From AI and inflation to Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, the business stories that dominated 2023

From AI and inflation to Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, the business stories that dominated 2023

The tide turned against inflation.

Artificial intelligence went mainstream — for good or ill.

Labor unions capitalized on their growing might to win more generous pay and benefits.

Elon Musk renamed and rebranded the social media platform Twitter, removed guardrails against phony or obscene posts, and ranted profanely when advertisers fled in droves.

The American housing market, straining under the weight of heavy mortgage rates, took a wallop.

Taylor Swift’s concert tour scaled such stratospheric heights that she invigorated some regional economies and drew a mention in Federal Reserve proceedings.

A look back at 10 top business stories in 2023:

RAGING AGAINST INFLATION

The Fed and most other major central banks spent most of the year deploying their interest-rate weapons against the worst bout of inflation in four decades. The trouble erupted in 2021 and 2022 as the global economy roared out of the pandemic recession, triggering supply shortages and igniting prices.

By the end of 2023, though, the Fed, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England had taken a breather. Their aggressive rate hikes had brought inflation way down from the peaks of 2022 when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy and grain prices rocketing and intensified price spikes.

In the United States, the Fed’s policymakers delighted Wall Street investors by signaling in December that 2024 would likely be a year of rate cuts — three to be exact, in their expectations — and not rate hikes. The Bank of England and ECB sounded a more cautious note, suggesting that inflation, though trending down, remained above their target.

“Should we lower our guard?” Christine Lagarde, the ECB president, told reporters. “We ask ourselves that question. No, we should not lower our guard.”

The Council on Foreign Relations, which tracks interest rates in 54 countries, found that central banks turned aggressive toward inflation in the spring of 2022. Policies remain tight, the council found, but the overall anti-inflation stance has eased.

AI GOES MAINSTREAM

Artificial intelligence thrust itself into public consciousness this year. But the technology, while dazzling for its ability to retrieve information or produce readable prose, has yet to match people’s science fiction fantasies of human-like machines.

Catalyzing a year of AI fanfare was ChatGPT. The chatbot gave the world a glimpse of advances in computer science, even if not everyone learned quite how it works or how to make the best use of it.

Worries escalated as this new cohort of generative AI tools threatened the livelihoods of people who write, draw, strum or code for a living. AI’s ability to produce original content helped fuel strikes by Hollywood writers and actors and legal challenges from bestselling authors.