Category: 3. Business

Disclaimer & Agreement

Bridgewater Associates, LP is a global investment management firm. Bridgewater Associates, LP advises certain private investment funds and institutional clients, and is not available to provide investment advisory or similar services to most other investors. This website is a resource for audiences other than investors such as potential employees, researchers, students, counterparties and industry participants. Bridgewater Associates, LP believes it is useful for such persons to have an accurate source of relevant information. Under no circumstances should any information presented on this website be construed as an offer to sell, or solicitation of any offer to purchase, any securities or other investments. This website does not contain the information that an investor should consider or evaluate to make a potential investment. Offering materials relating to investments in entities managed by Bridgewater Associates, LP are not available to the general public.

To view this content, you must agree to the following terms, in addition to and supplementing the Bridgewater Terms of Use and Privacy Policy:

I confirm to Bridgewater Associates, LP and agree that:

• I am entering this website only to obtain general information regarding Bridgewater Associates, LP and not for any other purpose.
• I understand that investments managed by Bridgewater Associates, LP are not available to the general public.
• I understand that this website does not contain the information I would need to consider for an investment, and that such information is only available to a limited group of persons and institutions meeting specified criteria.
• I understand that this website has not been reviewed or approved by, filed with, or otherwise furnished to any governmental or similar authority, and is intended only to provide limited information to members of the public who have a legitimate interest in that information for reasons unrelated to making investments.
• I understand that when Bridgewater Associates, LP makes third party information available, Bridgewater generally will not have verified statements made by the third party, and the presentation of information may omit important information.
• I understand that third party materials such as live interviews made available by Bridgewater Associates, LP generally will not have been edited by Bridgewater and statements in those materials by individuals associated with Bridgewater should be understood in the conversational context in which they were made, which may include providing historical background.
• The content constitutes the proprietary intellectual property of Bridgewater or its licensors and that I will not directly or indirectly copy, modify, recast, create derivative works, post, publish, display, redistribute, disclose, or make available the content, in whole or in part, to any third parties, or assist others to do the same, or otherwise make any commercial use of the content without the prior written consent of Bridgewater.

By registering my information below and clicking “Agree,” I certify that I have read, understand and agree to the foregoing Disclaimer, Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Feb. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Farmer sentiment weakened sharply in January, as the Purdue University/CME Group Ag Economy Barometer fell 23 points from December to a reading of 113. The decline reflected growing pessimism about both current conditions and the future outlook for U.S. agriculture; the Current Conditions Index dropped 19 points to 109, while the Future Expectations Index fell 25 points to 115. The largest shift was in producers’ long-term outlook for U.S. agriculture, with the index that measures expectations for widespread good and bad times over the next five years falling to its lowest level since September 2024. Producers also expressed greater concern about agricultural exports than last month. The survey was conducted Jan. 12-16, coinciding with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s release of the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report on Jan. 12.

Producers reported worsening farm financial conditions compared with a year earlier. Half of the farmers surveyed indicated that their operations were worse off than a year earlier. Looking ahead to the next 12 months, more producers expect conditions to worsen than to improve. Thirty percent of respondents anticipate weaker financial performance in the coming year, compared with 20% who expect improvement. Reflecting this more cautious outlook, the Farm Capital Investment Index fell 11 points in January to 47, its lowest level since October 2024. Just 4% of producers said they plan to increase farm machinery purchases over the next year.

“What stands out this month is the growing number of producers who report that higher operating-loan needs stem from carrying over unpaid debt from the previous year,” said Michael Langemeier, the barometer’s principal investigator and director of Purdue’s Center for Commercial Agriculture. “That points to increasing financial pressure heading into the year ahead.”

Since 2020, each January barometer survey has included questions about farmers’ operating loans for the upcoming year. Twenty-one percent of respondents said they expect to have a larger operating loan compared with a year earlier, up from 18% last year. Among producers anticipating an increase, 31% cited carryover of unpaid operating debt from the prior year as the primary reason. This percentage has risen steadily in recent years, increasing from just 5% in 2023 to 17% in 2024 and 23% in 2025. The results align with producers’ growing concerns about farm financial performance.

