Economy

American public opinion
Rich fight Trump's tax cuts: "Not a priority"

In recent decades, a new trend has been discernible among wealthy Americans: More and more are becoming Democrats. Unlike under Reagan and the two Bush presidents, when high-income earners tended to vote Republican, more than half of high-income households are now Democrats, according to a Pew Research study seen by the Washington Post.

One reason for the shift is that people with higher education tend to vote Democrats to a greater extent, while the opposite is true for Republicans.

More and more millionaires are now actively opposing Donald Trump's tax policies, even though they benefit their group the most, because they believe they are harming the country as a whole. Drew E. Pomerance, a lawyer in California, is one of the opponents.

"I like money. But at the expense of what is happening to the United States, giving us tax breaks should not be a priority," he told the newspaper.

Norwegian Oil Fund close to passing milestone – again

The value of the Norwegian Oil Fund passed the milestone of 20,000 billion Norwegian kroner for the first time in December 2024. When Dagens Industri checks the value again on July 25, it will be 19,985 billion, still a doubling compared to 2019.

The oil fund owns shares in 8,500 companies worldwide. When it passed the symbolic threshold, the portfolio corresponded to 1.5 percent of the total global market capitalization, according to AFP. 

Electricity prices
Swedish energy giant warns: “The conditions are poor”

SR Energy, which according to its own information has invested the most in wind power in Sweden, believes that there is a slowdown in investments after falling electricity prices and profit losses, writes Dagens Industri.

Last year, profit before tax fell from 152 million kroner to 16 million kroner. Although SR Energy has the ambition to grow, they believe that growth will have to wait, partly because international investors have chosen to leave the country.

– Unfortunately, the conditions are too bad, says CEO Peter Zachrisson to DI.

Among the largest owners in the company are Stena and the pension companies AMF and Alecta.

The development of AI
AI is blamed for the jobs – but “the evidence is thin”

Unemployment among recent graduates is high, but AI is not the cause, according to labor market analyst Will Raderman at the Niskanen Center think tank, writes Yahoo Finance.

– There are more standard explanations than the flashy AI explanation at the moment, he tells the site.

In an analysis under the heading “Don’t blame AI for the increase in unemployment among recent graduates,” he writes that there is admittedly greater unemployment in the group than in the population at large. But the trend began even before the arrival of language models.

As an example, he points out that after the pandemic, the gap between recent graduates and the general population was at its largest. Then it decreased by 0.6 percentage points when ChatGPT was released and continued to decrease by another percentage point the following year.

“On closer inspection, the evidence for this claim is thin,” he writes.