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The longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history appears to be nearing an end, but not without leaving a mark on an already struggling economy.About 1.25 million federal workers haven’t been paid since October 1. Thousands of flights have been canceled, a trend that is expected to continue this week even as Congress moves toward reopening the government. Government contract awards have slowed and some food aid recipients have seen their benefits interrupted.Most of the lost economic activity will be recovered when the government reopens, as federal workers will receive back pay. But some canceled flights won’t be retaken, missed restaurant meals won’t be made up, and some postponed purchases will end up not happening at all.“Short-lived shutdowns are usually invisible in the data, but this one will leave a lasting mark,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at accounting giant EY said, “both because of its record length and the growing disruptions to welfare programs and travel.”The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that a six-week shutdown will reduce growth in this year’s fourth quarter by about 1.5 percentage points. That would cut growth by half from the third quarter. The reopening should boost first-quarter growth next year by 2.2 percentage points, the CBO projected, but about $11 billion in economic activity will be permanently lost.The previous longest government shutdown, in 2018-2019, lasted 35 days but only partially shut the government because many agencies had been fully funded. It only nicked the economy by about 0.02% of GDP, the CBO said then.The current shutdown is adding to the economy’s existing challenges, which include sluggish hiring, stubbornly elevated inflation, and President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have caused uncertainty for many businesses. Still, few economists foresee a recession.About 650,000 federal workers didn’t work during the shutdown, which will likely boost the unemployment rate by about 0.4 percentage points in October, or to 4.7% from 4.3% in August, when the last report was released. Those workers would all then be counted as employed once the government reopens.Here are the ways the government closure is weighing on the economy: Missed paychecks All told, federal workers will have missed about $16 billion in wages by mid-November, the CBO estimates. That has meant less spending at stores, restaurants, and likely reduced holiday travel. Large purchases will probably be postponed, slowing the broader economy.Trump had threatened during the shutdown to not provide back pay but the deal struck in Congress would replace those lost wages once the government reopens.The shutdown has added to the Washington, D.C. area’s economic woes, where the unemployment rate was already 6% before the shutdown, after Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce this spring caused job losses. While the Washington, D.C. areaincluding the nearby suburbs in Virginia and Marylandhas the highest concentration of federal workers, most live and work outside of the nation’s capital.Federal workers make up about 5.5% of Maryland’s workforce, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. But they also comprise 2.9% of New Mexico’s workers, 2.6% of Oklahoma’s, and 3.8% of Alaska’s.Then there are the federal contractors. Bernard Yaros, an economist at Oxford Economics, estimates they could total as many as 5.2 million, and they are not guaranteed back pay once the shutdown ends. Flight disruptions Airlines scrapped more than 2,000 flights by Monday evening after canceling 5,500 since Friday on orders from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is seeking to reduce the burden on overworked air traffic controllers, who have now missed two paychecks.Even before the flight cancellations, Tourism Economics, an economic consulting firm, estimated that the shutdown would reduce travel spending by $63 million a day, which means a six-week standoff would cost the travel industry $2.6 billion.The canceled flights also mean less business for hotels, restaurants, and taxi drivers. And federal employees have already pulled the plug on upcoming trips, according to Tourism Economics, which may not be able to be rescheduled even when the government does reopen. Consumer sentiment The shutdown has worsened Americans’ outlook on the broader economy. Declining consumer sentiment can over time reduce spending and slow growth, though in recent years Americans have kept shopping even when their outlooks turned grim.Consumer sentiment dropped to a three-year low and close to the lowest point ever recorded in a survey by the University of Michigan, reported Friday, with pessimism over personal finances and anticipated business conditions weighing on Americans.The November survey showed the index of consumer sentiment at 50.4, down a startling 6.2% from last month and a plunge of nearly 30% from a year ago. Federal spending While the shutdown hasn’t cut off all federal government spending, it has reduced purchases of equipment and has cut off the issuance of new contracts.Yaros estimates that about $800 million in new contracts were at risk of not being awarded each day of the shutdown.