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Mondays sell-off on Wall Street sent consumers into a panic as talk of a recession continued to heat up. Most S&P 500 stocks are now in correction territory, and the trade war with Canada, Mexico, and China continues to heat up. Tuesdays trading, meanwhile, was something of a roller-coaster, with stocks yo-yoing and finally settling at another loss. The Dow fell 478 points, or 1.14%, with the Nasdaq index slipping 42 points (0.75%) and the S&P 500 largely flat, losing 32 points. Heres the good news. Despite all the negative news and Mondays sell-off, were not in a recession yetand its far from a sure thing. Consumer spending recently posted its first drop in nearly two years, but its still in a very healthy range. That said, the whiplash youre feeling is far from unjustified. Three weeks ago, stocks were at or near all-time highs, and few economists were talking about a recession. These days, its seemingly all anyone can talk about. What the analysts say Goldman Sachs on Friday increased its odds of a recession over the next 12 months from 15% to 20%, writing in a note to clients that we see policy changes as the key risk. Put another way: Goldman is keeping a close eye on tariffs. If Donald Trump is willing to back off of them as recession risks increase, the firm wrote, a recession can be avoided. If not . . . If the White House remained committed to its policies even in the face of much worse data, Goldman Sachs wrote, recession risk would rise further. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moodys Analytics, is less optimistic, however. He currently puts the odds of a recession at better than one in threebut he agrees tariffs are the trigger. The risks of a U.S. recession starting in the coming year are uncomfortably high and rising, he wrote Monday in a post on X. I would put them at 35%, up from 15% at the start of the year. For context, the typical recession probability is 15%the U.S. economy historically suffers a recession every 6 or 7 years on average. The economy will likely suffer a downturn if the Trump administration follows through on the tariff increases it has announced and maintains those tariffs for more than a few months. JPMorgan is the bear of Wall Street on this particular topic, putting the odds at 40%. Trump himself stoked fears on Sunday, when he said, I hate to predict things like that, when asked about the prospect of a recession, adding there is a period of transition. What to watch Technically, a recession can be declared after at least two consecutive quarters of declining economic output. So it would be July before any recession calls could be formalized. The effects of an economic downturn could be felt sooner, though. The numbers to watch to get a sense of where the economy is going are employment (which has seen employers add between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs per month since December), wage growth (which has been outpacing inflation for almost two years) and consumer spending (which showed a 2% drop in February). Keeping up with the fast pace of change in tariffs can be exhausting. On Tuesday alone, Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports to 50% following a decision by the Ontario government to impose a 25% tax on electricity exports to the U.S. By mid-afternoon, however, Ontario suspended its surcharge and Trump later walked back his escalation. So, rather than monitoring the day-to-day minutia, experts say its best to keep an eye on how widespread Trumps tariffs end up being. Tariffs themselves, depends how you use it, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Stanford Graduate School of Business in an interview released last weekend. [When used] as a tool or kind of a weapon to doin some casesgood stuff its very modestly inflationary, I mean youre talking about 0.1% or 0.2%. Now if you put 25% tariffs on all imports, thats a lot more. That could be, in my view, quite recessionary and inflationary.
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E-Commerce
More bad news out of the federal government this week, and its only Tuesday: The Trump administration and its chaotic Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are now turning their sights on kids’ school lunches, the latest casualty in the administration’s war on the federal government’s budget. “Millions of children could lose free school meals,” the School Nutrition Association (SNA) said in a statement, as a result of the $1 billion in cuts to the Department of Agriculture (USDA). That means about $660 million of those funds will no longer go to feeding needy children in schools and childcare facilities, set up through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. Those funds were meant to purchase healthy, local, and regional foods for school meals, supplied by local farmers and ranchers. Also cut: federal funds to purchase from those farmers for food banks and other organizations. These proposals [come] . . . at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs, said Shannon Gleave, president of the SNA. Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies. According to the SNA, one proposed cut to the Community Eligibility Provision would eliminate free meals available to some 12 million students in 24,000 schools nationwide, all with high-poverty rates. This is all bad news for our nation’s children and parents, as well as teachers and schools, which are already reeling from the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, which Trump has attacked, calling it a “big con job.” It’s also another blow to American families, who are already reeling from the rising cost of food and having to increasingly turn to food banks, while Republicans push for more cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for those with the lowest incomes, according to the Guardian.
