The wealth-devouring monster is not dead, but it may be gravely wounded. Inflation showed signs of easing slightly in April, and core prices — which exclude food and energy — slowed to their lowest increase since April 2021.

While the Federal Reserve will likely want more evidence of slowing before cutting interest rates, it’s probably safe to assume they’re not thinking about raising them anytime soon.

Pain in the Wallet

The scourge of inflation means the average American needs an extra $1,000-plus a month just to afford the basics compared to three years ago. Its tentacles have touched most people via an expensive housing market, pressure at the gas pump, and mounting credit card debt. But the Fed sees a 2% inflation rate as healthy, and that’s what it’s been shooting for with the 11 rate hikes it’s instituted since early 2022.

The latest consumer-price index report for April shows that we’re nowhere near that 2%, but we’re maybe getting on the right track:

• In April, the CPI rose just 0.3% from the previous month, and core prices progressed at a rate of 3.6% annually, both in line with economists’ expectations. Perhaps most importantly, the annual core rate was down from 3.8% in March.
• The price of shelter increased 0.4% month-over-month in April and was the largest factor in the index’s overall rise. Car insurance costs rose 1.8%. Energy went up 1.1%. And medical care, hospital services, and prescription drug costs all jumped as well. 

Food, Glorious, Expensive Food: Food prices were finally flat month-over-month in April, but they’ve climbed roughly 26% since 2020. The Biden administration wasted no time in continuing to message that price-gouging is driving inflation, and called on “grocery chains making record profits to lower grocery prices for consumers.” It echoed a similar blast posted on X in March by former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich aimed at Walmart, the country’s biggest grocery retailer, for boosting prices on its Great Value food brands before its net income “spiked 93% towards the end of 2023.” 

Meanwhile, the reality is that eating out may be the real food-inflation problem. While food-at-home prices are up 1.1% from a year ago, food away from home is 4.3% more expensive than last year.

Despite the price-gouging accusations, Walmart is expected to report steady if unspectacular revenue growth of 5% but its status as the biggest company in the US by revenue is in jeopardy as Amazon closes in with a historically higher growth rate, according to The Wall Street Journal. If only Walmart had thought of a cloud-computing side hustle before Amazon started up AWS. 

While American robotaxis spin their wheels, China’s raring to go.

Baidu, the Beijing-based tech giant sometimes referred to as “China’s Google,” said Wednesday that it projects its Apollo Go robotaxi business will start turning a profit as soon as next year. This is a bit of a kick in the teeth for US robotaxi wannabes, a couple of whom were just hit with regulatory investigations. Honestly, your cars hit one or two or 20 objects and the killjoys in Washington get all worked up…

A Few Speed Bumps

Robotaxis are a subset of the drive toward autonomous vehicles, offering the promise of summoning an autonomous car to take you to your destination. It’s a business that Google, Uber, Tesla, and Amazon are all dying to jump-start, but it’s been a sticky process. Autonomous driving isn’t exactly a 100% solved problem yet, so the early stages of getting AVs out into the world have been an experiment that uses real people as test subjects which… has some ethical complexities. That means regulators are extra sensitive to accidents that involve AVs, and there have been some fatalities.

The few robotaxi services that operate in the US do so in limited geographical areas, and often with human drivers sitting in the front seat, ready to intervene if the car does anything unpredictable. Some companies have reached the point though where they operate without that safety net, but regulators might be about to rain on that parade:

• Google’s self-driving car company Waymo operates robotaxis with no one in the driver’s seat in San Francisco and Phoenix, and this week the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into 22 incidents that involved Waymo’s cars, including crashes and fires.
• The NHTSA also launched an investigation into Zoox, a self-driving startup that was acquired by Amazon in 2020, over two incidents of unexpected braking that caused rear-end collisions with motorcyclists.

A Visit From the Overheads Fairy: Baidu also started operating some fully driverless robotaxi rides in September 2023, and announced that 45% of orders in Q4 of last year were the totally driverless kind. It also announced that it’s figured out how to more than halve the cost of its cars to around $28,160. That’s got to be a big help for its bottom line.

Real estate billionaire Frank McCourt wants to take on the mother of all TikTok challenges: Improving the internet.

On Wednesday, McCourt told Semafor that he’s cobbling together a bid to acquire TikTok. His goal? “A new and better version of the internet, where individuals are respected.” Somehow that seems harder than mastering the “Renegade” dance. 

McCourt of Public Opinion

McCourt’s goals may seem lofty — respect isn’t exactly a core value among internet denizens — but the man has a history of putting his money where his mouth is, and his words are hardly empty platitudes. In 2021, McCourt launched Project Liberty, a non-profit trying to develop a new internet infrastructure to free users from the grip of surveillance capitalism and the Big Tech platforms that thrive on it. He pledged $100 million to the project and established a pair of “digital governance” research institutions at Georgetown University and the Paris Institute of Political Studies. 

Those groups aided in developing a Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), a blockchain-based system that would essentially shift the ownership of users’ personal data from social media companies back to individuals — allowing users to move freely among platforms without losing their built-up social networks. 

Twitter clones like Bluesky and Mastodon employ similar open-source infrastructure for their few million users, but bringing the DSNP philosophy to TikTok’s 170 million US users would mark a major and expensive push into the mainstream: 

• A TikTok operating on a DSNP would grant users more ownership of their created content, allowing them to post and monetize videos on other platforms, and let them control what data they share and what kind of content the platform’s algorithm feeds them.
• Most estimates peg the value of TikTok in any presumptive sale at around $100 billion, based on reports of $16 billion of revenue in 2023. However, TikTok parent company ByteDance is reportedly exploring avenues to sell the platform without its ultra-valuable recommendations algorithm, potentially knocking its value; of course, McCourt’s bid is predicated on replacing the entire algorithm.

Mr. TikTok Goes to Washington: McCourt’s offer isn’t the only chapter in TikTok’s sell-or-ban drama to unfurl this week. On Tuesday, a group of eight TikTok creators sued the US government over the new law, arguing a ban would violate their First Amendment rights. That echoes TikTok’s own legal defense — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that ByteDance is covering the group’s legal fees.