If you were going to make a hat that embodies "high-tech" today, what would that mean?

We don't have to guess, because we've previously covered a number of innovations that could easily be built into a hat. It would probably involve things like wifi or perhaps a system that could help you avoid accidents or escape danger. Or maybe you would wear something that would help you breathe clean air. Or perhaps something that might automatically feed you a snack?

But what would it mean to invent a high-tech hat in 1890? What high-tech feature from that era would be something that would appeal to the hat-wearers of yesteryear?

On 18 September 1895, inventor James C. Boyle definitively answered that question when he applied for a patent for his invention of a saluting device. More remarkably, the patent examiners of the day agreed and awarded him with U.S. Patent 556,248, the hat that would automatically tip itself whenever social circumstances demanded it.

The internal apparatus Boyle wanted to incorporate within a hat is illustrated in Figure 1 from the patent:

Boyle describes the high-tech application he hoped his invention would achieve:

This invention relates to a novel device for automatically effecting polite salutations by the elevation and rotation of the hat on the head of the saluting party when said person bows to the person or persons saluted, the actuation of the hat being produced by mechanism therein and without the use of the hands in any matter.

But that's not all! In addition to this fantastic labor-saving capability, Boyle's self-tipping hat could be employed for a wholly separate and potentially lucrative opportunity by the hat-wearer:

The invention is also available as a unique and attractive advertising medium, and may be employed for such a purpose....

There may be a sign or placard placed on the hat having the improvements within it, and the saluting device be used to attract attention of the public on a crowded thoroughfare to the advertisement on the hat, the novelty of its apparent self-movement calling attention to the hat and its placard.

Unfortunately, Boyle's saluting device never caught on. We searched evidence his invention made it to the marketplace and came up nearly all but empty. We did find that the concept of a self-tipping hat was featured in the 1930 short film Soup to Nuts, which is better known for featuring the first appearance of the actors who would go on to become famous as The Three Stooges. Here's a clip:

As for his other patented objective of using a hat as an advertising medium, Boyle appears to have been just a bit ahead of his time. The first hats we can find with the equivalent of an advertisement placed on it are baseball caps, where hats were first transformed from a "sunshade into a billboard" by the Detroit Tigers, who added their original running tiger logo to their caps in 1901.

Today, hats with logos have attained a level of cultural influence, for which Boyle's 1896 invention would appear to be a significant step forward as the most high-tech hat of the 1890s.

From the Inventions in Everything Archives

The IIE team has previously covered the following stylish headgear items:

• Inventions in Everything: The Wearable Fire Escape
• Inventions in Everything: The Greenhouse Helmet
• Inventions in Everything: Substance Dispensing Headgear
• Inventions in Everything: A Third Eye for Smartphone Zombies
• Inventions in Everything: Has the Time of the Isolator Arrived?
• Inventions in Everything: The WiFi Wig

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) became the world's first publicly-traded company to clock a $4 trillion market cap during intraday trading on 9 July 2025.

That's a big deal because NVDA recently vaulted past two other megacaps to claim the title. In recent years, both Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) jockeyed for the title of being the world's biggest publicly-traded company, only to have Nvidia blow past them in just the last month.

The rise of NVDA is an ongoing major story, not just in the current headlines, but also in the history of stocks. Here's how CNBC reported today's milestone achievement:

Nvidia stock rose on Wednesday lifting the company’s market cap briefly past $4 trillion for the first time as investors scooped up shares of the tech giant that’s building the bulk of the hardware for the generative artificial intelligence boom.

However, Nvidia stock ended finishing the day only up 1.8%, giving the company a market cap of $3.97 trillion.

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, both of which hit the $3 trillion mark before Nvidia. Microsoft is also one of Nvidia’s biggest and most important customers. The chipmaker is the first company to ever achieve this market value during trading.

What makes this accomplishment more amazing is that NVDA's market cap has been remarkably volatile in recent months, especially after 20 February 2025, when the company behind China's DeepSeek artificial intelligence system announced they would make their code open source. That hurt NVDA's market valuation because DeepSeek's AI-code doesn't need to run on Nvidia's powerful AI-chips.

NVDA's market cap went from $3.4 trillion on 20 February 2025 down to a low of $2.6 trillion on 10 March 2025. The stock recovered a bit after that, rising back to $2.96 trillion on 24 March 2025. But then it plunged again in the reaction to President Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement on 2 April 2025. By 4 April 2025, NVDA's valuation totaled $2.30 trillion.