Producers also expressed increased pessimism about the outlook for U.S. agricultural exports in January. When asked about export prospects over the next five years, 16% of respondents said they expect exports to decline, up from 5% in December. Concerns were even greater among corn and soybean farmers when the question specifically addressed soybeans, a key agricultural export. This month, 21% of corn and soybean producers said they expect soybean exports to decline over the next five years, compared with 13% the previous month. Increasing competition from Brazil is also weighing heavily on producers’ minds. Eighty percent of corn and soybean producers said they were concerned or very concerned about the competitiveness of U.S. soybean exports relative to Brazil, including 44% stating they were very concerned.

Producers remained optimistic about short-term farmland values in January, while their longer-term outlook became more cautious. The Short-Term Farmland Value Expectations Index was unchanged at 117. After reaching a record high in December, the Long-Term Farmland Value Expectations Index fell 14 points in January to a reading of 152. Respondents cited alternative investment opportunities, net farm income and interest rates as the factors expected to have the greatest influence on farmland values.

The January survey asked corn and soybean producers how they expect to use payments from the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program announced in late December. More than half of respondents said they plan to use the payments to pay down debt, while 25% indicated the funds would be used to improve working capital. The remaining respondents said the payments would go toward family living expenses (10%) or investment in farm machinery (12%).

Producers’ broader outlook for the U.S. economy also softened. As in recent months, respondents were asked whether the U.S. is headed in the “right direction” or on the “wrong track.” In January, 62% of producers said the U.S. is headed in the “right direction,” down from 75% in December 2025.

About the Purdue University Center for Commercial Agriculture
The Center for Commercial Agriculture was founded in 2011 to provide professional development and educational programs for farmers. Housed within Purdue University’s Department of Agricultural Economics, the center’s faculty and staff develop and execute research and educational programs that address the different needs of managing in today’s business environment.

About CME Group
As the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, CME Group (www.cmegroup.com) enables clients to trade futures, options, cash and OTC markets, optimize portfolios, and analyze data – empowering market participants worldwide to efficiently manage risk and capture opportunities. CME Group exchanges offer the widest range of global benchmark products across all major asset classes based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, cryptocurrencies, energy, agricultural products and metals. The company offers futures and options on futures trading through the CME Globex platform, fixed income trading via BrokerTec and foreign exchange trading on the EBS platform. In addition, it operates one of the world’s leading central counterparty clearing providers, CME Clearing. 

CME Group, the Globe logo, CME, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Globex, and E-mini are trademarks of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. CBOT and Chicago Board of Trade are trademarks of Board of Trade of the City of Chicago, Inc. NYMEX, New York Mercantile Exchange and ClearPort are trademarks of New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc. COMEX is a trademark of Commodity Exchange, Inc. BrokerTec is a trademark of BrokerTec Americas LLC and EBS is a trademark of EBS Group LTD. The S&P 500 Index is a product of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC (“S&P DJI”). “S&P®”, “S&P 500®”, “SPY®”, “SPX®”, US 500 and The 500 are trademarks of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC; Dow Jones®, DJIA® and Dow Jones Industrial Average are service and/or trademarks of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. These trademarks have been licensed for use by Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. Futures contracts based on the S&P 500 Index are not sponsored, endorsed, marketed, or promoted by S&P DJI, and S&P DJI makes no representation regarding the advisability of investing in such products. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Purdue University
Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 106,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its integrated, comprehensive Indianapolis urban expansion; the Mitch Daniels School of Business; Purdue Computes; and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.

Source: Michael Langemeier, mlangeme@purdue.edu, 765-494-9557

CME-G

SOURCE CME Group

1. All information offered on Porsche Newsroom, including but not limited to, texts, images, audio and video documents, are subject to copyright or other legislation for the protection of intellectual property. They are intended exclusively for use by journalists as a source for their own media reporting and are not intended for commercial use, in particular for advertising purposes. It is not permitted to pass on texts, images, audio or video data to unauthorised third parties.

