This week’s Indicator newsletter is out. We tackle: 💼 Why employers don’t want to pay for GLP-1s 🏥 Why hospital mergers equate to higher prices with limited gains 🗳️ Where campaign cash ends up Read on tinyurl.com/3zpnaze

Texas’ main grid operator ERCOT says its peak demand could more than quadruple in the next few years overwhelmingly due to data centers. This summer will certainly see a new record up at ~15%, possibly double that.

US battery production inched up to a record high in data released this morning, up 36% from this time last year. Total output has more than doubled since 2022

As incoming chair Warsh comes to Fed with big plans for the Fed's balance sheet, Governor Michael Barr warns in a speech that lowering liquidity rules to get to smaller Fed holdings simply increases financial stability risks: "Shrinking the balance sheet is the wrong objective."

It's Friday! The Indicator is back with another newsletter ⚡ Texas is seeing unprecedented electricity demand. Can they meet it? 💸 There are so many other ways to tax the rich! Why are Americans obsessed with the income tax? 🎰 Insider trading is a problem. Why is it so tricky to stop? Read on

"The vote was 54-45 in the most-partisan-ever U.S. Senate confirmation of a Fed chair. A single Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted with the Republican majority."

Kevin Warsh has been confirmed as Fed chair. The 54-45 vote is the narrowest margin since Senate approvals became a requirement in 1977.

If you want some feel good stats about local news, there is a report for you. People have the most trust in local news compared to national news, independent creators, chatbots so on. And people blame local news the LEAST for misinformation.

Charts! Starting with the big one: Consumer prices in April were up 3.8 percent from a year earlier, the fastest inflation since May 2023. Over the past three months, prices have risen at an annual rate of 7.3%. #NumbersDay

Wild that aligning school times with biology would help young people do better... in school. Glad someone did this study

When grid upgrades take too long, say hello to a lot of new natural gas. The new 'structural supercycle' will create new gas-powered infrastructure. AI demand -> compute demand -> electricity demand -> grid too old -> yes please, all the fast-scaling natural gas

Today's Indicator newsletter is OUT. We cover: 🤖 How Chinese AI might actually help inequality 💼 How a unique legal strategy enables five subscribers to take on the Paramount+ merger ⚓ What alternatives exist for the Strait of Hormuz @planetmoney.bsky.social

Productivity increases 0.8% in Q1 2026; unit labor costs increase 2.3% (annual rates) www.bls.gov/news.release... #Productivity #BLSdata

My dad, Larry McKim, was an artist. He passed in 2019 and left behind hundreds of paintings that are either scattered in people’s homes or stuck in a storage unit. Art was his life. He just wanted his work to be seen. So I put together a living map of where his work has ended up!

The scale of power demand is absolutely nuts. So the all-time peak load for the ENTIRE ERCOT system (Texas’s independent electric grid) is ~85 GW. Oncor, the TX utility, has interconnection requests of 122 GW over the next five years within that system.

I reckon if you'd asked 2016-Ketan whether California's grid profile will look like this in 2026, he would've said something like "that'd be excellent, but it's pretty unlikely as batteries can't really perform load shifting at that scale" www.caiso.com/todays-outlo...

If you’ve flown recently, you may have learned the Wi-Fi was actually FREE. The trend is catching on. I’ve been a member of the “pay $8 dollars for bad airplane internet” community for many a year. Satellite tech has changed the equation to make airlines un-UN-bundle www.npr.org/2026/05/04/n...

The national average price of gasoline has just hit $4.50/gal, the highest level since July 17, 2022, according to GasBuddy data.

This is one of the more powerful stories I’ve been a part of this year. We put out a call for people who have seen family members struggle with their finances that turned out to be dementia-related. We got a surprising number of stories. tinyurl.com/3jh7c965

umm. hi. you should sign up for the indicator's newsletter. it is so SICK! This week, I wrote about how like half of data centers in the US aren't getting built. and ONE of the reasons... there aren't enough transformers!! Why is that? Read on if you want or don't. tinyurl.com/Indicator-Ne...

Love The Indicator and need more numbers from the news explained to you? My colleague @cooperkatzmckim.bsky.social has launched a brilliant companion newsletter that will arrive in your inbox weekly if you sign up here: npr.org/indicatornewsletter