it comes-will not prove AI was imaginary. It will merely prove that even a brilliant technology can be overcapitalized, overpromised, and purchased at a monetary hallucination.

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/25/2026 - 16:20
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Two Republicans Currently Lead California Governor's Race And Could Lock Out Dems In General Election

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

Two Republicans currently lead in the California governor’s race according to recent polls, making a Democrat lockout in the November general election a distinct possibility.

Photo: Huntington Beach, CA - April 22: Conservative commentator and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Hilton, greets supporters as he announces his campaign for California governor at the Pier Plaza in Huntington Beach Tuesday, April 22, 2025. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

California’s top-two primary system allows the two highest vote-getters to advance, regardless of party, and Republicans Steve Hilton and Sheriff Chad Bianco have emerged as the top contenders in the race. Unless one of the Democrat candidates break out, the two Republicans could face each other in the final runoff in November.

Hilton, 56, is a conservative commentator who formerly served as a political advisor in Great Britain. Bianco, 58, is a “law and order” sheriff and coroner of Riverside County.

Polls have consistently showed the two Republicans leading the pack.

The most recent Berkeley IGS Poll, conducted March 9–15, 2026,  showed Hilton leading with 17 percent support among likely voters, followed closely by  Bianco at 16 percent. Among Democrats, the deeply unpopular and controversial Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Rep. Katie Porter were tied at 13 percent, with left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer lagging at 10 percent.

 (Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

A full 16 percent of likely voters were undecided or backing other candidates.

Poll director Mark DiCamillo said that voters are “largely unenthusiastic,” and pointed out that nearly all the Democrat candidates have higher unfavorable than favorable ratings. Porter and Steyer had the highest unfavorable ratings at 37 percent.

California hasn’t elected a Republican to a statewide office since Arnold Schwarzenegger left the governors’ office in 2008. However, voter dissatisfaction with current leadership, high costs of living, and a desire for outsiders in politics are reportedly contributing to the competitive landscape.

With 16 percent of voters still undecided and the possibility of some Democrats dropping out, the race remains fluid ahead of the June primary.

Nevertheless, political commentator Mark Halperin recently opined that the California Democrats are “flailing.”

“The Democrats are in real danger of not getting a candidate in the final two,” Halperin noted on his video platform Two-Way, last week. He added that Democrat strategists have admitted to him privately that their “field is not great.”

There’s no one people are excited about, no one that people see as breaking away from the pack,” he said. “They’re all weak and they’re all susceptible to opposition research.”

Halperin predicted that the Dem candidates will eventually “start hitting each other,” and it will be “very brutal.”

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FBI Misled Court To Spy On Second Trump Campaign Adviser

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations,

Carter Page wasn’t the only adviser from Trump’s first campaign wiretapped by the FBI. Walid Phares was electronically monitored for a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington-based FBI agent who was assigned to investigate him as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion probe.

As in Page’s case, the bureau withheld evidence exonerating Phares from the court to secure surveillance authorization, according to newly declassified FBI documents.

“I had no idea any of this was happening,” Phares told RealClearInvestigations in an exclusive interview Wednesday night. “This is shocking because they told my lawyer that I was only a ‘witness’ and that they just needed some information.”

“But these were huge abuses that I can see now,” he added. Phares said he intends to sue the FBI and Justice Department for damages.

The 68-year-old Lebanese American scholar said case agents and prosecutors grilled him for months, questioned his employer, and even went after his bank records. As a result, he said he lost his job at a university, his livelihood, and even his bank accounts and credit card after Wells Fargo canceled them.

“It was like a disaster for me financially and physically,” he said. “I also lost my Fox News contract” as an expert on terrorism and the Middle East, which he had held since 2007.

Phares was not hired by the Trump administration, even though he had been expected to land a high-level foreign policy position. “They scared the agencies from me so I would have problems with [obtaining] a security clearance,” he said.

‘No Corroborating Facts’

Investigators could find “nothing” criminal on Phares during their probe, according to the lead case agent, and in fact, they concluded he was “honest.” Yet Mueller’s team continued to secretly spy on Phares—without providing the powerful federal spy court any of the exculpatory evidence that could clear Phares as required by law.

