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AI Threatens a Wall Street Cash Cow: Financial and Legal Data - WSJ
Wednesday February 4^th, 2026 at 9:48 AM

MARKET_VOLATILITY: Significant stock price declines occurred for financial data providers like S&P Global, MSCI, and London Stock Exchange Group following new AI product announcements.
ANTHROPIC_INNOVATION: The introduction of a legal plug-in and coding tools for the Claude-powered Cowork assistant triggered concerns over automated professional services.
SECTOR_DISRUPTION: Traditional business models relying on proprietary financial data sales are facing increased competition from generative AI capabilities.
GLOBAL_IMPACT: The selloff extended beyond Western firms to affect major international outsourcing and consulting companies such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.
INVESTOR_SENTIMENT: A broader downturn in the software sector has intensified as capital managers like Apollo Asset Management increasingly avoid the industry due to AI risks.
DATA_DEFENSE: Executives from established data firms maintain that proprietary, real-time information feeds remain essential and cannot be fully replicated by AI models.
CONTRARIAN_PERSPECTIVE: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang characterized the belief that AI will entirely replace existing software infrastructure as illogical and unlikely.
CAPITAL_EROSION: Expanding artificial intelligence capabilities contributed to a market value loss of approximately $300 billion across the software and data sectors in a single week.

By

Alexander Osipovich

and

Ben Dummett

Feb. 4, 2026 8:14 am ET

62

Watch: WSJ Interviews Anthropic’s CEO in Davos

A man works intently at the New York Stock Exchange.

Fears about new developments in artificial intelligence swept through the stock market on Tuesday. Richard Drew/AP

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What You Need to Know About the AI Models Rattling Markets

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Rapidly expanding artificial-intelligence capabilities helped erase $300 billion in market value on Tuesday.

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Financial Services Roundup: Market Talk

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Find insight on Commonwealth Bank of Australia, buyout funds and more in the latest Market Talks covering Financial Services.

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RELX, Wolters Kluwer Shares Plunge on AI Competition Fears

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Shares in European legal publishing companies plunged Tuesday as investors reacted to newly released tools from artificial-intelligence provider Anthropic.

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Finance Leaders Weigh In on Trump, the Fed, Investing and AI Risk

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The WSJ Invest Live event featured Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, Trian CEO Nelson Peltz and more.

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Tech, Media & Telecom Roundup: Market Talk

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Find insight on Verizon, Siltronic, SpaceX and more in the latest Market Talks covering Technology, Media and Telecom.

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Why Gartner and other IT stocks got slammed on Tuesday

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Gartner says customers are “slowing and deferring everything possible” as they make sense of a shifting AI landscape.

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A Century-Old Home—With a Japanese Soaking Pool and Hidden Room—on Lake Michigan’s ‘Art Coast’

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The compound, which includes the historic main residence and a guest house, stands minutes from Fennville, a fast-growing resort town

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bogorad

9 hours ago

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

From Greenland to Mauritius, ‘Decolonization’ Is Over | Compact
Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 4:39 PM

Compact

Geopolitical Intervention: Donald Trump has characterized the British plan to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius as a strategic error, citing concerns over the security of the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia.
Territorial Dispute: Britain maintained control of the Chagos Archipelago after Mauritius gained independence in 1968, leading to a long-standing sovereignty claim supported by a non-binding 2019 International Court of Justice ruling.
Diplomatic Agreement: Prime Minister Keir Starmer has negotiated a settlement to transfer sovereignty to Mauritius while securing a long-term lease for the Diego Garcia military base at an annual cost of $137 million.
Post-War Decolonization: The historical transition of territories like Greenland and Mauritius was shaped by United Nations mandates for self-determination through independence, free association, or full incorporation into existing states.
Ideological Drivers: Contemporary efforts to relinquish overseas territories are frequently motivated by a sense of Western imperial guilt and a desire to rectify perceived historical injustices.
Population Displacement: The original Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly removed to facilitate the military base's construction, yet many now oppose Mauritian rule, preferring British jurisdiction or independent return.
Economic Dependence: Territories currently undergoing "decolonization" debates, such as Greenland, remain significantly reliant on financial support and administrative structures provided by their current governing nations.
Strategic Risks: Prioritizing moral posturing over national interest in territorial negotiations may undermine security domestic sovereignty and fail to address the actual preferences of the affected populations.

