Waymo is recalling nearly 4,000 robotaxis after more than a dozen incidents in which the autonomous vehicles entered closed freeway construction zones, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recall report.

The recall affects 3,871 vehicles equipped with Waymo’s 5th Generation Automated Driving System.

According to NHTSA, the software issue could allow a vehicle to enter a closed freeway construction zone and continue traveling at posted speeds. Regulators said affected vehicles may avoid or fail to recognize certain construction-zone closures because of the software defect.

Waymo estimates that all 3,871 vehicles covered by the recall are affected.

WAYMO PAUSES FREEWAY ROBOTAXI ROUTES AFTER SAFETY AND SOFTWARE CONCERNS

A Waymo self-driving Jaguar I-PACE SUV waits at an intersection in San Francisco, March 18, 2025. (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images / Getty Images)

According to the recall report, Waymo’s Field Safety Committee began reviewing the issue in late April after examining six incidents in which robotaxis drove past ramp closure signs and entered freeway construction zones.

The committee met again in May after identifying seven additional instances involving active construction zones in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As a result of the 13 reported incidents, Waymo implemented freeway-driving restrictions while engineers worked to identify the root cause and develop a remedy, according to the filing.

The recall covers Waymo 5th Generation Automated Driving Systems manufactured between May 17, 2022, and May 19, 2026. As of June 13, a software remedy remained under development, according to the filing.

WAYMO RECALLS MASSIVE AUTONOMOUS FLEET AFTER INCIDENT FLAGS MAJOR SAFETY ISSUE

Waymo’s legacy fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan.  (Waymo / Fox News)

Waymo currently operates driverless ride-hailing services in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, and has announced plans to expand into additional markets.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

A Waymo spokesperson told FOX Business the company voluntarily restricted freeway operations while making improvements, notified regulators and filed a voluntary recall with NHTSA.

“We identified an area of improvement regarding performance around freeway construction zones,” the spokesperson said.

Rachel Reeves has been told that ministers cannot “act surprised” when pensioners start asking why retirement now comes with a larger tax bill.

The warning lands as fresh forecasts show an additional one million pensioners will be drawn into the income tax system by 2030-31, with frozen thresholds doing the quiet work that a headline rate rise would do in plain sight.

The Chancellor has faced sustained criticism over the decision to hold income tax thresholds at their current levels until 2031, a policy that opponents have repeatedly branded a “stealth tax” on older people. For a generation of savers who assumed the worst of the tax man was behind them, the effect is the same as a rate increase, just without the politics of announcing one.

Projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility, published alongside the Spring Statement, suggest the threshold freeze will pull an extra one million pensioners into paying income tax over the next four years. The OBR estimates that 600,000 additional state pension recipients will become liable by 2026-27, climbing to one million by 2030-31. It is a textbook case of fiscal drag: the personal allowance stays put at £12,570 while the state pension keeps rising under the triple lock, and the gap between the two slowly closes until it disappears.

The mechanics matter because they are so easily missed. As Business Matters has reported, 420,000 more pensioners were dragged into the income tax net this financial year alone as the freeze bit harder, taking the total well past eight million. The direction of travel is clear, and it is one way.

The issue reached the Commons on Monday following a public petition that gathered 119,206 signatures before closing on 1 April. It called for a new tax code that would double the £12,570 personal allowance for state pensioners, on the grounds that more retirees are being caught by the tax system precisely because their pension is going up.

During the debate, Conservative MP Alison Griffiths argued that pensioners could see the effect of the policy perfectly well without any help from the Treasury.

“The Government regularly tell people that they have not increased income tax rates,” she told MPs. “However, pensioners, who are a savvy bunch, can see exactly what is happening. They do not need a Treasury briefing to understand where more of their income is being taxed each year.”

She added: “The Chancellor chose to extend the freeze in the personal allowance until 2031. That was a political choice. It means that more pensioners will continue to be drawn into the tax system year after year. Ministers cannot make that decision and then act surprised when pensioners ask questions about fairness.”

Ms Griffiths reserved particular concern for the uncertainty still hanging over the system. Last year’s Budget promised that pensioners relying solely on the state pension would be spared the hassle of small tax bills through Simple Assessment from 2027, but she said her constituents remain unclear about who qualifies and how the process will actually work.