The agent told investigators in a separate 2020 internal FBI review that “there were no corroborating facts that tied Crosswind [the codename for Phares’s case] to certain facts that we thought were originally true,” according to a transcript of his testimony, released after more than five years of concealment.

He added that “nothing” collected from Phares’s communications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, including phone messages and emails, “aided the investigation other than to prove the target was being honest with investigators,” who had interviewed him repeatedly.

Nonetheless, the FBI continued monitoring Phares as part of a Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) investigation. He was never charged with any violations of the act.

“There was a ‘let’s get him’ attitude among prosecutors on Mueller’s team,” the agent said, according to the new documents, noting that several prosecutors shared an anti-Trump bias and even tacked up negative cartoons of the president on the walls of their office.

The FBI agent, whose name is redacted in several pages of declassified FBI documents released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, added that “there was nothing confirming Crosswind [Phares] received a large money payment, and nothing confirming Crosswind had a meeting in another country for the purposes of the initial allegation.”

Misleading the Court

When Mueller’s team applied for the fourth and final warrant to secretly surveil Phares in 2018, the agent argued that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) needed to be alerted to how new information “had changed our understanding of our initial analysis” that Phares was a foreign agent. He suggested several corrections, but was rebuffed by an FBI lawyer.

“I pointed out these specific corrections to the application in numerous instances throughout the FISA process,” the agent said. “I sent these edits to Kevin Clinesmith, who said, ‘We can’t send this to DOJ.’”

A senior FBI attorney, Clinesmith had also been assigned to Mueller’s team, which agreed the corrections were unnecessary.

It wouldn’t be the first time Clinesmith, whose internal texts and emails show he had an intense anti-Trump bias, withheld exculpatory evidence from the FISA court.

Clinesmith later pleaded guilty to altering evidence used in an application to renew a FISA warrant to spy on another Trump adviser, Page, whom the FBI falsely accused of acting as a Russian agent. To secure the renewal, Clinesmith changed the wording in an intelligence email that exonerated Page, reversing its meaning.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the FBI based its warrants targeting Page largely on a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier of false opposition research. The IG concluded the FBI abused its FISA authority while spying on Page, including failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to the surveillance court. Far from aiding Moscow, the former Naval officer had previously worked with the CIA and FBI to help catch Russian spies, as RCI first reported.

The FISA court subsequently invalidated some of the warrants against Page, who was never charged with a crime and is now suing the FBI and DOJ for $75 million for violating his constitutional rights against improper searches and seizures.

His case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, but the DOJ’s solicitor general has repeatedly delayed filing a response to his petition, claiming he has other “pressing” matters. The high bench has set the next filing deadline for April 22.

The year-long FISA eavesdropping on Phares appears to be missing from both Horowitz’s and Special Counsel John Durham’s reports investigating FBI abuses in the Russiagate scandal, raising fresh questions about the thoroughness of those investigations. It is still not clear if the three other Trump campaign officials subject to Russiagate investigations—Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos—were also wiretapped.

A $10 Million Bribe?

In an RCI interview, Phares said the false allegations against him originated with the CIA, which issued a report in 2016 alleging he had taken a $10 million bribe from the Egyptian government intended for the Trump campaign during a meeting in Cairo.

John Brennan, an Obama appointee, was the director of the CIA at the time. He is currently under federal grand jury investigation for his role in the Russiagate hoax.

DOJ is building a “grand conspiracy” case against former Obama and Biden officials for allegedly committing political espionage against Trump and his advisers by manufacturing criminal investigations and depriving them of their rights under color of law. It’s not immediately known if the investigation includes the Phares case. The FBI and DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.

Although the Mueller investigation’s primary mandate was to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, it veered into additional investigative areas, including probing campaign contacts with other foreign governments.

Phares had taken trips to Cairo during the 2016 campaign while advising Trump on the Middle East.

The investigating agent said the highly classified intelligence agency reports that Phares secretly worked with the Egyptian government to influence the incoming administration “were disproven.”

“Despite this, the [Mueller] team still went on with the third renewal of the FISA [against Phares],” he said.