2. All logos and trademarks mentioned on Porsche Newsroom are trademarks of Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG (hereinafter: Porsche AG), unless otherwise stated.

3. All contents of Porsche Newsroom are carefully researched and compiled. Nevertheless, the information may contain errors or inaccuracies. Porsche AG does not accept any liability with respect to the results that may be achived through the use of the information, in particular with respect to accuracy, up-to-dateness and completeness.

4. Insofar as Porsche Newsroom provides information concerning vehicles, the data refers to the German market. Statements concerning standard equipment and statutory, legal and tax regulations and repercussion are valid for the Federal Public of Germany only.

5. With respect to the use of Porsche Newsroom, technical faults such as, delays to news transmission, cannot be ruled out. Porsche AG does not accept any liability for any resulting damage.

6. Insofar as Porsche Newsroom provides links to the internet sites of third parties, Porsche AG does not accept any responsibility for the content of the linked sites. On using the links, the user leaves the Porsche AG information products.

7. In agreeing to these rights of use, the user shall be obliged to refrain from any improper use of Porsche Newsroom.

8. In the event of improper use, Porsche AG reserves the right to block access to Porsche Newsroom.

9. Should one or more provisions of these terms and conditions be or become invalid, this shall not affect the validity of the remaining provisions.

Terna S.p.A. has completed the placement of a perpetual, subordinated, hybrid, non-convertible European Green Bond issue with a nominal value of EUR850 million, intended for institutional investors. 

While Washington Post employees remain in the dark about an impending round of cuts that could dramatically reshape the publication, the man that many hoped could soften or stop the blow, owner Jeff Bezos, has remained silent.

So far, three staff-organized letters sent by Post employees to Bezos imploring him to protect the Post’s robust coverage have gone unanswered.

The first plea went to Bezos on 25 January, when about 60 people signed a letter asking him to protect the company’s foreign news operation, which is rumored to be a major target of cost-cutting.

Two days later, employees sent Bezos a letter asking him to preserve the newspaper’s local coverage, which is also said to be at risk for heavy cuts.

“Should you allow Post management to lay off the local staff, which has been cut in half in the last five years, the effect on this region and the people in it will be immeasurable,” the staffers wrote. “We care deeply about the DC area, and we know you do, too.”

At the end of last week, the publication’s White House reporters sent a letter to Bezos urging him to avoid cutting coverage areas central to its readership. Post staffers have also filmed and posted videos on social media urging Bezos to “#savethepost”.

While Post chief executive Will Lewis has been included on at least one of the emails, the letters have been addressed to Bezos, who some staffers hope might be more persuadable. (Matt Murray, the Post’s top editor, has had private discussions with several Post journalists in recent weeks, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.)

“As the Post’s [owner], Bezos is ultimately making the call on these cuts,” said a Post staffer who signed one of the letters but was not authorized to comment. “He also has enough money to do whatever he chooses here. Reporters across the newsroom want to be sure he understands the magnitude of the devastating cuts that we all expect are coming.”

Emails sent by the Guardian to Bezos and a representative at the company he founded, Amazon, have not been returned. A Post spokesperson declined to comment on the rumored cuts.

The Post staffer described the mood at the paper as “funereal”, with many expecting the cuts to come in the next few days – though the publication still has not acknowledged or confirmed that anything is happening. A rally to protest the cuts has been scheduled for outside the Post’s headquarters on Thursday.

On Monday, the union representing most Post employees called out Bezos in a series of posts on Twitter/X. “If @JeffBezos follows through with his reported plan to decimate the Post’s newsroom, it will be a huge indictment of his supposed business prowess,” the account wrote. “How else to explain his failure to monetize some of the world’s most award-winning, agenda-setting journalism?”