But then the company's valuation recovered, adding more than $1.7 trillion during the last three months, which has put in on the doorstep of a $4 trillion market capitalization.

We've updated the interactive chart we posted a year earlier to include the new $4 trillion benchmark.

The chart doesn't fully communicate the volatility of NVDA's market cap because it is based on snapshots of its total valuation as a percentage of the S&P 500's total market capitalization taken at roughly mid-year over the past 10 years, skipping over almost all of the volatility. As for where it stands today, the latest snapshot indicates NVDA's stock alone accounts for 7.07% of the total valuation of the S&P 500 index.

That in itself is remarkable because that's less that the 7.25% we estimated a year ago. What's happened since then is that the rest of the stocks that make up the index have increased their relative share of the total valuation of the index, while previous market cap champions AAPL and MSFT have lost some of theirs.

That's an underappreciated story in the U.S. stock market, which we'll revisit in the months ahead.

Disclaimer: Aside from long positions in funds that track the S&P 500 index, we don't hold any position of any kind in either NVDA, AAPL, or MSFT. We simply find these megacap stocks to be interesting because of their influence on the index.

Image credit: Microsoft Bing Image Creator. Prompt: "An artificial intelligence computer chip with the letters NVDA in the middle." We originally featured this image on 26 February 2024.

Coming up with a good metaphor to describe the state of international trade between the U.S. and China to base an editorial cartoon and headline around is challenging. Here a few of the contenders we considered for this article:

• US-China Trade Falls through the Floor in 2025 Tariff War's Second Month
• US-China Trade Plummets as 2025 Tariff War Impact Deepens
• US-China Cargo Trade Sinks as 2025 Tariff War Takes Toll

We thought the third option provided the best visual potential and went with it. But we could easily have run with any of the others, because they all work.

For example, trade between the U.S. and China did indeed fall through a floor in May 2025. Specifically, the total value of goods exchanged between the U.S. and China plunged below 2020's pandemic era low in the second month of the new tariff war between the two nations.

Trade between the U.S. and China did indeed plummet. We calculated the year-over-year growth rate for U.S. exports of goods to China and U.S. imports of goods from China and found both plunged by 40-41%. That's the second-lowest drop recorded in any month in trade between the two nations since January 1985, a period that covers the nearly entire modern era of trade between the U.S. and China when trade expanded as China's economy was restructured.

Meanwhile, May 2025 saw the total value of trade between the U.S. and China sink to its lowest level on record since the first quarter of 2009, when this measure bottomed during the so-called Great Recession.

The following chart presents the monthly figures for the combined value of goods exchanged between the U.S. and China with the trailing twelve month average and counterfactual projection of the trailing twelve month average through April 2025.

The chart also shows the growing deviation between the trailing twelve month average of the combined value of trade between the U.S. and China and our counterfactual projection of what that trajectory would look like had 2025's tariff war not happened. As expected, the shortfall between the no-2025 tariff war projection and the trailing year average grew.

The magnitude of the year-over-year decline and its impact in certain industries was such that it provided a huge incentive for the U.S. and China to strike a trade deal, which they announced and confirmed on 27 June 2025.

That event didn't occur until near the end of June 2025, so we anticipate another month in which devastating trade figures will be reported.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services (FT900). U.S. Trade in Goods with China, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Nominal Figures, Total Census Basis. [Online database]. Accessed 3 July 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of two half-full cargo container ships, one from the U.S. and the other from China, both of which have sprung leaks and are sinking".

American teens are facing very rough going in the U.S. job market of June 2025.

More specifically, the employment situation for older U.S. teens Age 18-19 turned for the worse between May and June 2025. Seasonally-adjusted age-based employment data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for June 2025 shows a large decrease in jobs concentrated within the older teen demographic.

Between May and June 2025, the number of 18-19 year-olds counted as having jobs decreased from 3,646,000 to 3,419,000. By comparison, the seasonally-adjusted number of employed teens Age 16-17 saw a small increasing during this period, rising from 1,939,000 to 1,958,000.

Overall, the reduction in the number of working Age 18-19 year-olds pulled the total estimate of employed teens down.

