Behind the scenes, the world’s richest person spent a record amount over two years to bend the country’s politics to his will. He couldn’t.

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How an unpopular president and an unpopular war provided an opening for Democrats to make sweeping gains in the midterms.

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Google parent Alphabet reported its Q3 financial results on Wednesday afternoon, showing a healthy rise in revenue for the months of July to September. But the company's stock price has taken a beating, marking one of the largest post-earnings drops in its history. It comes down to several troubling aspects of the new report, including an admission by the company that AI search isn't earning as much as organic search, and despite that, Google expects to spend even more on AI next year.

The company took in almost $128 billion in Q3 2026, earning more than $26 billion in net income. These may sound like good numbers, but financial markets are not impressed. While revenue is up 25 percent versus last year, net income is almost $9 billion lower. As of this story's publication, the stock price is down almost 12 percent, and it was down about 13 percent earlier in the day.

While revenue was up 25 percent year over year, analysts expected more. Google reported earnings per share of $2.12, but the consensus projection ahead of Wednesday was $3.02. Google's Cloud products actually beat expectations, crossing $30 billion in revenue. That's about a billion more than analyst guesses.

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© Ryan Whitwam

Some of the social media posts paid for by Gina Hinojosa’s campaign for Texas governor don’t include a disclosure, despite a state regulation that likely requires it.

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The latest Silicon Valley billionaire club is a $333 million political ad machine that is heavily engaged in next week’s elections.

© Ben Jones

The latest Silicon Valley billionaire club is a $333 million political ad machine that is heavily engaged in next week’s elections.

© Ben Jones

As political fights over artificial intelligence accelerate, there is now a super PAC aligned with the data center industry. Its first bet is on Ms. Graham, a Republican in an unexpectedly tight race.

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The company outlined a $65 million budget last year when it embarked on an effort to elect state politicians friendly to the A.I. industry.

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Bank of America's Merrill Lynch unit will pay $39 million to settle a class action claiming it paid brokerage customers near-zero interest ‌rates instead of market rates on idle cash in their retirement accounts.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, said internally that the super PAC, Leading the Future, had become a “distraction” for the A.I. company.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced Wednesday it had finalized changes to its annual "stress test" of ‌large bank finances to make the exams more transparent and less volatile.

China's services activity expanded at its fastest pace in three months in September, as stronger new orders, including from overseas, lifted output, a private-sector survey showed on ⁠Wednesday.

International cooperation among banking supervisors is becoming more difficult just as financial risks grow more interconnected, the chair of the global banking rulemaker said on Wednesday.

Australia's corporate regulator said on Wednesday it would formally review the country's banking sector's usage of AI in dealing with customers.

Too big a pullback in the US central bank's communications could lead to higher and more volatile interest rates and inflation if the public and businesses are left to guess ‌how it would react to different economic developments, St. Louis Federal Reserve President Alberto Musalem said on Tuesday.

The world's biggest sovereign bond markets are heading for their worst month in years as soaring energy costs fan inflation and the AI boom lifts economic growth, leaving investors positioning for an era where interest rates stay higher for longer.

Anthropic plans to caution potential investors in its IPO that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity," an extraordinary warning by a company seeking to profit from the same ‌technology.

Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. But the cost to get there will be staggering.

Jefferies Financial beat third-quarter profit estimates on Monday, as higher fees from advising on deals and underwriting stock sales were complemented by a record haul in equities trading business.

American Express said on Monday its credit cards can now be used at over ‌190 million merchant locations worldwide, with acceptance outside the US having more than doubled over the past four years.