“The federal award spigot has all but turned off at the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Department of Homeland Security,” Yaros wrote. SNAP benefits The shutdown delayed the payment of $8 billion in monthly SNAP food aid to 42 million recipients in November, creating a significant financial disruption for many households that likely reduced spending. Some states have managed to pay full benefits for this month, though the Trump administration is still fighting over the issue in court.The deal currently under consideration in Congress to reopen the government includes full funding of SNAP benefits. Interest rate cuts The government shutdown cut off the flow of economic data on unemployment, inflation, and retail spending that the Federal Reserve depends on to monitor the economy’s health. Even as the government reopens, some of that data will still be delayed. As a result, the Fed may not deliver a third interest rate cut at its December meeting, which was widely expected before the shutdown.“What do you do if you’re driving in the fog? You slow down,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference late last month.Powell said the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee is deeply divided over whether to reduce its key rate, partly because the economy’s health is unusually cloudy right now. The government has missed two monthly jobs reports and the October inflation data, scheduled to be published Thursday, will likely never be issued.Powell said a rate cut in December was not a “foregone conclusion”and added that the lack of data could contribute to a decision by the Fed to skip a rate cut at its next meeting December 9 and 10. Fewer rate cuts could discourage borrowing and spending and weigh on the economy in the coming months. Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
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E-Commerce
Shares in CoreWeave Inc are sinking this morning after the company revealed its third-quarter 2025 results yesterday. While the New Jersey-based AI infrastructure firm more than doubled its revenue from the same quarter a year earlier, it also revised down its full fiscal 2025 forecast, sending its stock price tumbling. Heres what you need to know. Whats happened? Yesterday, AI infrastructure company CoreWeave announced financial results for its Q3 2025, which ended on September 30. There was some good news for the quarter, including revenue of nearly $1.4 billion (up 134% year over year) and a revenue backlog of $55.6 billion (up 271% YoY). Revenue backlog is a metric that includes future revenue that CoreWeave expects from existing client deals. CoreWeaves main business is leasing AI hardwaremainly servers powered by Nvidias AI GPUsto AI software companies. Some of CoreWeaves most prominent customers include OpenAI and Meta. However, that means CoreWeaves future growth depends on two primary factors: growing its client base and building massive data centers to house advanced AI servers to meet client demands. Its that latter factor that has caused CoreWeaves stock price problems today. Data center delay necessitates revised 2025 forecast Unfortunately for investors, when CoreWeave announced its strong Q3 2025 revenue numbers, the company also said that it was revising down its full 2025 fiscal year guidance. As noted by FXLeaders, CoreWeave said it now forecasts fiscal 2025 revenue of between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion. The company had previously forecast fiscal 2025 revenues of up to $5.35 billion. The reduced revenue forecast is due to a data center delay. During the company’s earnings call, CEO Mike Intrator revealed that the development of a third-party data center on which CoreWeave was counting is behind schedule. “There is a problem at one data center that’s impacting us, but there are [41 data centers] in our portfolio,” Intrator said, adding that the overwhelming majority of the data center delay should be resolved within the companys first quarter of fiscal 2026, which correlates to January through March of next year. That data center delay will impact one of the companys clients. As reported by CNBC, CoreWeave did not name the client but said the client had agreed to keep the full value of the contract intact, meaning CoreWeave will not lose out on that revenue backlog; it will merely be delayed. In addition to revising down its full fiscal 2025 revenue forecast, CoreWeave said it expects to end 2025 with adjusted operating income of between $690 million and $720 million and capital expenditures of $12 billion to $14 billion. CoreWeave stock sinks nearly 10% Despite CoreWeaves assertion that the data center issue isnt a long-term problem, the delay and disappointing guidance are affecting CoreWeave’s stock (Nasdaq: CRWV),which sank in premarket trading on Tuesday. As of the time of this writing, CRWV shares are currently trading down almost 10% to $95.54 in premarket. Thats a low CRWV has not seen since September. CoreWeave went public in March of this year. Despite lowering its IPO price right before its Nasdaq debut, the companys stock has skyrocketed in 2025. In its March IPO, CRWV stock began trading at $40 per share. By June, shares had surged to $187. As of yesterdays market close, CRWV shares had risen more than 170% for the year. But CoreWeaves double-digit stock decline this morning highlights the fact that investors are increasingly on edge about the valuations and lofty stock prices of companies operating in the AI space. There are growing concerns about an AI bubble that could mirror the Dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. CoreWeaves data center delay isnt a sign of any such bubble in itself, but the companys stock price fall may indicate that investor nerves are high when AI companies dont meet expectations.