Liberal Democrat MP Charlie Maynard went further, condemning the freeze as “both wrong and unfair” and accusing the government of running a stealth tax that falls hardest on the lowest paid and most vulnerable. “An estimated 600,000 people were dragged into paying income tax for the first time this April and a further 580,000 were pulled into the higher 40p rate,” he said, describing such measures as “dishonest with voters”. He urged ministers to drop stealth tax policies at a time when cost of living pressures are squeezing households at every stage of life.

Conservative MP John Lamont, meanwhile, challenged the comfortable assumption that pensioners are uniformly well off, telling the House that while it may be true of a small minority, it does not reflect the reality for most.

The Treasury defended its position. “Anyone whose only income is the full new or basic State Pension without any increments will not pay income tax and we are committed to that over this Parliament,” a spokesperson said. The department pointed out that 12 million pensioners would see their income rise by up to £470 this year through the triple lock, while still benefiting from the highest personal allowance in the G7.

The government has also pledged to ease the administrative burden for pensioners whose sole income is the basic or new state pension, promising they will not face small tax demands through Simple Assessment from 2027-28 should the state pension tip over the personal allowance threshold. Ministers say they are still working out how best to deliver that change and will set out more detail next year.

For now, the awkward arithmetic remains. The triple lock pushes the state pension up, the personal allowance stays frozen, and the space between them narrows each year. As analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others has shown, freezing thresholds is one of the most lucrative levers a Chancellor can pull, which is precisely why it is so hard to give up. Business Matters has previously examined how this stealth tax raid is reshaping the finances of older households, and the political cost of taxing state pensions despite repeated pledges not to is only growing.

The message from Monday’s debate was blunt. The freeze is a choice, the consequences are predictable, and ministers should not expect retirees to be fooled by the absence of a number on a manifesto.

Jamie Young

Jamie is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, bringing over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting.
Jamie holds a degree in Business Administration and regularly participates in industry conferences and workshops.

When not reporting on the latest business developments, Jamie is passionate about mentoring up-and-coming journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.

Advertisement

One of the most telling statements from President Trump at this week’s G-7 meeting was how worried he was about a potential economic catastrophe related to the Iran war and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. And equally telling, the president referred to the stock market as a key barometer of the economy.

This is very similar to over a year ago when he modified his original liberation day tariff schedules because the stock market tanked badly after his speech. So he made adjustments.

And I can tell you with my own experience when I worked at the National Economic Council in the first term, however many 100 times I was in the oval, he always asked about the stock market when he saw me coming in. 

It’s an interesting point of view. And it’s a kind of old-fashioned point of view. Because business and financial economists used to use the stock market as a key barometer of the economy.  

Leftists hate this, and unfortunately, today’s Wall Street is heavily populated by leftists, particularly the economists. Not all of them. But most of them.

So anyway, the president didn’t want to be remembered as Herbert Hoover. And here’s exactly what he did say on Wednesday in France:

“So the one thing I didn’t want to see is I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened. But all I know is, every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship. It never went down. They didn’t like it.” 

Mr. Trump added that “the stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is, including the people on this stage other than me, of course. Rather than possibly going into a depression, rather than having your favorite president be Herbert Hoover, who was always the one I didn’t want to be.”

I think that’s very important and very instructive on his thinking. I’m gonna get to the masterful, maiden voyage of the Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh, in just a moment, but I want to add from Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post this morning:

“OIL IS FLOWING, IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON (THE WORLD WILL BE SAFE), THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING, JOBS ARE AT RECORDS, AND PRICES ARE DROPPING (AFFORDABILITY). OUR COUNTRY IS STRONG, SAFE, AND RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE.” 

Mr. Trump concluded: “YOU’RE WELCOME.”

So now, Mr. Warsh made clear in yesterday’s presser that strong economic growth and low inflation, meaning stable prices, and low unemployment can all exist together. He basically told us that models developed 50 years or more ago should not be used in today’s ultra-high-tech, faster-than-the-speed-of-light economy. An important policy statement. And an enormous breath of fresh air.

Meanwhile, reports are coming in that oil is already flowing through the Strait of Hormuz faster than anyone thinks possible.

At $75 and change a barrel, West Texas intermediate oil today is right where it was one year ago, $75. But a year ago, gasoline was $3.18 a gallon. That’s a good forecast for what may happen. Right now it’s $3.99 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA. By the way $3.18 is an awfully good number for the GOP midterm outlook.

