Point of View: The Federal Reserve Has Over-Eased, with a 65% Chance of Stagflation in the United States

Beating AI Express News: Perplexity has officially launched Teammates, an AI Agent tool designed to handle specific tasks long-term like human employees. CEO Aravind Srinivas revealed that roughly 10,000 AI Teammates have been created internally at the company over the past 30 days—20 times the total number of its human staff. Built on Perplexity Computer, Teammates lets users assign roles, goals, and permissions to the AI, which then continuously tracks work progress, proactively identifies issues, and uses tools to address them. Multiple Teammates can also divide tasks among themselves and communicate with human colleagues via Slack. For instance, a sales Agent can spot that a customer hasn’t placed an order for a long time, automatically investigate the cause, and prepare a follow-up plan. A development Agent, upon finding a website bug, can pass the task to another Agent to write the fix code. Each Agent has an independent workspace, retaining project memory and task history, allowing users to check progress, adjust direction, or take over operations at any time. The product has been in development for a long time: Business Insider exposed Perplexity’s internal Teammate tool back in July, when it was mainly used for software engineering tasks like bug fixing and system monitoring. Now, it has expanded to cover marketing, sales, customer service, and operations, adding long-term task management and cross-Agent collaboration features. Teammates is currently available as a research preview to Perplexity’s $200/month Max subscription users, with initial web support, and native mobile and desktop versions set to launch later.

Beating AI News Flash: Meta’s personal AI agent Muse has launched real-time voice functionality. Users can call Muse directly, chatting while it carries out tasks such as trip planning, organizing ideas, or interview preparation. Conversations can be interrupted at any time, and Muse can continue processing tasks in the background. The tool also features a real-time dynamic virtual avatar: when the AI speaks, the avatar makes facial expressions and movements matching the conversation’s tone, and offers hundreds of voice options. The feature is now rolling out to U.S. users, supporting mobile, web, and Mac platforms, with future integrations planned for Meta AI glasses and the Muse Charm keychain.

Per Bitget market data, Brent crude oil posted an intraday gain of 1.00%, currently trading at $98.82 per barrel. WTI crude oil is up 0.74% at $91.84 per barrel.

South Korea's stock market has plunged sharply from this year's peak, erasing over $1.7 trillion in market value, sparking fierce discontent among retail investors and putting President Lee Jae-myung's policy to shift household funds from real estate to equities to the test. During his election campaign, Lee pledged to lift South Korea's KOSPI index to 5,000 points. Driven by the AI investment boom, the index once hit a record high of 9,114.55 points, but has since declined steadily. On Friday, the index plummeted 8.8% intraday, breaking below the 5,000-point threshold, with a cumulative drop of over 40% since its June peak. Many retail investors said they heeded the government's call to forgo home purchases and invest in stocks instead, only to suffer massive losses. Meanwhile, Seoul's housing prices have risen for 91 consecutive weeks. One investor noted that roughly 65% of the 40 million won he allocated to a small-cap index fund has been wiped out. The market reversal is deepening investors' skepticism toward the government's policies.

According to Bloomberg, Hudson River Trading, one of Wall Street’s largest market makers, has started trading on prediction market platform Kalshi, joining a growing number of institutions seeking growth opportunities in the prediction market sector. A source familiar with the matter said the New York-based trading firm began trading on Kalshi around a month ago. The insider requested anonymity as the details are not yet public. Hudson River Trading did not respond to a request for comment. Additionally, the firm is an investor in Kalshi’s latest funding round, which raised $1 billion, giving the platform a post-money valuation of $40 billion.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently appeared on ABC’s *The View* and made a clear call: the new U.S. Congress, set to take office in January next year, should immediately hold Elon Musk and other figures accountable. She accused the individuals of “manipulating data to try to influence decision-making”, stressing the government must act and not let them go unpunished. “For people like Elon Musk, we need government action. I advocate holding these people accountable starting in January when the new Congress takes office. They can’t get away with manipulating data to influence decision-making,” she said. Background: Musk donated roughly $290 million to Republican candidates and related causes during the 2024 general election, and spent about $470 million supporting the Republican Party in the latest midterm election cycle. After Trump won the presidential election, he appointed Musk as a senior advisor and co-led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was officially disbanded in July 2025. The Democratic Party has previously been planning investigations into Musk’s affairs, which may involve issues including federal contract conflicts of interest, data access and layoff impacts during DOGE’s tenure, and X platform algorithms. Trump’s team has stated it will take steps to protect Musk if necessary, including potential pardon discussions, but presidential pardon power primarily covers federal criminal offenses and cannot directly block congressional oversight, subpoenas, or hearings. The new Congress is expected to officially take office in January 2027, at which point Democratic-led committees (such as the House Oversight Committee) may launch relevant hearings and document requests.