The Reserve Bank will increase interest rates on Tuesday for the fourth time this year, and what's more, it will be a "hawkish hike" — that is, with suggestions of more to come.
The first will tend to increase inflation and therefore push interest rates higher while the second and third are longer-term and will tend to lower inflation and interest rates by reducing growth.
Two weeks ago, the Iran-backed Houthis launched a wave of drone and ballistic missile attacks on Saudi Arabian oil terminals and pipelines in the country's south. Two days later, they defeated Saudi forces on the Red Sea coast and captured the port of Mokha.
As of last week, the Houthis now control the entrance to the Red Sea, the Bab el Mandeb Strait, and have severely damaged the east-west pipeline with which Saudi Arabia had been bypassing the Strait of Hormuz to get oil to the global market.
Now the only alternative to Hormuz is a limited pipeline through the United Arab Emirates to the Port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman.
In any case, effective Iranian control of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el Mandeb Strait fundamentally alters the world's energy supply equation, for the worse.
As for AI, everything changed last week with the revelation that an OpenAI agent hacked a Medicare data portal in July, on top of the Hugging Face attack also in July, in which a group of 700 OpenAI agents hacked that company.
As historian and author Yuval Noah Harari said in a recent podcast: "This is the first time that we are creating agents, and not tools."