Yet Mr. Warsh was very clear that he is leaning toward restoring what he calls price stability. The Fed under its former chairman, Jay Powell, hadn’t hit its 2 percent inflation target in five years. Mr. Warsh wants to correct this.

I think it’s doubtful that he’s gonna start raising the Fed’s target rate, though. Why? Because they’d be looking backward at the lagging story of spiking oil, a story that has obviously completely reversed. Don’t base policy on last year’s story, try to look ahead. This too is a key Warsh theme.

And by the way, he watches commodities, which in general are falling. Energy, gold, silver, corn, wheat, etc., all falling. And as I noted yesterday, under Mr. Warsh, good news can once again be good news.

His goal is to get markets to react to the actual data news, not what some flyover regional reserve bank president says. That’s why forward guidance is gradually going to go away.

You know what’s really good news? Mr. Trump has decimated Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities. They’re on their knees. And that has allowed him to try and pull together a deal that includes reopening Hormuz.

And that’s going to allow Mr. Warsh the latitude for even more good news, both on falling inflation and rising prosperity. Think of it.

Britain’s unemployment rate edged down to 4.9 per cent in the three months to April, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday, handing policymakers a modest piece of good news just hours before the Bank of England delivered its latest call on interest rates.The reading

was down from the five per cent recorded in the previous quarter and came in better than the expectations of economists, who had pencilled in an unchanged jobless rate of five per cent. It is the sort of small upside surprise that rarely shifts the dial on its own, but it lands at a sensitive moment for rate-setters weighing how much slack is building in the labour market.

Pay growth excluding bonuses held steady at 3.4 per cent over the same period, comfortably ahead of forecasts of 3.2 per cent. Adjusted for consumer price inflation, real earnings rose by 0.3 per cent, leaving workers fractionally better off in real terms. Total pay including bonuses climbed 4.4 per cent, also beating the four per cent the market had expected.

The numbers arrived only hours before the Bank of England announced its decision, with the Monetary Policy Committee widely tipped to leave borrowing costs unchanged at 3.75 per cent. The Bank trimmed rates to that level late last year, as covered in our report on how UK interest rates were cut to 3.75% as the Bank signalled inflation nearing target, and has since trodden carefully amid a patchy growth picture. The full detail of the Committee’s thinking is set out on the Bank’s own Bank Rate page.

Rate-setters have been watching the jobs data closely as they judge whether elevated oil prices, linked to the conflict involving Iran, could feed through into stronger wage demands. A tight labour market would raise the risk of a second-round inflation effect, the kind of dynamic the Bank is determined to avoid.

Responding to the figures, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said the data showed 400,000 more people in work than a year earlier, while acknowledging that instability in the Middle East was creating uncertainty. “We have the right economic plan for growth and stability in a volatile world, and we are taking action to create opportunity and make sure that no one is left behind,” he said.

He pointed to what he called the biggest youth employment reforms in a generation, including a Youth Guarantee backed by £2.5 billion of investment aimed at creating almost a million opportunities for young people, and the Connect to Work programme designed to support 300,000 disabled people into employment.

Not everyone read the release as a turning point. Independent economist Julian Jessop cautioned that the underlying trend remained soft. “Even after some favourable revisions, the trend in payroll jobs is still down, with 119,000 fewer employees in May than in the same month a year earlier, and 187,000 fewer than two years ago,” he said.

A further worry for the Committee is whether softer demand for workers is eroding employees’ bargaining power and their ability to push for bigger pay rises. Most members believe labour market conditions have loosened compared with recent years, making large wage increases less likely. The shift is stark set against the period after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when inflation peaked at 11.1 per cent and wage growth ran above five per cent for almost three years.

Suren Thiru, chief economist at ICAEW, struck a downbeat note. “These figures point to a jobs market struggling under the strain of soaring energy bills and employment costs, with more firms limiting hiring and holding down pay, especially for younger workers,” he said. The cooling he describes echoes the picture in our earlier coverage of how the UK jobs market is slowing as wage growth eases and vacancies fall amid higher business taxes.

Thiru argued that weaker wage growth would reassure policymakers that any inflationary spillover from the conflict involving Iran could be contained. “These figures seal the deal on a midday interest rate hold by reassuring rate-setters that a softening labour market can help keep this Iran-driven inflation shock short-lived by dampening demand across the economy,” he said, adding that the Committee’s vote split and accompanying minutes could take on a slightly more dovish tone.

