We will spend this week discussing four policy issues now facing the world and its governments that are getting surprisingly little mainstream media attention because the Charlie Kirk shooting has sucked all the air out of the newsroom. Artificial intelligence as an industry, US monetary policy, US/Chinese relations and ... Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book. First up, AI: I believe we are seeing the bursting of an AI bubble. AI companies are not even remotely worth the values implied by their present equity prices, any more than dotcom companies were worth their stock prices in 1998. And (as then) the bursting of the bubble will have consequences for the world beyond the industry concerned. Case in point in very recent days, and one that you dear reader likely have not heard of: Mistral. This is not a publicly listed company anywhere so calculations of its equity value depend on sporadic deals. On September 10 the Wall Street Journal reported that the value of a French ...