We’ve seen a string of high-profile mea culpas the past few months. About time. Anthropic founder Dario Amodei said last year, “There’s a 25% chances that things go really, really badly” with artificial intelligence. In 2023 he worried about human extinction. But with trillion-dollar-valued initial public offerings in the air, he and Open AI CEO Sam Altman have sharply pivoted to AI optimism. Last week Mr. Altman tweeted, “I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years.” Cure us before it kills us, I guess. On the pending job apocalypse, Mr. Altman said, “I’m delighted to be wrong about that.” OK.

Once-hot money manager Michael Burry, 25, of Situational Awareness, wrote a letter to investors in July after his fund dropped 67%, admitting, “We let you down this month.” Ya think? The fund was up 400%-plus for the year, running $45 billion, and owned every momentum name in the AI space, memory, energy, neoclouds. But, and it’s a big but, he used debt to boost returns, to the tune of 4 times leverage. Michael Burry. His problem—rookie mistake—was being unaware that he had become the market. Everything he bought went up, so he bought more. If he had stopped buying or sold, he would have seen the selloff before others. Public filings, 13Fs of his positions, allowed others to view his precarious situation. As his stocks started selling off, margin calls came flooding in, and Citadel and Goldman Sachs took his lunch money. I’ve always said equity hurts, leverage kills. His bad.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced plans to increase buying of US long bonds starting Sept. 9 to keep a lid on yields. She also touts US First but recently has intervened along with Japan to support the yen. Why? A mistake? Will it work? The Japanese 10-year government bond yield is now 2.9%, up from 1.6% a year ago. The problem is that years of lower Japanese interest rates have fueled the yen-carry trade: borrow cheap in yen and invest elsewhere in the world. It’s one of the reasons US stocks keep hitting new highs and hedge funds can lever up on the cheap. In 2023 Deutsche Bank thought there was $20 trillion in yen-carry trades outstanding. It’s surely higher now. That’s a lot of hot air. Best not let that deflate too quickly, try to keep the yen-carry and stock market party going until after November elections, keep control of Congress and avoid your boss’s impeachment. Clue: Boosted bond buybacks end Nov. 4. After these interventions stop, watch out. In what should be a mea culpa for Democrats, but sadly won’t be, Nancy Pelosi summed up today’s collectivist fervor: “We’re the only country where you have to be rich enough to be a socialist.”

San Francisco car break-ins dropped from 22,700 in 2022 to 1,764 so far in 2026. In addition to more surveillance, including Flock automated license-plate readers, state Sen. Scott Wiener notes, “We changed state law by removing a massive loophole that required prosecutors to prove all car doors were locked, even if evidence of a break-in was clear.” A huge “my bad.”

This newspaper recently detailed Stellantis’s bringing back Hemi V-8 engines for its Ram trucks because customers demanded it. The turbo in-line six-cylinder engine was fine and all but, one customer complained, “it sounded like you were driving a Honda.” Mea, meet culpa. Similarly, a clever headline from last December: “Ford pulls the plug on the all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck.” It’s like bringing back old Coke after new Coke bombed. Duh! Why does management always forget the No. 1 creed of business: Delight your customers? Elon Musk, best known for disdaining fossil fuels and selling close to 10 million electric vehicles, is actively advocating natural-gas turbines for data centers and chip factories. Pragmatic beats stubborn. In May, the American ...