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France’s budget battle is testing two powerful forces: citizens who want to see the social safety net maintained and even expanded and a bond market that can’t stomach the idea of France’s deficit getting any larger. (Source: Bloomberg)

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news Elsewhere in the bond markets, Brazil’s debt is dropping in value after president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a dramatic victory over his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro , to claim a historic fourth term in power. Bolsonaro, son of the former president, had been expected to oust Lula, but instead the left-wing incumbent triumphed, with 51.79% of the vote to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.21%. “We have spent the past few years debating whether AI will replace people. But the more immediate question for many businesses is whether AI could end up costing more than the people and processes it replaces. “Businesses need to remember every decision an AI makes and every action an agent takes has a price tag. The AI people see and the prompt they enter is only part of the story. AI doesn’t just answer questions: it reasons, retries, checks and refines its response, drawing on models, enterprises data and computing power just to complete a single task. That iterative process and response refinement are what drive AI costs. Once agents are embedded across applications and running tasks throughout a business, the metre is always running – yet many companies still have no idea how many tokens they are using or what a particular task will cost because of this AI cost domino effect. Continue reading...

France is facing a mounting economic crisis that pushed its 10-year government bond yield to a new 24-year high on Thursday.