The claimant count told its own story. The number of people claiming unemployment benefits rose by 31,200 in May, ahead of forecasts for an increase of 25,800 and following a revised rise of 8,300 in April. Employment grew by 100,000 in the three months to April, down from 148,000 in the previous period but still ahead of expectations for growth of 80,000.

Thiru warned that falling vacancies suggested demand for workers was weakening at an uncomfortable pace, as businesses absorbed mounting financial pressures and automation reshaped the workforce. That theme of a stalling hiring engine has been building for some time, as our reporting on long-term unemployment climbing to a decade high made clear.

“While the US-Iran peace deal has halted hostilities, the damage to the UK’s labour market is already done,” he said, predicting that unemployment could drift towards six per cent if higher energy costs continue to weigh on employers’ hiring plans.

For now, the headline rate is moving in the right direction. The harder question for businesses and policymakers alike is whether that holds once the full weight of higher costs and weaker demand works its way through.

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.

This article was written by

Follow

Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of META either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

Taxi drivers, stockbrokers and the bloke propping up the bar at your local have all, at one time or another, served as a source of share tips. Now there is a fresh seam of supposed wisdom for retail investors to mine: chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude.

These artificial intelligence tools, known in the trade as large language models (LLMs), are increasingly being pressed into service by amateur and professional investors alike to generate investment ideas. Yet for all the awe AI has inspired, the jury is still out on whether the machines are actually any good at making money.

Back in 1973, the academic Burton Malkiel argued in his now-famous book that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper could pick a portfolio just as profitable as one chosen by highly paid professionals. His point, the bedrock of the efficient market hypothesis, was that returns on the stock market are essentially random and unpredictable, and that nobody can hold a lasting edge over anyone else.

The notion that LLMs might be superior stock pickers to humans would, of course, blow a hole in that theory. A clutch of start-ups has already set AI to work trading and investing, with markedly mixed results.

According to a recent test run by the US research lab Nof1, six of the eight most popular AI models lost money investing in American technology shares. Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet shed almost 60 per cent of its initial $10,000 (£7,500) stake, while Google’s Gemini gave up more than $5,000. Only two came out ahead: ChatGPT, which made nearly $900, and Elon Musk’s Grok, which roughly broke even.

To the technology’s believers, however, it is only a matter of time before LLMs start besting the very best of Wall Street.

Faizan Ahmad, a former Meta engineer, is co-founder of Rallies, a start-up that uses AI to help people choose shares. His own experiments have thrown up some eyebrow-raising results, with the machines displaying a flash of ingenuity in navigating choppy markets.

Claude, for instance, deftly handled the fallout from the conflict with Iran by rotating out of growth shares and into defence stocks. ChatGPT, meanwhile, plumped for Credo Technology Group, a high-speed connectivity firm, as a likely beneficiary of the global build-out of internet infrastructure around seven months ago. The shares have since climbed by more than 75 per cent.

“No one had heard about that stock, and I hadn’t,” says Ahmad. “That stock was starting to show very early signs of becoming core to Nvidia’s and other players’ infrastructure.

“These models get access to all of the research and can go through entire SEC [US Securities and Exchange Commission] filings. The ability to parse a plethora of information and then find a stock that actually went up quite a lot was amazing.”

Rallies has launched its AI portfolios on a service that lets retail traders copy its trades. It now has $10m of retail money shadowing ChatGPT’s picks and $14m across all of its AI portfolios. And it is not only the small investor taking an interest.

Far from the living rooms and box bedrooms of ordinary punters, the gleaming towers of the City and the professional money men are dabbling too. Algorithmic trading has long been a feature of institutional investing, a subject Michael Lewis brought to wider attention with his 2014 book Flash Boys, but the arrival of LLMs has now piqued the interest of hedge funds.

At Man Group, the world’s largest listed hedge fund, LLMs have already been behind a number of profitable trade ideas.

“We have, right now, several examples where we’ve had an idea proposed by an LLM and have passed it through our diligence process before ultimately being accepted by the investment committee,” says Tushara Fernando, head of data and AI at the firm. “If it can come up with an accepted proposal, that’s fantastic, and then the resulting code goes into production and can trade real money.”