The investigation was closed in 2019, and Phares was never charged with a crime. Mueller’s $30 million-plus investigation ultimately found no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia or any foreign government.

Misconduct and Bias

Grassley said the FBI agent’s testimony “details substantial allegations of misconduct and political bias occurring within Special Counsel Mueller’s office during the investigation,” including “misleading the FISC,” or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The Republican senator has requested DOJ provide his committee “all FISA applications, predication material, and related reporting” from the Crosswind probe to understand the full extent to which the FISA court was misled.

The identity of the FISA judges who approved the top-secret warrants is not yet known. But the presiding FISC judge at the time was Rosemary Collyer, a George W. Bush appointee who personally signed off on the wiretapping of Carter Page. Before resigning in 2020, Collyer issued an order stating that the FBI in its sworn affidavits had “provided false information and withheld material information detrimental to the FBI’s case [against Page].”

RCI first reported that Phares was the subject of a FARA investigation approved by former Obama DOJ official David Laufman, along with four other Trump campaign officials. But the revelation he was also put under FISA surveillance—the government’s most powerful investigative tool—had not been known until Grassley’s disclosures earlier this week.

Phares said he suspected he might be under some kind of surveillance but didn’t know for certain until this week’s release of the declassified FBI documents. He said he recently received notices from Hotmail and Yahoo that the DOJ had sought records from his email accounts through an unspecified legal process.

“They were fishing,” he told RCI.

Although agents working with Mueller initially asked Phares about Russia, they soon zeroed in on his dealings with Egypt. Mueller’s prosecutors later told him he was merely a witness, not a target.

Phares said he was first interviewed in September 2017 by Washington-based FBI agents working for Mueller.

“Two agents showed up at my door flashing badges and asked if we could speak,” he recalled. “I welcomed them in because I was a lead lecturer at the FBI (on counterterrorism), but they took four hours questioning me, and it made my wife very uncomfortable.”

Added Phares: “I made a huge mistake not lawyering up earlier.”

‘Rougher and Tougher’

He said their questions got “rougher and tougher” over the next few months of interviews, which he said later included Mueller prosecutor Zainab Ahmad, who was originally hired at Main Justice in the Spring of 2016 by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Ahmad was one of the key Mueller team members responsible for handling the controversial perjury case against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, which was later thrown out. Like Flynn, Phares was an outspoken critic of Islamic terrorism, Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal, and the influence of the radical, pro-jihad Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and America.

He said he believes the Obama administration—including Brennan’s CIA—was also monitoring him during the 2016 campaign.

Declassified briefing notes from a meeting shortly after Trump took office between former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Obama-appointed officials with DOJ’s national security division indicate that the FBI and DOJ were “working on a FISA application” targeting “Walid Phares” as early as March 2017.

“They knew they had nothing on Russia, so they went after me on Egypt. But the main target was President Trump,” Phares said. “They had to neutralize him and any of his associates who could carry out his agenda.”

Civil rights watchdogs have called the egregious spying violations against Carter Page the worst abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act since it was enacted more than 45 years ago. Now another U.S. citizen may have been subjected to even worse abuses.

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Florida Cities Enforce Curfews And Mass Arrests After Spring Break Chaos

Do certain groups of people deliberately seek out chaos?  Do they revel in it so much that they choose to create it from thin air wherever they go?  Or, are they completely unaware of the destruction that follows them around?  One thing is certain - they obviously don't care about how it affects the people around them.  

Spring Break in Florida has always been a wild affair attracting masses of young vacationers from across the US to white sandy beaches, condos and the night life.  Decades ago, the locals were complaining just as they are now, but in recent years the demographics have changed dramatically and with this change comes the inevitable increase in random criminal violence.  It's not just loud parties and DUIs anymore.

Some residents are now referring to these incidents as "Ghetto Spring Break".  With the demographic being pushed out of traditional getaways like Miami Beach due to higher fees and restrictions, they have surged into alternatives like Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach.  This has led to skyrocketing crime and essentially unusable tourist spots. 

