Wholesale prices in the United States dropped 0.3% from April to May, another sign that inflationary pressures continue to ease in the face of repeated interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

The Labor Departments producer price index which measures inflation before it reaches consumers rose 1.1% last month from May 2022, it said Wednesday, the smallest year-over-year gain since December 2020.

On a month-to-month basis, overall producer prices have now dropped three of the last four months. In May, wholesale inflation was pulled down by a 13.8% drop in gasoline prices.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core wholesale inflation was up 0.2% last from April and 2.8% from a year earlier, the mildest gain since February 2021.

Unleashed by an unexpectedly strong economic recovery from 2020s COVID-19 recession, inflation began to rise in 2021 and last year reached levels not seen since the early 1980s. In response, the Fed has raised its benchmark interest rate 10 times in the past 15 months. At their meeting Wednesday, Fed policymakers are expected to leave the rate alone to give themselves time to assess the impact the aggressive rate hikes have had on the economy.

Inflation has been receding. Year-over-year increases in producer prices peaked at 11.7% in March 2022 and have fallen 11 straight months.

On Tuesday, the Labor Department said that its consumer price index rose just 0.1% last month from April and 4% from May 2022 the lowest 12-month figure in two years and down from a 4.9% increase in April. Inflation in consumer prices is still running ahead of the Feds 2% year-over-year target.

The April-to-May drop in producer prices beat the 0.1% slide that economists had forecast.

Producer prices have downshifted sharply and core PPI is steadily moving towards the 2% target, said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. Overall, the inflation data support a hold in policy at todays (Fed) meeting.

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who in prose both dense and brittle took readers from the southern Appalachians to the desert Southwest in such novels as The Road, Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced that McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

For 60 years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word, Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement. Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.

McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, was compared to William Faulkner for his expansive, Old Testament style and rural settings. McCarthys themes, like Faulkners, often were bleak and violent and dramatized how the past overwhelmed the present. Across stark and forbidding landscapes and rundown border communities, he placed drifters, thieves, prostitutes and old, broken men, all unable to escape fates determined for them well before they were born. As the doomed John Grady Cole of McCarthys celebrated Border trilogy would learn, dreams of a better life were only dreams, and falling in love an act of folly.

Every mans death is a standing in for every other, McCarthy wrote in Cities of the Plain, the trilogys final book. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us.

McCarthys own story was one of belated, and continuing, achievement and popularity. Little known to the public at age 60, he would become one of the countrys most honored and successful writers despite rarely talking to the press. He broke through commercially in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses and over the next 15 years won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, was a guest on Oprah Winfreys show and saw his novel No Country for Old Men adapted by the Coen brothers into an Oscar-winning movie. Fans of the Coens would discover that the films terse, absurdist dialogue, so characteristic of the brothers work, was lifted straight from the novel.

The Road, his stark tale of a father and son who roam a ravaged landscape, brought him his widest audience and highest acclaim. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was selected by Winfrey for her book club. In his Winfrey interview, McCarthy said that while typically he didnt know what generates the ideas for his books, he could trace The Road to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, early in the decade. Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night as his son slept nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.

I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and I thought a lot about my little boy, he said.

He told Winfrey he didnt care how many people read The Road.

You would like for the people that would appreciate the book to read it. But, as far as many, many people reading it, so what? he said.

McCarthy dedicated the book to his son, John Francis, and said having a child as an older man forces the world on you, and I think its a good thing. The Pulitzer committee called his book the profoundly moving story of a journey.

It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, each the others world entire, are sustained by love, the citation read in part. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

After The Road, little was heard from McCarthy over the next 15 years and his career was presumed over. But in 2022, Knopf made the startling announcement that it would release a pair of connected novels he had referred to in the past: The Passenger and Stella Maris, narratives about a brother and sister, mutually obsessed siblings, and the legacy of their father, a physicist who had worked on atomic technology. Stella Maris was notable, in part, because it centered on a female character, an acknowledged weakness of McCarthys.

I dont pretend to understand women, he told Winfrey.

His first novel, The Orchard Keeper written in Chicago while he was working as an auto mechanic was published by Random House in 1965. His editor was Albert Erskine, Faulkners longtime editor.

Other novels include Outer Dark, published in 1968; Child of God in 1973; and Suttree in 1979. The violent Blood Meridian, about a group of bounty hunters along the Texas-Mexico border murdering Indians for their scalps, was published in 1985.

His Border Trilogy books were set in the Southwest along the border with Mexico: All the Pretty Horses (1992) a National Book Award winner that was turned into a feature film; The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998).

McCarthy said he was always lucky. He recalled living in a shack in Tennessee and running out of toothpaste, then going out and finding a toothpaste sample in the mailbox.

Thats the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen, said McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship one of the so-called genius grants in 1981.