Unlike some of the start-ups letting AI loose unsupervised, Man uses the technology to generate ideas that still require a human stamp of approval. Even so, Fernando says the sheer speed of LLMs lets fund managers kick around far more ideas than they otherwise could.

“[A fund manager] might previously have tested two to three investment ideas a day, for example, modelling different scenarios with the aim of proving out new trades,” he says. “Now they’re able to explore and backtest hundreds in a very short space of time. While they’ve gone for a coffee, the agent’s running a backtest, which uses historical data to evaluate how a potential trade would likely perform under differing conditions.”

Many of the largest hedge funds were early adopters of AI and machine learning long before LLMs went mainstream. Bridgewater Associates, the US fund founded by Ray Dalio, launched a vehicle using machine learning as the primary basis of its decision-making two years ago. In 2018, Two Sigma poached Mike Schuster, an AI specialist, from Google’s Brain team to spearhead its efforts.

Balyasny Asset Management, one of the biggest hedge funds in the US, said recently that 95 per cent of its investment teams were using OpenAI. Agents are set to work analysing and synthesising tens of thousands of documents, from company filings to research notes and earnings reports. The firm has also used AI to monitor and update the probability of mergers and acquisitions completing, and to dissect speeches by central bankers. Balyasny said the technology had slashed the time taken to work out the economic implications of those speeches from two days to 30 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, simply having access to the latest and greatest models is not enough. It is proprietary data that gives the hedge funds their edge. Anthropic announced a partnership with Man Group in February to deploy its Claude model across the firm’s investment process, both to surface new insights from data and to speed up coding tasks.

That, though, presents its own headache for firms such as Man, which must bolt cutting-edge LLMs onto their own highly sophisticated technology stacks.

“LLMs are fantastic at using public knowledge. They may know the last 12 songs on the Taylor Swift album and how to solve a Rubik’s cube, but they don’t know Man Group: our strategies, how much we trade, or our databases or execution platform,” says Gary Collier, chief technology officer at Man Group.

For the largest and most established hedge funds, then, people remain firmly at the controls. Ahmad, who intends to launch a hedge fund through Rallies in due course, is convinced that fully AI-managed funds are not far off.

“We are very bullish that eventually, three or two years down the line, there are going to be hedge funds that are entirely run by AI, that are provided with data and anything the models need, which then go ahead and trade,” he says.

Forget the cabbie’s hot tip. The AI chatbot, it seems, may yet become the next font of all stock-picking wisdom. Whether it proves any more reliable than Malkiel’s dart-throwing monkey is, for now, anyone’s guess.

With AI now driving the lion’s share of global trading volume, the technology’s grip on markets is only tightening. For context on the wider boom, see how Britain’s AI investment hit a record £8.3bn and why Big Short investor Michael Burry is betting $1.1bn against AI stocks.

Jamie Young

Jamie is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, bringing over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting.
Jamie holds a degree in Business Administration and regularly participates in industry conferences and workshops.

When not reporting on the latest business developments, Jamie is passionate about mentoring up-and-coming journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.

Marc Guay

Well, welcome, everybody. Good morning. Welcome to the 2026 Annual General and Special Meeting of Unitholders of Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund. My name is Marc Guay, and I am a trustee of the Fund. I would like to call the 2026 Annual General and Special Meeting of the Unitholders of Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund to order.

As a trustee of the fund, I will act as Chair of this meeting. Jonathan Jeske of Boston Pizza International Inc. will act as Secretary of the meeting. Also Yanni Yu of Computershare Investor Services will act as scrutineer for this meeting.

I would like to welcome and thank you for taking the time to attend this meeting. Before proceeding with the formal business of the meeting, I would like to introduce the other trustee of Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund, who is in attendance, Shelley Williams, Trustee. I would also like to note that Paulina Hiebert, Trustee is unable to attend today’s meeting due to medical reasons. On behalf of the fund, we extend our best wishes to Paulina and look forward to her return.

In addition, I would like to introduce the following representative of Boston Pizza International, who is participating in today’s meeting: Mr. Jordan Holm, President of BPI and Boston Pizza GP. I have before me an affidavit from [ Michael Kim ] of Computershare attesting that the notice calling this meeting together with the management information circular were mailed to registered shareholders and intermediaries in accordance with the National Instrument 54-101.

Therefore, I conclude that the meeting has been properly called. With your consent, I will not read the formal notice of meeting that was sent to unitholders. — your