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Disney strikes deal with OpenAI to license characters

admin - Latest News - December 11, 2025
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Disney strikes deal with OpenAI to license characters



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Dec. 11, 2025, 3:08 PM ESTBy Steve KopackFor the first time since President Donald Trump rolled out his sweeping global tariff program in April, month-over-month customs receipts declined in November.Last month, the U.S. government collected $30.75 billion in import duties. This was down from $31.35 billion collected in October. Over the last few months, the monthly increase in tariff money collected by customs has slowed, but November’s total marked the first month with collections lower than the previous month. Trump rolled out his tariffs in early April, on what he called “Liberation Day.” That month, import duties collected surged to $15.6 billion. These revenues have steadily climbed over the course of the year, but in recent months they have stopped rising as fast as they did earlier in the early months of the tariff regime. In August and September, net tariff revenues were a little more than $29 billion per month. In October, revenues reached their peak of the year.Several factors may have helped trigger the recent reversal in the trend of ever-increasing tariff revenues. But looming large for the Trump administration is a cost-of-living crisis that pushed the administration to announce roll backs of a number of food-related tariffs in mid-November.Those included tariffs on coffee and bananas, which the U.S. does not readily produce. The reversal also included tariffs on beef, a household staple whose cost has soared this year. In January, the average price per pound of ground beef was $5.54, according to data from the Consumer Price Index. In the latest edition of CPI, published in September, that cost had surged nearly 15% to $6.32. More recent CPI data will not be released until Dec. 18 due to the government shutdown.Over the last 5 years, the cost of beef has skyrocketed by 55%. But not all of that has to do with tariffs. Since the summer, ranchers have been struggling with a flesh-eating parasite that has been infecting livestock. And while consumers may not yet be seeing a drop in retail prices for these items, it appears that Trump’s tariff reversals have already started to impact the government’s bottom line.Traditionally, a minor drop in monthly tariff revenues would not set off alarms at the Treasury Department.But unlike previous administrations, Trump has made some big promises to voters about what this additional tariff revenue might provide for average Americans.The president has floated the idea of using tariff revenue to justify eliminating the individual income taxes. He has also repeately proposed using some of the customs receitps to send each American a stimulus — loosely based on the wildly popular stimulus checks that his first term administration distributed during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump has also said tariff revenue will help reduce the national debt.However, from January through November only $236.2 billion of tariff money has been collected. Even if the administration were to put that entire amount toward reducing the national debt, it would cover less than 1% of America’s current $38.38 trillion in outstanding obligations. A White House spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the tariff revenue dip and how Trump plans to deploy the customs duties.People pass by the National Debt Clock in New York on July 1, 2025.Brendan McDermid / Reuters fileThe tariff money could, however, cover the $201 billion of interest annually on that debt — but only one year’s worth. In the meantime, the tariff revenue is helping to reduce the budget deficit. In November, the government spent just $173 billion more than it took in, which is less than half the amount of the deficit for the same month a year ago. It’s unclear if the tariff revenue funds will be used for many of Trump’s proposals. But on Monday, the president did put some of the money to work.Starting next year, the federal government says it will use $12 billion of the tariff money to fund an aid package for farmers impacted by the president’s trade war with China. The majority of that package, $11 billion, will be in the form of direct one-time payments, which should start to go out in the new year.The future of a large swath of Trump’s tariffs also hangs in the balance at the Supreme Court. Through late September, the most recently available data shows that about $90 billion of the $174 billion in tariff money collected up to that point was done via presidential authority granted under a law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.If the Supreme Court finds that IEEPA did not, in fact, grant Trump the power to impose those unilateral tariffs, and the court strikes them down, it’s possible that most or all of the import taxes collected under the IEEPA law would need to be refunded to the importers who paid them. This would wipe out a significant amount of the tariff revenue that has been collected this year. Steve KopackSteve Kopack is a senior reporter at NBC News covering business and the economy.