Donald Trump had a busy January. Just as he withdrew his threat to invade Greenland, he threw a spanner in the works of Keir Starmer’s plan to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Calling Starmer’s deal “an act of great stupidity” on Truth Social, the president inserted Washington into the debate over the future of the little archipelago, a British overseas territory home to an important US military base. But like the obsession with Greenland, what is driving the newfound concern is America’s intensifying geopolitical competition with China.

The Chagos negotiations began in November of 2022 just after the chaotic rise and fall of Liz Truss. When serving as foreign minister, Truss had been cornered by her Mauritian counterpart at the UN General Assembly, who initiated a discussion that Britain had until then wisely avoided. The Chagos Archipelago was a dependency—an administrative colonial designation—of Mauritius when that nation gained independence in 1968, but Britain made an agreement to retain the Chagos. The Mauritians have been claiming the territory on and off since 1982, when the Mauritian Militant Movement first came to power. In 2019, the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, ruled in Mauritius’s favor. Although the ruling was not legally binding, Starmer has now negotiated a deal to hand over the islands, and then lease the largest of them, Diego Garcia, home to an Anglo-American military base, for the hefty sum of $137 million a year.

Greenland and Mauritius took two different paths open to colonial possessions and their colonizers after the Second World War. The newly founded United Nations, driven by the stated anticolonialism shared by Washington and Moscow, resolved to put an end to European empires; the Europeans, exhausted by war, could hardly object. There were three available paths to self-determination: full independence, free association, or full incorporation. Under UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld, the goal was two-fold: self-determination and development. Mauritius became fully independent from Britain, while Greenland was incorporated into the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953. Since then, Greenland has gradually gained more autonomy, and is now a self-governing territory.

The Cold War determined the fates of many former colonies. The Soviet Union and the United States, each uneasy about the prospect of Greenland falling into the other’s hands, supported continued Danish possession. For its part, Britain bought the Chagos Islands for the purposes of hosting the American military base in Diego Garcia. The Chagossians who had lived there for generations, most as workers on coconut oil plantations, were displaced to Mauritius; later, many moved to Britain, where most have settled in Crawley, in Sussex.

Alongside the formal processes that accompanied it, decolonization began to acquire a broader meaning, whereby a former colonial metropole, a curriculum, or even a countryside could be in need of “decolonization.” Decolonization, by this logic, became a continuous moral imperative, and its driving force is Western imperial guilt. It was also widely accepted that the official end of colonial rule had led not to true independence but to neo-colonialism. Waning European power had given way to increasing American influence. UN efforts towards global development were also sometimes treated as covertly imperialist, since they suggested there was something superior about Western capitalism and liberal democracy.

The new postcolonial logic made little distinction between the different processes and constitutional agreements that had bookended the imperial era, so it is unsurprising that many of these arrangements are being reconsidered. This was the background of Britain’s talks with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands as well as Denmark’s recent reckoning over Greenland. For instance, in 2025 the Danish prime minister issued an apology for a birth control campaign in which—as a part of Danish modernization efforts—the coil was widely encouraged as contraception in Greenland. Greenlandic women who had coils inserted without their knowledge or proper consultation were offered compensation.

But in the domain of geopolitics, decolonization is a more complicated proposition. Mauritius and the Chagos are entirely the product of colonization: Both were uninhabited when the French first settled in the eighteenth century. As one academic put it, Mauritius is “a flotsam left behind by the wreck of the colonial world.” Greenland is a Scandinavian welfare state on a block of ice which still has no roads connecting major towns. Greenlanders hope to develop more self-sufficiency through tourism and increased access to natural resources, but are for now reliant on Danish financial support for about half of national income.