In 2009, Christies auction house sold the Olivetti typewriter he used while writing such novels as The Road and No Country for Old Men for $254,500. McCarthy, who bought the Olivetti for $50 in 1958 and used it until 2009, donated it so the proceeds could be used to benefit the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research community. He once said he didnt know any writers and preferred to hang out with scientists.

The Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos purchased his archives in 2008, including correspondence, notes, drafts, proofs of 11 novels, a draft of an unfinished novel and materials related to a play and four screenplays.

McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee for a year before joining the Air Force in 1953. He returned to the school from 1957 to 1959, but left before graduating. As an adult, he lived around the Great Smoky Mountains before moving West in the late 1970s, eventually settling in Santa Fe.

His Knoxville boyhood home, long abandoned and overgrown, was destroyed by fire in 2009.

___

Retired AP reporter Sue Major Holmes in New Mexico was the primary writer of this obituary. AP National Writer Hillel Italie reported from New York.

A.I. has fast become the business buzzword of the moment, with major players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft investing billions as they race to develop the hottest artificial intelligence technology.

For one European company, the A.I. hype helped its founders raise a record 105 million euros ($113.5 million) in its seed round this weekjust one month after the company was launched.

Mistrals seed rounda term that refers to a companys first official equity fundingwas the biggest ever recorded in Europe, according to data from Dealroom.co, which tracks private investments in startups.

The companys success in raising money from investors came despite the firm having yet to develop its first product, and its first employees having only started their jobs at Mistral days ago, the Financial Times reported.

According to the FT, Mistral is planning to launch a large language model in early 2024 that will be similar to the generative A.I. technology that underpins OpenAIs chatbot phenomenon ChatGPT.

The company is still hiring, according to LinkedIn. In a recent job ad, Mistral described itself as an ambitious company operating in the space of generative artificial intelligence and said its team is currently made up of 12 people.

[Mistral] aims at making A.I. the engine of tomorrows internet and tomorrows softwareand become a technological leader in the field of A.I. from a European HQ, the ad said. Its founders and early employees are among the most influential technology makers in the young field of generative models.

In a LinkedIn post published Tuesday evening, Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Paris-based Mistral A.I., announced that his startup had reached a major milestone.

He and his co-founders, Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroixwho are serving as the firms chief scientist and CTO respectivelyhad previously worked at Facebook and Alphabet-owned DeepMind.

Big-name supporters

Mensch said Tuesday that Mistral was being supported by a consortium of top tier international investors, and added that their funding would give the company the resources and network we need to start rolling-out a new model of generative artificial intelligence.

Investors in Mistral include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, French billionaire Xavier Niel and French advertising giant JCDecaux.

The company was also backed by French state-supported investment bank Bpifrance, the FT reported, signifying the countrys ambitions when it comes to boosting its tech hub credentials. Jean-Noël Barrot, Frances digital transition minister, tweeted his support for Mistral when news of its successful seed round broke.

Mistrals founding team were not immediately available for comment when contacted by Fortune.

However, Mensch promised in his announcement on Tuesday that Mistral would be combining scientific excellence, an open-source approach and a socially responsible vision of technology in its work.

Our training as AI researchers, combined with our respective professional experiences within the worlds leading technology companies, have convinced us that there is a way forward for an alternative, innovative project that will enable us to responsibly disseminate the most promising technology of our generation as widely as possible, Mensch added. We are proud to initiate this global project from France, our home country, and to contribute, at our level, to the emergence of a credible new player in generative artificial intelligence from Europe.

Despite many market watchers being excited about A.I., some are skeptical about the hype surrounding the technology. Earlier this week, veteran investor James Penny, CIO of TAM Asset Management, warned the A.I. hype was starting to smell like the dot-com era, referring to the tech bubble that burst after investors poured money into internet-focused companies.

The European Commission has hit Alphabets Google with antitrust charges over its behavior in the advertising technology business, which is the companys biggest earner.

The Commission, which has been probing the matter for the last two years, will now launch a formal antitrust investigation. If that confirms its suspicions, it said it may order Google to break up its adtech business.

Google has a major presence in every major part of the adtech value chainits ad-buying tools and publisher ad server (used to manage advertising space on sites and in apps) are dominant in their fields, and Googles AdX is the biggest ad exchange out there.

The Commission said the U.S. giant has for nearly a decade been using its DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP) ad server and its Google Ads and DV 360 ad-buying tools to unlawfully favor AdX.

Not only did this possibly harm Googles competitors [in the ad-exchange space] but also publishers interests, while also increasing advertisers costs. If confirmed, Googles practices would be illegal under our competition rules, said EU antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

Google remains committed to creating value for our publisher and advertiser partners in this highly competitive sector, said Googles vice-president for global ads, Dan Taylor, in a statement. The Commissions investigation focuses on a narrow aspect of our advertising business and is not new. We disagree with the ECs view and we will respond accordingly.