A large percentage of the crime is committed by minors and college age vacationers.  Underage teens roam in massive groups unaccompanied by parents is a common scene.  Authorities made more than 130 arrests last weekend, including 84 in Daytona Beach and 49 in New Smyrna Beach.  Officials say they specifically plan to bring the hammer down on "takeover events" which involve spontaneous parties announced on social media that takeover random streets, beaches or city blocks.  Such events usually end with violence. 

Daytona has been forced to declare a state of emergency and implement sweeping restrictions including a youth curfew from 8pm to 6am and zero-tolerance enforcement for violence, fighting, disorderly conduct, etc.  Authorities have responded with a heavy police presence.

 

Similar measures have been used to great effect in deterring the "usual suspects" from showing up to certain cities during the season.  The fatigue is very real, so much so that some traditional travel destinations are willing to sacrifice some tourist dollars in order to avoid gaining a reputation as a spring break cesspool.  

For example, violent crime reports and arrests for spring break used to make up 20% of Miami's yearly total, and this spike occurred in the span of just a couple of weeks.  Miami, dealing with dozens of shootings per season and thousands of arrests, decided to start cracking down on festivities in 2025. 

New measures included parking garage closures in South Beach, restricted beach access (e.g., certain entrances closing at 6 p.m.), sobriety checkpoints, potential curfews, high parking fees ($100 in some areas), no coolers/tents/tables/loud music on the beach, increased police presence and targeted road closures.  Incidents are down 21% so far this year, and there are no reported spring break related shootings. 

Florida cities are no longer embracing the concept of "grinning and bearing" this kind of tourist influx in exchange for quick cash.  The new regulations and fees also prove that cities are capable, to some extend, of filtering out the worst perpetrators of seasonal crime.  The first step to eliminating mindless mobs is to stop enabling mindless mobs. 

*  *  * ORDER BY MIDNIGHT PST / FREE SHIPPING OVER $500

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Clinton-Appointed Federal Judge Blocks Trump's Pentagon Media Access Restrictions

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge on March 20 issued an order blocking the Trump administration’s media access policy at the Pentagon after The New York Times sued over the restrictions.

An aerial view of the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., on Dec. 15, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

The Department of War tightened its rules for the media in September 2025 after officials said reporters were roaming the halls of the Pentagon. The department took the position that the restrictions were reasonable and designed to safeguard national security.

The new rules provided that soliciting non-public information from department personnel or encouraging employees to break the law “falls outside the scope of protected newsgathering activities.” They also stated that reporters would be denied press passes if officials determined they posed a safety or security risk.

Most members of the Pentagon press corps declined to sign an acknowledgement of the new policy and lost their press passes.

In December 2025, The New York Times sued, arguing that the policy violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by restricting “journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done—ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”

U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman wrote in his new ruling that the drafters of the First Amendment “believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech.”

That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.”

Friedman held that the Pentagon press policy ran afoul of both the First and Fifth Amendments.

Friedman repeated a comment he made in open court in which he said the federal government has been dishonest in its communications with the public about military matters in the past.

We’ve been through, in my lifetime, you know, the Vietnam War, where the public, I think it’s fair to say, was lied to about a lot of things. We’ve been through 9/11. We’ve been through the Kuwait situation, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay.”

The judge also wrote that the department could not show that it would be harmed by the cancellation of the policy, which the judge said was vague and “fails to provide fair notice of what routine, lawful journalistic practices will result in the detail, suspension, or revocation” of a press pass.

The policy’s “true purpose and practical effect” was “to weed out disfavored journalists—those who were not, in the Department’s view, ‘on board and willing to serve,’—and replace them with news entities that are,” he wrote.

Washington-based Friedman issued a permanent injunction preventing the department from enforcing the challenged restrictions. The judge also ordered the department to reinstate the credentials of six reporters and to file a status report with the court by March 27 certifying compliance with its order.

The New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said the media organization “welcomes today’s ruling, which enforces the constitutionally protected rights for the free press in this country.”

“Americans deserve visibility into how their government is being run, and the actions the military is taking in their name and with their tax dollars. Today’s ruling reaffirms the right of The Times and other independent media to continue to ask questions on the public’s behalf.”

The Epoch Times reached out for comment from the U.S. Department of Justice, which represents federal agencies in court. No reply was received by publication time.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

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