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E-Commerce
Darin Fisher is a little older than the fresh-faced, newly minted PhD types you see roaming the well-appointed floors at OpenAIs second location in San Franciscos Mission Bay district. Before arriving at the AI super-startup, he spent 25 years working on some of the most important web browsers in the history of the web: He worked on Netscape Navigator, which helped define the early consumer internet. He worked on the popular Firefox browser at Mozilla, then went to Google, where he was a member of the Chrome team. After Google, he wanted to explore alternative browsers; he did so first at Neeva (which offered an ad-free experience), then at the Browser Company, which built the influential Arc browser. The opportunity to come to OpenAI and infuse the AI model into all of this and to think about how that can really transform the experience was all kinds of super interesting to me, Fisher says. In OpenAIs new ChatGPT Atlas browser, all tasks start with a prompt to the AI models working in the background. As the user accesses the web, the chatbot, which rides along at the right of the screen, can see the content of each webpage, answer questions about it, or take actions on it. An agent mode allows the AI to perform complex, multi-step tasks like filling out forms or shopping on the user’s behalf. We asked Fisher about the choices, trade-offs, and innovations that went into designing OpenAI’s AI-first browser. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What’s the core philosophy behind Atlas? One of the most important features of Atlas is really that chat is at the heart of it. You should start your journey with ChatGPT. Not because we work at OpenAI, but because I actually realize so many times, I kick myself why didn’t I just ask the model first? It would save me time. It should be the thing that’s there on autocomplete in the browser. It should be there so conveniently, effortlessly. This is the feedback we hear from people who’ve gotten to try Atlas. How did you approach the design challenge of getting people to adopt new habits? There’s this dance of the familiar as well as moments when you can optimize some things. I worked on browsers that have tried much more radical takes on browser UI, for good reasons, because there’s frustrations with a traditional browser UI. When you have all these little tabs at the top, at some point that starts to break down and you’re like, “Well, I guess I have to clean up now.” We really tried to get the basics right because people live in this thing. Not only are they used to it, but you’re working. You don’t want to be frustrated by it. One of the big challenges of browser design is tab management. Can you explain Atlass scrolling tabs feature? We built a classic tabs mode which works just like Chrome, but we also have a scrolling tabs mode in Atlas. What it does is it makes the tabs stay a fixed width and they start to scroll. But importantly, for this to work, new tabs enter at the left, which can be very disorienting for people. But once you get used to it, it’s kind of neat because what it means is new tabs are always opening on the left, old tabs are going off to the right. Your area of focus and what you’re working on stays on the left and all the tabs are nice and visible. What’s really cool is once you get used to this, you start accumulating a bunch of tabs and you can use the tab search feature Command+Shift+A. It’ll find your tab, and then you can zoom it back to the left. How did you approach building on Chromium while maintaining design freedom? [Chromium is a Google-developed open-source browser project that provides the foundation of several major browsers, including Google Chrome itself.] When people build on top of Chrome, you’re sort of constrained in some ways to the shape that it takes and the structure that it has. Not because you couldn’t change a lot of stuff, but because the more you change, the harder it is to update Chrome. What we really wanted to do was have our cake and eat it too. We came up with this clever way of essentially running Chrome almost unmodified, projecting the contents of the web pages into a Swift app [Swift is an Apple-developed programming language for building apps for Apple devices.] So Atlas could just be a pure Swift app, a relatively small app actually. It means we had this blank canvas on which to make anything look like anything we want. We were very free from a design perspective to rethink how so many things work. The main constraint is what people think a browser is and how they think it should work. Can you walk me through the side chat feature? When you click on links inside of ChatGPT inside of Atlas, it does this transition of moving the chat into side chat and opening the web page. This side chat . . . is now connected to the site that you’re on. You can ask questions about the site. [While shopping for couches at a retail site, for example] it could be things like, “What is the price range of your couches?” or “Who else sells something like this?” The model can go and look at the internet and tell you about all that stuff and you can just ask it a very simple question. Sometimes these websites are so cluttered too. A good example is a recipe site. You might say, “Can you just tell me the recipe?” You just ask the model to do that for you. Even on the recipe, you can be like, “I actually want to make this for four people, not six. Adjust the amounts of each portion.” When you open a new tab, you dont immediately see the chat sidebar. You see a chat window right in the middle of the page. Why did you do it like that? We really went with this idea of one box. You should feel like it’s a simpler, cleaner experience. When we did this, we got a lot of feedback where people were like, “Where’s my URL bar?” We discovered that we could put one thereyou just have to hover and then it will be there. Or if you’re a keyboard user and you did Command+L, it would activate. One of the innovations with Chrome was one box where you can enter URLs or searches. But if you go to Chrome and you open a new tab, you’ll actually see there are two boxesone at the top and one in the middle. We’re like, “Well, can we have one instead of two?” It was remarkable that it didn’t have to actually be in your face for that to be true. Everybody was happy. Everybody has no problem finding it. Using agent mode, you might, for example, ask Atlas to go out and find the best deal on a plane ticket, or even go further toward a purchase. You’re definitely asking this thing to go do stuff on your behalf, but you want to feel in control too. There’s a stop button that’s very prominent. There’s a take