The following pair of charts presents seasonally adjusted U.S. teen employment and the teen employed-to-population ratio from January 2021 through June 2025.

The seasonally-adjusted employment data shows teen jobs peaked in February 2025. Since then, total teen employment (Age 16-19) has dropped by over seven percent, falling from 5,792,000 to 5,361,000.

The figures and percentages presented in these charts have each been subjected to their own seasonal adjustment by the analysts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so the number of employed Americans Age 16-17 and employed Americans Age 18-19 won't necessarily add up to the indicated number of working Americans in the whole Age 16-19 bracket. If you want numbers that do add up, aside from small rounding errors, you'll want to access the non-seasonally adjusted data available at the BLS' data site.

Speaking of which, the non-seasonally-adjusted employment data shows some contradictory trends between May and June 2025:

• Younger teens (Age 16-17) increased by 391,000 from 1,831,000 to 2,222,000.
• Older teens (Age 18-19) increased by 223,000 from 3,661,000 to 3,884,000.
• Total teens (Age 16-19) increased by 615,000 from 5,492,000 to 6,207,000.

But the seasonally-adjusted data signals the Summer 2025 job market for teens is far worse than these numbers would suggest. That's because far fewer teens, especially older teens, have been able to get jobs than would ordinarily be expected based on the historic peak in teen employment that takes place every summer.

In the case of older teens, June 2025's employment numbers are way less would be expected during an average year. The employment outlook for older teens appears to be finally catching down with the more-than-year-long downtrend for younger teens.

If the employment situation data for teens represents an early warning system for the U.S. economy, the falling seasonally-adjusted number of working teens could go a long way to explaining why President Trump has been putting so much pressure on the Federal Reserve to resume cutting interest rates to boost the economy sooner rather than later.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 3 July 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon with an older high school student who is reading a help wanted sign that says 'NOW HIRING AGE 18 20 & UP', with '18' crossed out". The AI couldn't quite get to what we wanted, so we tweaked the result by adding the "20".

The Independence Day holiday-shortened trading week saw the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) power higher to reach new record highs throughout the trading week. Overall, the index rose 1.7% over its preceding week's close to end the week at 6,279.40.

Several market-moving news events combined to produce this positive result for S&P 500 investors. On Monday, weekend headlines that Canada pulled the plug on its digital services tax boosted U.S. tech stocks after President Trump had suspended trade talks with Canada because of the new tax.

After taking a proverbial 'breather' on Tuesday, Wednesday saw the announcement of a major trade deal with Vietnam, which pushed the market higher. Finally, Thursday saw a better-than-expected jobs report and also the U.S. Congress' passage of President Trump's tax bill, which avoids a massive tax increase from taking effect in 2026 because of the expiration of President Trump's 2017 tax cuts.

And that doesn't even include the noise around when and by how much the Federal Reserve will cut U.S. interest rates!

The latest update of the alternative futures chart shows the rising trajectory of the S&P 500 during the week that was.

Although the index' trajectory is overlapping the trajectory associated with investors focusing on the distant future quarter of 2026-Q2, we think based on the recent history of the index and the context provided by the week's market moving headlines that investors are still fixed on 2025-Q4 in setting current day stock prices.

By recent history, we observe that investors shifted their attention to 2025-Q4 several weeks ago, with the level of the S&P 500 consistently running to the underside of that alternative path by a small percentage. We think that's continued in this past week, mainly because nothing in the contemporary headlines points to any new information that would compel investors to shift their focus out to a more distant point of time in the future.

What the headlines of recent weeks do indicate is quite a lot of attention on how the Federal Reserve will be setting the U.S.' Federal Funds Rate through the rest of 2025, particularly with respect to how many rate cuts there will be in the fourth quarter.