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Oct. 17, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Rob WileThe torrent of billion-dollar investment announcements related to artificial intelligence has raised fears that the economy is sitting on a bubble that, if popped, could send it into a tailspin. Some on Wall Street aren’t buying it. In a note to clients published Thursday titled “AI Spending Is Not Too Big,” Goldman Sachs economist Joseph Briggs made the case that the billions being spent on building out data centers — known as capital expenditures, or “capex” — remains sustainable.In short: Briggs believes AI applications are leading to real productivity gains that will help boost companies’ bottom lines. Meanwhile, the cost of the computing processing needed to power those applications justifies the billions in spending, assuming the sophistication of the applications continues to improve. In total, Briggs expects U.S. companies to generate as much as $8 trillion in new revenue thanks to AI. “The key takeaway from our analysis is that the enormous economic value promised by generative AI justifies the current investment in AI infrastructure and that overall levels of AI investment appear sustainable as long as companies expect that investment today will generate outsized returns over the long run,” Briggs wrote. Other key Wall Street players have echoed his assessment. This week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon compared AI to the internet, which led to its own “dot com” bubble but ultimately created real economic and societal impact. “You can’t look at AI as a bubble, though some of these things may be in the bubble. In total, it’ll probably pay off,” Dimon said at a conference hosted by Fortune. Predictions about the economic impact of AI continue to run the gamut, from only a modest bump in productivity to the end of all jobs as we know them. Evidence of current effects so far is mixed, though the roster of companies citing AI or automation as a reason for job cuts — whether they actually intend to meaningfully increase its use — continues to grow.Amid all those variables, AI’s biggest impact has arguably been on stock returns. Despite some recent drawdowns, major U.S. stock indexes continue to sit near all-time highs, thanks largely to gains from tech companies participating in the AI boom. Peloton turns to AI in hope of boosting slumping sales03:41On Thursday, tech stocks got another lift when chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) reported record profits and soaring revenues. TSMC is the main supplier of semiconductors for Nvidia — the most valuable publicly traded company in the world — and it also counts Apple, Qualcomm and AMD as clients. “Our conviction in the megatrend is strengthening, and we believe the demand for semiconductors will continue to be very fundamental as a key enabler of AI applications,” TSMC Chief Executive C.C. Wei told analysts on an earnings call. Briggs of Goldman didn’t offer a direct comment about whether his analysis means AI-related stocks themselves have room to run. And there are growing signs that many investors now believe that whatever AI’s broader economic payoff is, stock valuations have become stretched. In its latest weekly investor sentiment survey, the American Association of Individual Investors found bullish sentiment had dipped below its historical average of 37.5% for the first time in five weeks, with 55% of respondents agreeing “stocks in general are overvalued.” Briggs did warn that some of the companies whose shares have had the greatest run-ups so far won’t necessarily be the ones who end up reaping the greatest overall returns from the AI revolution.“The ultimate winners from infrastructure builds are determined by a complex set of factors including timing, regulation, and market competition,” he wrote. Eventually, Briggs said, computing costs will decrease, meaning some proportion of the current AI spending boom will look overdone in hindsight. But given a 15% boost to productivity, a slower adoption timeline and other factors, current spending levels on AI investment are sound, he added. “While investment should eventually moderate as the AI investment cycle moves beyond the build phase and declining hardware costs dominate, the technological backdrop still looks supportive for continued AI investment,” he wrote.Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” had a similar assessment this week, comparing the current AI moment to the dawn of the railroad age. “I am telling you, this is just the beginning,” he said. While not every company riding the wave will survive, the build-out itself changed the economy forever, he said, and “once the losers got wiped out, the winners won big.” Rob WileRob Wile is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist covering breaking business stories for NBCNews.com.
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Dec. 3, 2025, 4:22 PM ESTBy Joe MurphyThis year’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was chopped down in Rensselaer County, New York.Statistically speaking, that’s unusual.While New York state is one of the 10 leading producers of Christmas trees in the U.S., according to the Department of Agriculture, it accounts for less than 3% of the nation’s cut Christmas tree output.Nationwide, about 1 of every 3 Christmas trees that are cut down are cut down in Oregon.U.S. tree farms cut 14.5 million Christmas trees in 2022, the most-recent year USDA data was available. There are more than 300 million Christmas trees growing on the approximately 15,000 farms in the U.S., according to the National Christmas Tree Association, an industry trade group.Michigan, North Carolina and Oregon have the most land devoted to Christmas tree farms. These farms nationwide cover more than 400 square miles of land — a little less than half Rhode Island’s land area — according to the latest USDA data.
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