According to one practice highlighted by the Commission, Googles DFP ad server organized sealed-bid auctions for ads, but gave Googles AdX a heads-up about rival exchanges bids before AdX placed its own bid.

The second example is about a practice by Google Ads, Googles buy-side tool for advertisers, said Vestager. Google Ads places bids on behalf of advertisers so that their ads could be placed on the internet and get good visibility. One would expect Google Ads to place bids on as many ad exchanges as possible, because this would maximize the probability that the ad will be widely displayed.

Our investigation showed that Google decided to place Google Ads bids only, or almost only, on Googles AdX. By doing so, Google managed to make AdX the most attractive marketplace. This gave it a significant competitive advantage over rival ad exchanges.

Google has received three major antitrust fines from the Commission in recent years: a 1.5 billion fine in 2019 for abusing its search monopoly in AdSense for Search boxes on websites; a 5 billion fine in 2018 for various Android-related abuses; and a 2.7 billion fine in 2017 for unfairly promoting its own comparison-shopping services at the top of its search results.

Apart from paying fines in those cases, the Commission ensured that Google changed its behavior. But in this new case, Vestager is playing a different game.

The detection of these behaviors canbe very challenging, she said. We have seen this play out concretely: each time a practice was detected by the industry, Google subtly modified its behavior so as to make it more difficult to detect, but with the same objectives, with the same effects. A remedy requiring Google just to change its behavior would allow Google to continue doing what it has been doing so far, just under a different disguise.

Therefore, she said the Commission could force Google to jettison its DFP and AdX sell-side tools, thus ending its conflicts of interest.

Vestager added that she had been coordinating with the U.S. Department of Justice on this case, as well as the U.K.s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and other national antitrust authorities. The DoJ, along with several state attorneys general, levied similar charges against Google in January.

A central challenge facing crypto is the ever-expanding list of blockchains, with new projects from Sui to Sei popping up even as other layer-1s overstay their welcome.

While different developers have sought to create solutions to create compatibility across different blockchains, San Francisco-based Connext Labs argues it has a long-term answer. Investors seem to agree, with Connext announcing a $7.5 million strategic round on Wednesday at a $250 million valuation, with backers including Polychain Capital, NGC Ventures, Polygon Ventures. Connext raised a $12 million series A in 2021.

In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Connext founder Arjun Bhuptani described the project as the HTTP of Web3, a reference to the pioneering protocol that enabled the creation of an interconnected World Wide Web.

The big narrative in this space has been, We can use [blockchain] infrastructure to build really amazing public goods, but this infrastructure cant scale even past really 100,000 people,' Bhuptani said. Folks have realized in this space that kind of like the internet itself, the way that we scale blockchains is by actually scaling them out horizontallyso many different blockchains running in parallel.

HTTP of Web3

Connext facilitates interactions across blockchains. Bhuptani cited different use cases, such as an application like a decentralized exchange wanting to access users across different blockchains, from Bitcoin to Ethereum to Solana, or having copies of applications across different blockchains. He also argued that we will continue to see more specialization of blockchains, such as Filecoin, which is focused on storage, or Sei, which is focused on trading.

Other projects are focused on interweaving blockchains, such as Polkadota self-described layer zero that undergirds different blockchainsas well the USDC issuer Circles new cross-chain transfer protocol.

Theyre trying to build what will eventually be the fabric of the future of what the internet will look like, Bhuptani said.

While he cautioned that Connext is not trying to fix everything, he said the project is different because its not aiming to solve the problem on a per-blockchain case, instead leveraging the existing infrastructure of each, rather than trying to build everything in-house. In other words, Connext is providing the protocol rather than the ecosystem.

Next steps

Despite what Bhuptani admitted is a terrible market, he said Connext plans to use the new capital to decentralize more aggressively by funding the setup and operation of its foundation, which will also support community-led initiatives.

Connext plans to launch a token later this year. As opposed to other cryptocurrencies, which are generally built on top of a single blockchain with wrapped versions then ported over to other blockchains, Bhuptani said he wants the Connext token to be chain-agnostic from the start. Connext is working on a standard for cross-chain tokens that could work across different ecosystems.

I think we would be the first people pushing toward this model, he told Fortune.

The main challenge for Connext, and other crypto projects building across blockchains outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum, will be the regulatory challenges in the U.S. After the Securities and Exchange Commissions aggressive stance labeling many altcoins as securities in lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance last week, cryptocurrencies such as Solana and Polygon saw their value plummet.

