Category: 3. Business

Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday expressed satisfaction over the performance of the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), as the benchmark KSE-100 Index surged past the historic 150,000-point milestone.

In a statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office, Shehbaz Sharif said the bullish trend in the stock market was a strong reflection of investor confidence in the government’s economic policies.

By the grace of Allah, economic improvement has restored the confidence of investors and the business community, the prime minister said adding that the country was on the path to progress. However, he stressed that more hard work was required.

He said the economic team worked tirelessly day and night to steer the economy out of difficulties.

The investors and business community continued economic activities in Pakistan even during tough times, which is commendable, PM Shehbaz added.

He hoped that with the growth of business and increase in investment in the country, more employment opportunities would also be created.

Snapchat has launched “Buddy Passes” for members to boost the Snapchat+ subscription. This feature will allow subscribers to gift a free one-week trial of Snapchat+ to their friends.

It’s a great strategic move by Snapchat to ramp up its membership by allowing potential members to glimpse what the subscription plan offers without any cost.

The platform explained to the users, “If you’re a Snapchat+ subscriber, you can give your friends free access to Snapchat+ using a buddy pass. On the first day of each month (on an annual plan or the first day of each billing cycle (on a monthly plan), you’ll get three Buddy Passes to give to friends that will allow them to use Snapchat+ for free for 7 days.”

Currently, the app has over 15 million Snapchat+ members, and the new feature Buddy Passes could bring 45 million new users to try out premium features, with a possibility that they will convert to paying subscribers.

Of course, not everyone is going to use all passes; therefore, it’s a good promotion as an option for Snapchat users.

The social media platform is good at outperforming the competitors who are offering similar packages, such as Meta Verified and X Premium.

The service is particularly appealing to a younger audience, offering them add-on enhancements, exclusive features, and early access to experimental tools.

Subscribers can send Buddy passes from the Snapchat+ management pages within the app. Follow the process given by the app:

1. “Go to your Snapchat+ management page
2. Tap ‘Send Buddy Passes’
3. Select three friends who aren’t already Snapchat+ subscribers
4. Send them your Buddy Passes!”

Remember! Once a Buddy is sent, it would be impossible to take it back. The Snapchat support team does not help in this regard.

Is Snapchat bigger than Instagram?

No, Instagram has a significantly bigger number of users than Snapchat.

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“Benevolent leadership,” combined with best practices, can improve overall organizational well-being, researchers determined from a study of 350 respondents at knowledge-worker institutions. These findings were published on Aug. 13, in the journal Scientific Reports.

For the purposes of the study, benevolent leadership was defined as a style “characterized by warmth and a paternalistic approach.” Ultimately, researchers found that this approach can create the kind of workplace environment that encourages knowledge-sharing and promotes organizational learning.

The Scientific Reports study fills in “a significant gap” in existing organizational research, which tends to focus on “transactional” leadership styles, the report noted.

The findings can help guide employers when it comes to creating a learning and development strategy. Business leaders have a direct impact on company culture and workplace learning, the report found. 

“Leaders shape formal policies and informally influence the social norms that can foster an environment conducive to learning,” researchers said.

And in general, learning is increasingly crucial in talent attraction. More than half of Generation Zers said they’re prioritizing roles with personal development opportunities in their job search, according to an August report from Flexa.

More specifically, Gen Zers were 68% more likely than their millennial, Gen X and baby boomer counterparts to seek jobs with concrete L&D benefits, such as language lessons, mentor programs and study leave.

From the researchers’ perspective, these findings challenge the idea that benevolent leadership “inherently promotes a learning environment.” Instead, it takes benevolent leadership, plus trust and open communication, the report finds.

Regarding trust, benevolent leaders are the type to empower workers by “delegating meaningful tasks and providing the necessary resources and autonomy to complete them, making them feel valued and part of the organization’s goals.” 

And regarding open communication, researchers said that benevolent leadership inspires a workplace culture where “knowledge is not hoarded but shared freely among peers.” Knowledge sharing and open communication cannot exist without each other, researchers said.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to help doctors screen patients for several routine diseases. But a new study raises concerns about whether doctors might become too reliant on AI.

The study looking at gastroenterologists in Poland found that they appeared to be about 20% worse at spotting polyps and other abnormalities during colonoscopies on their own, after they’d grown accustomed to using an AI-assisted system.

The findings, published in the journal Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even after a short period of using AI, experts may become overly dependent on AI to do certain aspects of their jobs.

“We were quite surprised,” says Marcin Romańczyk, an M.D.-Ph.D. gastroenterologist at H-T Medical Center in Tychy, Poland, who led the study.

But not everyone is convinced that the paper proves doctors are losing critical skills because of AI.

“I think three months seems like a very short period to lose a skill that you took 26 years to build up,” says Johan Hulleman, a researcher at Manchester University in England who has studied human reliance on artificial intelligence.