It is worth noting that Mauritius is not challenging those parts of the 1968 agreement that were beneficial to the Mauritians, which included, among other things, mineral and fishing rights. The Mauritians and their supporters point to the displacement of the Chagossians by the British to bolster their claims, but this has been severely complicated by the fact that the Chagossians themselves oppose returning the islands to Mauritius.

In fact, in Greenland and the Chagos Islands, the “colonized” are on the side of their supposed colonizers. Within Britain, Chagossians are campaigning for their own return to the Chagos Islands, a prospect they consider less likely under Mauritian control. The Trump administration similarly tried to take up the plight of the Greenlanders, and the story about the coil campaign was picked up in the conservative New York Post. But when JD Vance visited Greenland last year, his flight was diverted to the American Pituffik space base at the news of protests, and a whopping 85 percent of Greenlanders oppose an American takeover, with a majority preferring continued Danish rule to that alternative. Applied postcolonial history seems to be little more than an exercise in selective counterfactuals.

In Britain, too, there is much confusion over the exact implications of former imperial wrongs. A report from the think tank Policy Exchange notes that parliamentarians consistently failed to understand that recognizing a “legal obligation” to cede the Chagos to Mauritius would make it impossible for Britain to “negotiate assurances about defense interests, the rights of Chagossians, and the environment.” A “legal obligation” had become just another form of moral posturing, rather than a binding imperative. The opposition, which also supported the deal, was no better than the Tory government. Jeremy Corbyn, when leader of the Labour party, seemed unable to understand that the Mauritian claim to the territory and the ability of the Chagossians to return to their homeland might be in conflict. Starmer’s deal—a negotiated settlement with no clear upsides for Britain, which involves handing territory and cash over to a foreign government—is the ultimate expression of British imperial self-flagellation.

“Imperial guilt is a shallow, self-sabotaging basis for geopolitical strategy.”

In his famous introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that his countrymen ought to “have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.” Well, Europeans do feel ashamed, but the consequences have proven far from revolutionary. Who are Greenland’s relevant colonizers—the Danes or the looming Americans? Who are the relevant former colonial subjects in the Chagos negotiations—the Mauritians or the Chagossians? Imperial guilt is a shallow, self-sabotaging basis for geopolitical strategy. It is time for European leaders to rediscover their own national self-interest.

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bogorad

1 day ago

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Women Are More Likely Than Men to Endorse Political Violence // A new survey finding points to the dangers of digital outrage culture. by Colin Wright
Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 1:18 PM

City-Journal text

Survey Basis: NCRI’s weighted 1,055-respondent study asked whether targeted murder of Trump or Mayor Mamdani could ever be justified on a seven-point scale.
Left-of-Center Findings: 67% of left-of-center participants expressed some justification for killing Trump, up 11 points from an earlier 2025 study.
Right-of-Center Findings: 54% of right-of-center respondents expressed some degree of justification for murdering Mamdani.
Generalized Tolerance: Justifications for killing Trump and Mamdani were strongly correlated, suggesting tolerance for political violence crosses partisan lines.
Gender Disparity: Women were roughly 21% more likely than men to justify Mamdani’s murder and nearly 15% more likely to justify Trump’s, even after controlling for age and other factors.
Punitive Femininity: The author labels the mindset driving this disparity “punitive femininity,” fueled by anger, moral certainty, and emotional manipulation rather than innate aggression.
Social Media Impact: Heavy social media use and a belief in America’s terminal decline are the strongest predictors of violence tolerance, as platforms reward outrage and moral absolutism that erode traditional norms.

When we talk about political violence, we almost always assume that its perpetrators are young men. That makes sense: men are statistically more likely to engage in physical aggression and get arrested for violent crimes at higher rates. At the same time, many are dealing with rising unemployment, declining educational achievement, and growing social disengagement. Given all that, researchers may reasonably assume that young men are driving greater tolerance for political violence.