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E-Commerce
Just five years ago, when the movie Parasite won a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, Bong Joon Ho, its South Korean director, said in his acceptance speech that American audiences needed to get over their issue with the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles. His point was that there’s a whole world of great cinema beyond English-language films, and we shouldn’t let subtitles be a deal-breaker. That compares to audio dubbing, the technique that places English dialogue over the moving lips of an actor speaking in another language. Americans maintain their hesitancy around dubbed movies. In a 2021 survey, 76% of Americans said they preferred subtitling over dubbing. Compare that to European countries such as France, Italy, and Germany, where the majority of moviegoers prefer dubbing. Even younger generations in the U.S. are leaning toward subtitles, according to a 2024 Preply survey. 96% of Gen Z Americans prefer subtitles to dubbings, compared to just 75% of baby boomers. But now, AI could change all that. Amazon just made a big bet on dubbing, introducing AI-driven audio translation to some of its Prime Video entertainment. Its still a pilot, though there are signs for how successful the AI audio-translation program will be. Meanwhile, video startups including ElevenLabs and InVideo are also dipping their toe into dubbing. Yet, the question of quality remains: Will these efforts make dubbing more lifelike and artful, or will it simply make it more common? The AI dubbing boom Amazon is slowly introducing AI dubbing to its Prime Video content, having started with just 12 licensed movies and series, including the documentary El Cid: La Leyenda and the drama Long Lost, translating between English and Latin American Spanish. These translations arent exclusively performed by AI; Amazon still employing localization professionals for quality control. From the outside, it looks like Amazon is employing AI to up the quantity of dubs, but not necessarily the quality. Amazon declined to comment, but pointed to a public blog post, which provides some clues. The blog notes that Amazon is only creating new dubs, not modifying preexisting ones. In his statement, Prime Video VP of technology Raf Soltanovich emphasized making international titles more accessible and enjoyable. Reactions to Amazons new tech have been mixed. Futurism called it an assault on cinema. On Saturday Night Live, Michael Che joked that the tool needed to translate Sylvester Stallone. Lifehackers Jake Peterson tried the tool himself. While Peterson maintained that there was no way [he] would genuinely enjoy watching an entire movie or series with an AI dub, he admitted that some of the tech was impressive, like when the AI muffled its own voice for the marshmallow-stuffing chubby bunny challenge. But Amazon isnt the only company investing in AI dubbing tools. ElevenLabs, most known for its AI voice generator, has its own dub software. So do a handful of other startups, including InVideo, Dubbing AI, and Dubverse. But all these toolsincluding Amazonsare still nascent. Even if their voices are monotone and robotic now, that could change in the coming months. Will dubbed media ever be watchable? In the world of anime, theres a common saying: Subs not dubs. The argument goes that an actors (or voice actors) performance is tied to their intonation and speaking style. Severing the voice from the body, and inserting a whole new voice in a new language, destroys the artistry. That’s not a problem for Western European audiences, where dubbing is often more common than subtitles. But, for Americans viewers, it can still be discomforting. The expectation is that AI can help here. Audio generators can replicate the sound of another actors voice. In some ways, thats scary: Much of the 2023 SAG strike revolved around protections against AI duplication. But, in the dubbing space, that offers promise. The viewer could hear the performance in the voice of the actor, but within their own language. AI tools have also been able to hear emotion in a voice; they could replicate that in the duplicated audio. Weve seen early-stage versions of this quality-altering AI voice tool. Respeecher lets audio engineers tinker with accents and fix pronunciations. Thats the tool that caused a ruckus for The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez during awards season. But, at scale, this kind of audio manipulation and regeneration could have seismic industry effects. Voice actors would be out of work. In their current form, subtitles still trump dubbing. But, with AI, that could all change sooner than we think.
Category:
E-Commerce
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