Trump’s attacks on Lisa Cook are but a prelude to the major event of the week — a speech from Fed Chairman Powell from the central bank’s Jackson Hole, Wyoming retreat this week.

This year, investors expect fireworks. If so, that’ll be the first time in about 9 years when a Fed speech from the Jackson Hole retreat mattered.

Back in 2016, then-Fed Chair Janet Yellen used the retreat as the opportunity to note that the U.S. economy was “resiliant” and could support a quarter-point rate cut that September.

In the early 21st century, as we pump trillions into AI systems that we increasingly do not understand, we are confronted by a paradox as old as Prometheus: that to gain fire is to risk the wrath of gods — or to become gods ourselves.

But these thinkers aren’t building heaven or hell. They’re building something stranger: a successor species not born of biology but of code and concept, free from carbon and chaos, capable of exploring dimensions of consciousness we have only dreamed of.

This isn’t extinction in the Hollywood sense. It’s evolution. Not the end of meaning — but the beginning of deeper meaning, designed not by divine intervention or natural selection, but by minds we taught to think better than us.

If that offends your human pride (and it does mine), then you and I may be clinging to the past.

But if you believe that intelligence is sacred, then you understand that its purpose is not to remain chained to Homo sapiens, but to explore the universe without us, or perhaps with us, in new form.

Cash holders saw their worst returns in the 2010s. Although inflation was moderate during that decade, and the Fed was arguably fighting deflation following the Great Financial Crisis, banks largely paid no interest to depositors.

That’s improved since the Fed aggressively raised interest rates in 2022-2023. Investors are almost getting a positive return after inflation.

But with rates coming down, potentially aggressively under a new Fed Chair next year, that trend will worsen.