New data complicate that assumption. A recent survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers found that under certain conditions, women were more likely than men to express support for political violence. The findings were so counter to the prevailing narrative that they surprised even the researchers.

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It makes sense, though, when you start to recognize where these women’s impulses come from. The rise of what I call “punitive femininity” is downstream of the toxic political culture online, a culture that is transforming the sex long viewed as more restrained and less prone to violence.

To investigate toleration of political violence, NCRI use data from a survey of 1,055 respondents, weighted to be representative across sex, age, race/ethnicity, and education. The survey asked participants whether they saw any justification for the targeted murder of President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It recorded responses on a seven-point scale ranging from zero (“completely unjustified”) to six (“highly justified”).

Among left-of-center respondents, 67 percent expressed at least some justification for the murder of Trump, an 11-point increase over NCRI’s earlier 2025 study. Fifty-four percent of right-of-center respondents expressed some degree of justification for murdering Mamdani.

Strikingly, justification for killing Trump and justification for killing Mamdani were strongly correlated. This implies that support for political murder is not merely partisan but reflects a generalized tolerance for political violence.

The most unexpected result: women were significantly more likely than men to endorse such violence. Female respondents were approximately 21 percent more likely than males to express some justification for murdering Mamdani and nearly 15 percent more likely to justify murdering Trump.

Both differences were statistically significant. These effects persisted even after controlling for age and other variables.

This disparity isn’t obviously the result of biological sex differences or even political polarization. Rather, it reflects the rise of a distinct and disturbing mindset.

The strongest predictors of tolerance for violence in NCRI’s data were heavy social media use and a sense that America is in a state of terminal decline. The supporters of violence in the survey aren’t traditional extremists. Rather, they seem motivated by the despair, nihilism, and moral confusion online.

For whatever reason, women seem uniquely at risk for infection by this mindset. Over the past decade, women—especially younger women—have become more politically and affectively polarized in their political judgments. Political disagreement is increasingly treated as a serious moral offense rather than a simple difference of opinion. When you see the world that way, punishing someone for holding different views becomes a moral good.

I think of this mindset as “punitive femininity.” By punitive femininity, I do not mean to invoke notions of hostility, cruelty, or aggression in the conventional sense. I mean the transformation of moral concern into a license to act punitively. Adoption of this attitude is fueled by a combination of raw anger, emotional manipulation, and an exaggerated sense of moral certainty.

Social media plays a central role in this transformation. Modern platforms reward outrage, absolutism, and performative aggression. They flatten moral complexity, elevating and even glorifying condemnation.

This lens helps make sense of some of the strangest corners of the internet. Consider the online reaction to Luigi Mangione. After his arrest for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some treated Mangione not as a killer, but as a celebrity. They even explicitly sexualized him, describing him as attractive, charismatic, and even romantic.

When violence is paired with attraction, it stops being judged on moral terms. Instead of asking whether an action is wrong, people start asking whether it feels meaningful, expressive, or somehow justified.

Women aren’t uniquely prone to this dynamic. But they do disproportionately occupy and get their news from the digital spaces where this kind of aestheticization spreads fastest.

Historically, women have played a stabilizing role in moral and civic life. Across cultures, they score higher on measures of empathy, care, and harm avoidance.

When women become less likely to demonstrate these virtues, it doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly transformed. It means the moral climate itself has deteriorated. Social media is breaking down basic norms of restraint, and that breakdown is showing up in groups once closely associated with moral caution and care.

If we care about social stability and the well-being of the next generation, we need to change course. We must stop rewarding moral outrage—especially when it means support for violence.

Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images

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bogorad

1 day ago

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Trump’s Fed Pick Could Be Just What the Central Bank Needs // If he acts in harmony with his past statements, Kevin Warsh could restore the Fed’s integrity and independence. by Allison Schrager
Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 1:18 PM

City-Journal text

Warsh’s profile: Former Fed governor with political connections, not a monetary policy scholar, now favored by Trump to replace Jerome Powell.
Powell’s nomination rationale: Chosen in 2017 for his market experience and communication skills after a streak of Ph.D. economists chaired the Fed.
Policy shift critique: Powell’s 2019 framework review elevated employment goals, which the author links to inflation running hot despite unemployment concerns.
QE expansion concerns: Powell’s doubling of the balance sheet during the pandemic is blamed for distorting the housing market and leaving the Fed with a bloated balance sheet.
QE’s consequences: Enlarged balance sheet invites political pressure, more interference, and expectations that the Fed will buy long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities.
Warsh’s stance: His opposition to QE, potential lower reserve rates, and consistent hawkish tone could restore Fed independence and shield it from future interventions.

I first became aware of Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in 2006, when I was in graduate school and he was nominated to the Fed Board of Governors. Just 35, with a respectable (if unremarkable) career in finance but extremely well-connected politically, he raised more than a few skeptical eyebrows that he could survive the grueling Senate confirmation process (even Nobel laureates aren’t a lock). But 20 years later, Warsh may be just what the Fed needs to restore integrity to the institution.

In some ways, Warsh is an obvious pick: he looks the part, was a former Fed governor, and is close to the Trump administration. Yet he’s also a surprising choice: he is not a great scholar of monetary policy, did nothing notable in his finance career, and has a long history of taking more hawkish stances on monetary policy than Donald Trump.

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True, Powell was not a scholar of monetary policy, either—but he is a lawyer. In nominating him in 2017, the first Trump administration’s thinking was that, after three consecutive economics Ph.D.’s, the next Fed chair should be someone steeped in markets, with strong communication and political skills, backstopped by board members with strong academic training.

Powell wound up making several major errors, though keeping interest rates too high for too long was not one of them. Some of his missteps—letting the Fed wade into climate change and racial-justice issues, for example—made it more vulnerable to political attacks. His big policy errors include shifting the central bank’s focus to weight employment more than inflation during the 2019 framework review. This contributed to letting inflation get out of control, and it remains high today.

Though unemployment is a serious problem, putting greater emphasis on the issue was never wise. Monetary policy’s impact on unemployment is still not well understood, and some unemployment is caused by supply conditions, over which the Fed has less control. A greater focus on unemployment also makes the institution more subject to political capture, because favored groups can be singled out to justify loose monetary policy. Warsh’s history suggests that he would be more concerned with reducing inflation. Some central banks target only inflation.

Powell’s other significant error was expanding the Quantitative Easing (QE) program by more than doubling the Fed’s balance sheet during the pandemic—a decision that continues to distort the housing market. Today, the balance sheet is still large relative to earlier rounds of QE. Warsh probably would have made a different choice.

Warsh was serving on the Fed Board when QE began in November 2008, as well as during the change to the ample, or even abundant, reserve system during the financial crisis. At the time, interest rates stood at zero, and the Fed was looking to support the economy, so it paid interest on the money that banks kept parked at the Fed and bought long-dated treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, hoping to boost demand. These actions did change the scope of monetary policy: the Fed’s balance sheet is now much larger. But they also created many problems in exchange for few benefits, since we lack strong, consistent evidence that QE ever did, in fact, boost economic demand.

QE imposes many costs. One heavy one is that central banks face more outside interference, which undermines independence. That the Fed buys things other than short-term debt means that it will come under greater pressure to buy long-dated treasuries to reduce debt-service costs, and to buy more mortgage-backed securities to bring mortgage rates down.

The balance sheet’s sheer size also makes it a target. The Cares Act directed the Fed to extend credit to middle-market firms. The FDIC borrowed from the Fed, rather than the Treasury (which is bound by the debt limit) to bail out bank deposit holders.

Warsh’s desire to phase out QE, or even potentially pay a lower rate on reserves, could enhance financial stability and insulate the Fed from more political attacks.

More recently, Warsh sided with President Trump on cutting rates. This position seems at odds with what he has argued for on the board and as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. But if, as chair, Warsh acts in harmony with his statements over the last 15 years, he could be the one to restore more independence to the Fed and protect it from future interference.

Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images

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bogorad

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

SpaceX, xAI Tie Up, Forming $1.25 Trillion Company - WSJ
Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 5:11 AM

Corporate Consolidation: SpaceX has officially acquired xAI, merging Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company with his artificial intelligence startup.
Vertical Integration: The merger aims to create an integrated innovation engine combining orbital infrastructure with advanced narrow and general AI capabilities.
Financial Valuation: The combined entity is valued at approximately $1.25 trillion, with the xAI portion specifically valued at $250 billion.
Transaction Structure: The deal is executed via a share exchange where xAI shares convert into SpaceX stock at a ratio of 0.1433 per share.
Resource Synergy: This acquisition follows a pattern of Musk cross-leveraging his companies, similar to previous integrations involving SolarCity, Tesla, and X.
Orbital Infrastructure: SpaceX has filed to deploy a network of up to one million satellites designed to operate as space-based AI data centers.
Energy Strategy: The merger seeks to solve terrestrial power limitations by utilizing solar energy in space to fulfill the high electricity demands of AI.
Operational Challenges: Successful execution depends on the continued development of the Starship rocket, which has yet to deploy an operational payload during testing.

By

Micah Maidenberg

,

Meghan Bobrowsky

and

Berber Jin

Updated Feb. 2, 2026 8:22 pm ET

288

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Musk’s SpaceX Restricts Starlink for Russian Drones

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The world’s richest man has repeatedly become entangled in the four-year conflict as his Starlink is key to Ukrainian military communications.

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Google Is Spending Big to Build a Lead in the AI Energy Race

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A deal to buy wind and solar developer Intersect is the latest in a series of moves that have left Google well prepared for the power crunch facing data centers.

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AI’s Fundraising Frenzy Continues

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Plus, China’s EV victory, 7 reasons teens say no to AI, trouble with the Nvidia-OpenAI megadeal and how AI is coming for Apple’s profit margins, in this edition of the Technology newsletter.

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Oracle Plans to Raise Up to $50 Billion for AI Infrastructure Buildout

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The cloud-services giant said it expects to raise the money through a combination of debt and equity.

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What Oracle Has to Lose From OpenAI and Nvidia’s Rocky Relationship

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Nvidia’s OpenAI pivot puts Oracle’s accounting in the spotlight.

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SpaceX officially acquires xAI. Here’s how Elon Musk justifies the move.

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Musk says the newest merger of companies he owns is necessary to create “a sentient sun to understand the universe.”

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Penthouse Atop Wavy New Tower on Manhattan’s Upper East Side Sells for $25 Million

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bogorad

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Dear Democrats, enforcing immigration law is not fascism
Monday February 2^nd, 2026 at 1:24 PM

Washington Examiner

POLICY_OBSTRUCTION: Coordinated and well-funded provocations aim to end all immigration enforcement by creating chaos and obstructing federal law.
IDEOLOGICAL_DELUSION: Democratic leaders operate within media bubbles, falsely characterizing standard law enforcement activities as a generational struggle against fascism.
INFLAMMATORY_RHETORIC: Prominent figures use extreme historical analogies, comparing immigration officers to Nazis and equating current events to the story of Anne Frank.
FACTUAL_DISTORTION: Activists and politicians frequently rely on uncritically accepted propaganda and AI-generated misinformation to frame law enforcement encounters.
LAW_ENFORCEMENT_REALITY: Incidents involving Renee Good and Alex Pretti are characterized not as random violence, but as consequences of activists physically obstructing officers.
PUBLIC_DEMAND: A significant portion of the American public supports the deportation of illegal immigrants, while the majority of the Democratic party opposes such enforcement.
SOVEREIGNTY_CONFLICT: Tensions exist between state and local governments that refuse to cooperate with federal officers and the necessity of maintaining the nation-state.
ORDERED_LIBERTY: The maintenance of a functioning democratic republic requires respect for federal authority and the enforcement of established immigration laws.

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