control button. The model is tuned to understand that it should present you with results at a certain point and now you can take it to the next step, review its work, see what it’s doing. The model can open multiple web pages in the background to do its work. Also prominently, you can choose, “Do I want this to use my authentication, my cookies, or no?” [This might be your username and password at Google, and your preferences stored as cookies.] This is actually huge because aybe you just don’t trust it yet and you want to develop some trust. You want to see what it’s going to do and you want to try it out in a safe way. How do you think about ChatGPT search versus traditional search engines? Google, full stop, is amazing. It’s an amazing tool. But at the same time, it works the way it works. It works a certain way. People are used to it as the tool that it is. This AI stuff is different and it’s a different kind of interaction. What we’ve done to improve ChatGPT search capabilities inside of Atlas was not just because it was important for ChatGPT, but also because it’s kind of essential when you’re approaching it from a browser lens. Sometimes you’re typing in that box because you have high navigational intent. Like, “I want DNS for the web” or “I want to go look at a product on Amazon.” I don’t need anything else other than just get me there. Google’s outstanding at that, but ChatGPT with these capabilities does a great job at that, too. What did Sam Altman and the leadership team tell you about wanting to build a browser when they brought you in? The focus was squarely on bringing ChatGPT to more people more readily and having it be just core to that experiencerealizing that in a browser traditionally you’re like Open tab, Go to ChatGPT.com. There’s just an extra clunkiness to that. The time’s right, you want a more streamlined experience, let’s go build it. Sam was super clear about that, which actually I really appreciate. This is a company that is rapidly putting out features. We’re often in the mode of “what can we do this month?” But this is an investment, because it’s not just what we’re going to do in Januaryit was what are we going to do in January to unlock what we could do in November? We spent all that time building a foundation and now we’re on a weekly cadence of putting out new features and new things and building on this foundation. How did you approach testing and getting feedback during development? We are an opinionated bunch, that’s for sure. But you want to validate your ideas. We had the internal population of OpenAI, which is not the most representative samplethese are really heavy tech folks. The kind of features that people are asking for internally would be things that we know from past experience might not be what everybody wants. We also brought in trusted testers. We brought in friends and family. There was this cohort of students and other cohortswe got feedback from different folks to help inform and understand just how people experience this. We had this guiding principle that people can only learn so many things differently. You’ve got to start out with the familiar. What’s been the feedback since launch? I think we’ve gotten an enormous amount of positive feedback. There’s general excitement around these agentic browsers. Maybe some degree of people wanting to just kick the tires and see what it’s all about and maybe some level of skepticism too, but also enthusiasm, generally . . . The feedback really hasn’t been surprising at all. For example, we know that it’s a lot to ask for people’s habits to change on anything. Bringing ChatGPT front and center in the experience is a big change actually. For many people, early tech adopters, this feels very natural and they actually remark at how comfortable it feels that they’re [the browser and the AI] side by side. But I think for most people, they’re still early on that journey to be honest. What features are you working on for the future? Every week we put out a new version addressing feedback. We’ve already addressed some of the top feedback that we got. There’s a lot of stuff that was in the hopper that we paired back because we didn’t want to just go outwe wanted to go out with as polished of an experience as we could. Adding a model picker in the side chat was onethey already added that. Vertical tabs is another feature that we’re getting a lot of requests for. What was the biggest design challenge in Atlas? Thematically, probably one of the biggest arguments was just, “Is this in or out? How do you keep it simple?” Pretty soon if you’re not careful, you have the kitchen sink, you have the Swiss Army knife. You’re trying to satisfy everybody, but you satisfy nobody. You don’t want to overwhelm at the start. You want it to be familiar, easy. They [users] can do things that maybe aren’t the most efficient, but that’s okay. Then they can start to learn how to leverage more efficient ways. As a user, it keeps you in control. When I want to use chat, it’s there for me. But if I don’t want to be using chat on a web page, I don’t have to. I think that’s very important. You should feel empowered. How do you design a product that has a deep set of features but still looks simple? There’s this idea of progressive disclosure in design. [We] have a new product that can do all these things and maybe you’re really eager to try to tell everybody about it, but if when they open the product the first time, it’s telling you about all the things you can do, suddenly you’re like, “I don’t know what to even do.” Progressive disclosure can mean that as you use the product it might advertise progressively different features, but I also think of it as there’s a bunch of Easter eggs for you to discover. What do they do? They give you superpowers and help you feel like you can do better, but they aren’t in your face so you still get a product that’s approachable. Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of Atlas? This is the beginning of a journey. It’s going to continue evolving. I think it’s also going to continue evolving as ChatGPT itself evolves. All these things are being built in tandem by different teams at OpenAI. A lot of ChatGPT’s best features, including things like deep research and study modeall of those are in Atlas too. There’s all these modesmodel picker, tools that you can invoke. At some level, those are powerful toolsbut do you want to try them out? But over time, the model absorbs some of that. There’s a natural tension there. You give people a palette of things, but you also want to keep it simple. Ultimately, it’s just meant to be ask the model to do stuff for you.
Category:
E-Commerce
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