Hulleman believes statistical variations in the patient data might be part of the explanation for why the numbers appear to drop. Factors such as the average age of the patients used in different sections of the study might explain the variation, he says.

AI in medicine

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly common for a number of routine medical scans. The next time you get a scan for your eyes, breast cancer, or colon disease, there’s a decent chance that AI might be analyzing the images.

“AI is spreading everywhere,” Romańczyk says. At the same time, many doctors are playing catch-up, because learning how to use the technology wasn’t part of their training.

“We’ve been taught from books and from our teachers,” he says. “No one told us how to use AI.”

A few years ago, four clinics in Poland tried out an AI system to detect polyps and other abnormalities during colonoscopies. The AI works in real time, analyzing video from a camera inside the colon.

If it spots something, it will highlight the area for the clinician to see.

“In this particular one there’s a green box, showing where the polyp might be,” he says.

In the box

The clinics were collecting data on whether the AI system worked. It turns out it did, but when Romańczyk and his colleagues reanalyzed the data, they found something else: After the system was introduced, doctors became significantly worse at detecting possible polyps when the AI was switched off.

According to their analysis, after doctors got AI, detection rates of possible polyps fell from 28.4% to 22.4% when their new AI system was switched off. In other words, the doctors seemed to become quickly dependent on AI systems catching the polyps. Romańczyk says he’s not quite sure why it’s happening, but he has some theories.

“We are subconsciously waiting for the green box to come out to show us the region where the polyp is and we’re not paying so much attention,” he says.

There are other examples that support that idea: A similar study has shown that nonexperts do a worse job scanning mammograms if they know they can get an AI system to help them with the push of a button.

Johan Hulleman, who helped lead that mammogram study, describes it as a “safety-net effect.” He says these latest results could be interesting, but he’s skeptical. The study of colonoscopies took place over three months, and the doctors participating had decades of experience. He thinks statistical variations due to a number of factors, such as age of the patients, might be behind the apparent drop.

Additionally, he says, “We don’t know how many polyps there really were, so we don’t know the ground truth.” By that he means it’s unclear how many of the possible polyps that doctors supposedly missed were actually medically important.

The study’s author, Romańczyk, does believe the drop is real — though he admits that studying AI in a clinical setting like this can be tricky. There are a lot of variables the researchers couldn’t control.

He’s not against using AI. He actually thinks the little green boxes help him to do better colonoscopies. But he thinks that there should be more studies like these examining how AI might be changing the way doctors work in the real world.

“Because look what’s happening,” he says. “We have AI systems that are available, but we don’t have the data.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is slated to speak on Friday at the Fed’s annual gathering of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Evercore ISI warns that market participants might not love what he has to say. 

Powell “is likely to indirectly signal a 25bp rate cut” at the Fed’s next policy meeting in mid-September, argued Evercore analysts led by Julian Emanuel in a note on Sunday. “For a market that was eager to embrace ’50 in Sept,’” referring to market chatter about the likelihood officials would cut rates by 50 basis points, or half a percentage point, next month, “a balanced view could catalyze a near term -7% to -15% pullback into October.”

The Economic Outlook Is ‘Muddled’

“The stakes … are high with both sides of the Dual Mandate muddled,” the analysts wrote, referring to the Fed’s job of balancing stable prices and maximum employment. 

Inflation data last week painted a muddy picture of how tariffs are affecting prices; the Consumer Price Index rose less than expected in July, while wholesale prices climbed much faster than forecast. 

Labor market data is not much clearer. Weekly initial unemployment claims have held steady this year. Meanwhile, job growth has fallen to its slowest 3-month pace (outside of the pandemic shock) since 2010, when the unemployment rate was about 9%, double what it is today.

President Donald Trump is adding to the uncertainty. Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly criticized Powell, whom he appointed in 2019, and called on the Fed to lower rates. In early August, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a disappointing jobs report, alarming some economists concerned that political interference could skew official economic data. 

How to Weather an Autumn Fall

High stock prices and seasonal weakness are additional causes for concern, says Evercore. 

“Pedal to the metal equity market bullishness in August typically runs into the realities of September,” which is historically the worst month of the year for stocks, the analysts wrote. And Wall Street’s post-“Liberation Day” rally, fueled by trade deals and resilient corporate earnings, has stock valuations near their highest levels since the Dotcom Bubble. 

Against that backdrop, Evercore recommends investors hold a core portfolio of “AI Enablers, Adopters and Adapters” in the communication services, consumer discretionary, and tech sectors. Big names in the category include Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG), and Micron (MU).

They recommend supplementing those core holdings with attractively priced stocks with positive earnings revisions. They note healthcare companies, including Pfizer (PFE) and Cigna (CI), are overrepresented in the list of stocks that meet these criteria. They suggest funding those purchases by selling pricey stocks with less attractive earnings outlooks, including retail investor favorites like Palantir (PLTR), Tesla (TSLA), and Strategy (MSTR).