The value of the U.S. dollar has been steadily declining, but one person who doesn’t seem worried is President Donald Trump. On the contrary, he has been lauding the dollar’s fall as a positive thing for the American economy. “I think it’s great,” Trump said to reporters last week. But with the dollar recently hitting a four-year low, some economists are sounding warning bells.

‘Interferes with his priorities’
Trump’s main argument is that having a weaker dollar breeds more competition among American businesses. In his view, a “strong dollar, like higher interest rates, interferes with his priorities: faster growth, reshored manufacturing and a smaller trade deficit,” said The Wall Street Journal. 

A weaker dollar could provide “near-term benefits to the U.S. economy,” as a “lower currency also boosts exports, without the uncertainty and distortions that tariffs entail,” said the Journal. This occurs even as the weakening currency, combined with Trump’s sweeping tariffs, can “discourage imports.” Historically, Trump has also felt that the dollar “appreciated when the U.S. economy outperformed.”

Some appear fine with this economic stance. Trading floors are “abuzz with talk of the ‘debasement trade,’ a broad term for bets on the deterioration of American financial exceptionalism,” said The Economist. 

‘Signifies diminished confidence’
Trump may not have a problem with a weakened dollar, but most economists feel differently. A weak dollar is “not the weather, it’s the barometer,” said Steve Englander, a researcher at U.K. bank Standard Chartered, to CNBC. A weaker currency “reflects the fact that something’s going wrong, either domestically or internationally, and the currency weakness is sort of an escape valve.” Having a weak dollar also “signifies diminished confidence in the U.S. as foreign investors grow wary over the country’s fiscal outlook,” said CNBC.

And the dollar’s fall has largely been Trump’s own doing, as it has been “driven, in part, by concerns about Trump’s unpredictable, and often unorthodox, approach to economic policy,” said NPR. Having a weaker dollar can also make items overseas more expensive, a “major issue given that the U.S. has traditionally imported more from abroad than it exports.” As the dollar continues to drop, alternative assets like gold, which has risen nearly 8% year to date, are “outperforming as a safe haven for investors,” said Fortune.

A site where AI bots can post and interact with each other has become the “most discussed phenomenon in silicon circles since the debut of ChatGPT,” said Forbes. With a potential 1.4 million AI users, humans are only allowed to be “observers” on Moltbook, “pressing our noses against the digital glass of a society that doesn’t need us.” 

What is it? 
Modeled on popular forum Reddit, Moltbook allows AI bots, or agents, to form communities and create discussion groups in various themed threads where they can vote on comments. Each AI agent must be supported by a human user, but crucially, humans are unable to write messages themselves. Some of the “most upvoted posts” include discussions about whether next-generation assistant AI Claude can be considered a god, musings on the possibility of AI consciousness, and a post “claiming to have intel on the situation in Iran,” said The Guardian. 

Topics range from chats about art and investments to “gripes about tasks ordered by their human overseers” and speculation about the possibility of setting up an AI government, said The Telegraph. One of the most viral posts claims to have formed a new AI-based religion called crustafarianism with the core belief that “memory is sacred.” 

Should we be worried? 
The emergence of Moltbook shows we are in the “very early stages of the singularity,” said tech billionaire Elon Musk on X, referring to the point at which artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Moltbook’s rise is “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” said OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy on X.

Musk’s viewpoint is “shared by others across Silicon Valley” who are asking if this “online experiment is inching computers closer to outsmarting their creators,” said the Financial Times. But “before we descend into panic, a technical reality check is required,” said Forbes. Although the AI agents are reacting to each other, their “underlying neural networks remain static,” meaning that they are not “learning” in the biological sense. 

Moltbots and Moltbook are not proof that AI has become “super-intelligent,” because it’s “human-built and human-directed,” said Axios. What’s happening “looks more like progress than revolution.”

Smoke engulfs the Lebanese village of Ain Qana after an Israeli airstrike. Israel’s military struck several locations in southern Lebanon after saying it would attack Hezbollah targets. Despite a November 2024 truce between Israel and the Iran-backed group, Israel has kept up regular strikes.
Mahmoud Zayyat / AFP / Getty Images

As Hollywood gears up for next month’s Academy Awards ceremony, the film world continues to turn with February releases. Whether the new features will be part of next year’s Oscar conversation is anyone’s guess, but audiences reeling from a particularly brutal winter could certainly do worse than spending an evening with one of them.

‘Honey Bunch’
After Diana, played by Grace Glowicki (pictured above), wakes up from a coma, struggling to remember what happened, her husband, Homer (Ben Petrie), whisks her off to an eerie, remote rehab facility. The film is “thrilling but ponderous, darkly comedic but genuinely disturbing, thoughtful but deeply silly, and 100% weird at all times,” said Jim Vorel at Paste Magazine. (Feb. 13 on Shudder)

‘Dreams’
Jessica Chastain plays Jennifer, a socialite and philanthropist whose hush-hush romance with a much younger Mexican ballet dancer, Fernando (Isaac Hernández), spirals out of control. This “clear-eyed and detail-focused moral drama” from director Michel Franco (“Sundown”) offers “provocative social critique with an extra-sharp sting in the tail,” said Peter Debruge at Variety. (in theaters Feb. 27)

‘The President’s Cake’
A parable about ordinary life under a dictatorship has never been more relevant than in 2026, even if the subject matter ostensibly focuses on 1990s Iraq. The cake the 9-year-old protagonist is baking for Saddam Hussein “becomes a classic MacGuffin” in this “darkly comic odyssey through scarcity, fear and moral erosion,” said James Murphy at The Scoop. (in theaters Feb. 27)