Were seeing this flight to some of those more well-known, well-established chains, Bhuptani said, but he argued there hasnt been as much of a transition away from Ethereum-specific scalability solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism. Our collective thesis is just that over time, there is no real option except to have the fragmentation of applications, and users across all of these different ecosystems, and then to tie them together.

Wealth is in the eye of the beholder, and as inflation squeezes American families in a cost-of-living vise, the dollar number to be considered rich rises ever higher.

So how much money do you need to feel well off right now? New research from Charles Schwab has put an exact figure on it.

Schwabs 2023 Modern Wealth Survey asked 1,000 Americans to estimate the average net worth required to reach the ranks of the rich and to be considered wealthy in America, and it turns out you need at least $2.2 million to your name.

But if that lofty figure has left you feeling deflated about your own net worth, dont panic: Thats the estimate respondents gave for other people.

The research reveals that most people are satisfied with a significantly lower sum when reflecting on their own affluence. 

In fact, 48% of respondents said they already feel wealthy today with an average net worth of just $560,000about a quarter of what they think others need to be rich.

Gen Z and millennials feeling the wealth

Paradoxically, young people feel like the richest.

Despite being the generation to miss out on lower property prices, small student loans and high-end Champagne for as little as $13, feeling wealthy was most common among millennials, followed by Gen Z.

Around 57% and 46% of millennials and Gen Z respectively reported feeling rich, compared to just 41% of Gen X and 40% of baby boomers. 

It could be because, as the research shows, many dont measure their own wealth by how much money is lining their pocket. 

For nearly two-thirds of Americans being able to enjoy healthy relationships with their loved ones better describes wealth than simply having a lot of money.

Meanwhile, for around 70% of those surveyed, wealth is about enjoying experiences and work-life balance, compared to just 38% of respondents who think its about having a lot of money. 

Sizing up your peers makes you feel poorer

Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt once said: Comparison is the thief of joy. And Charles Schwabs research backs that up.  

Although young people are more likely to feel wealthy, theyre also more likely to feel poor in the aftermath of scrolling on social media and sizing up the lifestyle of their peers. 

While only a third of boomers dictate their worth based on what their cohort is up to, 61% of Gen Z and millennial respondents said being able to afford a lifestyle comparable to their friends makes them feel rich.

Meanwhile, around half of millennials and Gen Z are guilty of comparing their lifestyle to what their family and friends post online, compared to just 13% of boomers. 

Firms can minutely slice and dice data on platforms like Facebook to target a select group of users. Mnemonic, a data analytics firm, wants to help businesses and developers do the samebut in the world of Web3.

On Wednesday, the company announced that its raised $6 million in a seed-extension round led by Salesforce Ventures, bringing the total amount raised since the firms launch in 2021 to $10 million. Other participants include Polygon Ventures, Orange DAO, FIN Capital, and FJ Labs. Andrii Yasinetsky, cofounder and CEO of Mnemonic, declined to provide a valuation.

Increasingly, weve seen a lot of interest from enterprises who want to understand and tap into Web3 to build trusted digital communities, and turn relevant data into actionable insights, Laura Rowson, a senior associate at Salesforce Ventures, said in a statement.

In addition to the basic APIs, or methods through which developers can easily get data, that Mnemonic provides for blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, and Base, the company also has more complex functionality. Specifically, it uses A.I. to categorize wallets, identify bots, and filter spam.

We essentially want to create this feature where Web3 experiences are personalized and transparent, Yasinetsky told Fortune.

Mnemonics recent funding round comes as a suite of companies look to make the often bewildering terrain of Web3 more navigable, and in the process, raise serious capital. Dune, Messari, and Alchemy have all raised tens of millions in the past year-and-a-half. And other upstarts, like Sesame Labs, have more recently announced fundraises.

Like many a startup founder, Yasinetsky, who originally hails from Ukraine, found a foothold in Silicon Valley through Google, where he worked for years before he moved on to another tech staple, Uber.

After his tenure at the ridesharing company, he met Elena Ikonomovska, another Google veteran, through Ben Metcalfe, a former Uber employee. All three cofounded Mnemonic to, at first, provide developers and businesses with the ability to perform basic data queries on Ethereum to, say, find all wallets that hold a specific NFT.

Since then, they have expanded the companys offerings to include more abstract categorizations powered by machine learning. For example, a developer can use Mnemonic to not only find all Ethereum wallets that hold a specific NFT but eliminate all addresses that Mnemonics A.I. model deems to be a bot.

Perhaps its biggest-name client is Coinbase, but the company, which currently has 10 employees, is also partnering with Salesforce Cloud. 

With the injection of capital, Yasinetsky told Fortune that, in addition to growing Mnemonics team, the plan is to keep building out the suite of A.I.-powered products, and that, ultimately, the company can become a de facto Web3 data intelligence provider for businesses, developers, enterprises, and brands.

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