Some Post staffers also noted that Bezos has not yet commented on the 14 January raid of a Post reporter’s home, even though many groups that advocate for journalists decried the government’s tactics as unprecedented and dangerous. Cameron Barr, a former managing editor of the Post, called out Bezos for his silence in a post on LinkedIn, writing: “It’s not just the chest-thumping overreach of the Trump administration that will crush American freedoms – it’s the silence of its enablers.”

Amazon and Bezos have also faced criticism for spending approximately $75m to acquire and promote a documentary about Melania Trump – particularly after Bezos faced accusations of cozying up to Trump by killing the Post’s planned endorsement last fall of Kamala Harris for president.

Glenn Kessler, who ended a 27-year-long career at the Post last year, expressed cautious optimism about the campaign to reach Bezos. “That kind of pushback might have an impact,” he said. “We don’t really know until we see what the actual result is.”

Kessler said he and a few other reporters had lunch with Bezos, who purchased the paper in 2013, after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. “He wanted to hear war stories and that sort of thing,” he recalled. “He was quite interested in what people did. He had this great laugh, and he seemed quite engaged.”

But Kessler was heavily critical of Bezos’s handling of the Harris endorsement and his decision to refocus the section’s opinion page to prioritize writing “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”, decisions that led to the resignation of a top editor and quickly cost the Post hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

“Even before these cuts, you can question the quality of Bezos’s stewardship,” Kessler said. “The sense I get is that he’s not nearly as engaged with the Post as he once was. If you’re not really that engaged or invested in the thing that you own, the easiest thing to do is to cut back the money you’re losing on it.”

“I think it’s hard to overestimate how excited the journalists and editors were when Bezos bought the company,” recalled political journalist Chris Cillizza, who worked at the Post from 2006 to 2017. “The richest man in the world buys the company and he says all the right things. I think people were slower to see that something had changed because they wanted to believe so badly that the original sense we had of Bezos was it.”

Cillizza remembered being skeptical when Bezos said he intended the Post to be profitable. “I remember thinking to myself even then, in 2013: ‘Man, that’s going to be tough.’”

While Bezos has stayed silent about potential cuts to the Post, and ignored an effort by the union last year to get him to visit the newspaper, he was more visibly engaged with one of his other companies on Monday, the spaceflight startup Blue Origin.

Bezos was on hand to meet secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, who last November called the Post’s reporting “fake news”, during a visit to the company’s facility in Florida. “Great to see you,” Bezos told Hegseth. “Welcome – it’s an honor to have you.”

In 2025, 52.7% of EU enterprises used paid cloud computing services (i.e. online services used to access software, computing power, storage capacity, etc.), marking a 7.4 percentage point (pp) increase compared with 2023. A more substantial increase was registered compared with 2014, when 17.8% of enterprises used paid cloud services.

The highest shares of enterprises that used paid cloud computing services in 2025 were recorded in Finland (79.2%), Italy (75.6%) and Malta (74.9%). At the other end of the scale, less than a quarter of enterprises in Romania (24.9%), Greece (24.3%) and Bulgaria (17.8%) used such paid services.

Between 2023 and 2025, the use of paid cloud computing services increased in most countries, with Lithuania (+19.7 pp), Italy (+14.2 pp) and France (+13.7 pp) experiencing the highest rise. 

Source dataset: isoc_cicce_use

E-mail, office software and file storage – most popular cloud services in 2025

Data show that in 2025, most EU enterprises used paid cloud computing for e-mail services (85.2%), office software (71.7%) and file storage (71.5%). Security software applications (65.5%), finance or accounting software applications (58.2%) and hosting for the enterprise’s database (45.5%) were also popular. 

Enterprises also used paid cloud service for enterprise resource planning software (30.1%), computing power to run the enterprise’s own software (28.2%), customer relationship management software (27.9%) and lastly, for computing platforms for application development, testing or deployment (26.1%).

Source dataset: isoc_cicce_use