Speaking of which, here are the week's market moving headlines:

Monday, 30 June 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US narrows trade focus to secure deals before Trump's tariff deadline, FT reports
• India to finalise interim trade deal with US as early as this week, FT reports
• Canada scrapping tax on US tech firms after Trump suspends talks
• US to restart trade negotiations with Canada immediately, White House says
• Oil edges down on easing Middle East risks but gains for a second month
• US crude oil output hit record in April, EIA data shows
• Fed minions called “too late” in not delivering interest rate cuts, don’t think the economy will experience stagflation:
• Trump hammers Powell again as Bessent mulls Fed power transition timeline
• White House says Trump wrote Powell to urge lower rates
• Fed's Goolsbee sees no stagflation but 'definitely' things could get worse
• Growth signs, bigger stimulus developing in China:
• China's factory activity returns to growth in June, Caixin PMI shows
• China's weak factory activity maintains pressure for more stimulus as tariff risks weigh
• ECB minions worry about inflation, ready to stand by for action, getting ready to accept U.S. tariffs on Eurozone goods:
• Euro zone facing increased inflation volatility, Lagarde says
• ECB ready for 'forceful' action in world of inflation swings
• EU to accept Trump's universal tariff but seeks key exemptions, Bloomberg News reports
• S&P tops 6,200 for the first time, Nasdaq seizes all-time high as trade deals progress
• S&P 500, Nasdaq close at record highs, cap best quarter in over a year

Tuesday, 1 July 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Trump says he won't extend July 9 trade deadline, expresses doubt on Japan deal
• US job market surprises with increased openings in May
• Oil settles up on signs of strong demand; investors await OPEC+ decision
• Fed minions signal they’ll think about cutting rates in July, but are still expected to wait until September:
• Trump Gives Fed New Mandate
• Powell signals openness to July US interest rate cut
• Fed rate cut bets rise after Powell doesn't rule out July
• Powell reiterates Fed will wait for more data before cutting rates
• Fed hawks and doves: what US central bankers are saying
• ECB minions hit Eurozone inflation target, ready to pause interest rate cuts, thinking about devaluing Euro currency:
• Eurozone inflation rises to ECB’s 2% target
• ECB can afford to hold off on further rate changes for a while, Müller says
• ECB more likely to wait until year-end to cut rates, Simkus says
• ECB policymakers set pain threshold for euro rise in weak economy
• Wall Street's record-breaking rally takes a breather as S&P, Nasdaq end lower

Wednesday, 2 July 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Trump says US has struck trade deal with Vietnam
• Oil prices jump 3% as Iran suspends cooperation with UN nuclear watchdog
• Oil, gas activity contracted in Q2 on higher US steel tariffs, Dallas Fed survey shows
• Fed minions still expected to resume cutting U.S. interest rates in September 2025:
• US rate futures raise easing bets for July, fully prices in September cut
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China's top leaders vow crackdown on price wars as deflation risks mount
• China Communist Party magazine calls for crackdown on price wars
• BOJ minions thinking about pausing or not pausing Japan's interest rate hikes:
• BOJ's Ueda says underlying inflation still below 2%
• New BOJ board member warns against rushing into rate hikes
• ECB minions ambivalent on how many more rate cuts they'll deliver:
• ECB should consider mildly supportive stance as on low growth, inflation, Wunsch says
• S&P 500, Nasdaq close up on Vietnam trade deal, tech stocks
• Wall Street ends at a record high after U.S-Vietnam trade deal
• Shares of health insurers fall sharply as patient care costs jump
• US banks announce big shareholder payouts as Fed eases stress tests

Thursday, 3 July 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US factory orders rebound in May on strong aircraft demand
• US trade deficit widens in May on weak exports
• Instant view: US job growth beats expectations in June
• Oil prices ease on US tariff worries and expected OPEC+ output boost
• Republicans muscle Trump's sweeping tax-cut and spending bill through Congress
• In July 4 ceremony, Trump signs tax and spending bill into law
• Fed minions say they will have to wait up to a year to see if tariffs will cause inflation they predicted:
• Fed's Bostic: Adjustment to Trump policies could take a year or more
• Bigger trouble, U.S. trade deal developing in China:
• China's services activity growth hits 9-month low in June, shows Caixin PMI
• US paves way to resume ethane exports to China amid trade truce
• BOJ minions split difference, will pause then resume hiking Japan's interest rates:
• BOJ policymaker calls for resuming rate hikes after temporary pause
• ECB minions see some Eurozone economic growth, worry about not having enough inflation:
• Euro zone services sector returned to modest growth in June, PMI shows
• ECB's Wunsch: Inflation risk more downward than upward
• S&P 500 ends about 20 points shy of 6,300 level ahead of Independence Day holiday weekend
• S&P 500, Nasdaq touch new peaks after strong labor data; Nvidia hits all-time high

The CME Group's FedWatch Tool projects the Fed will continue holding the Federal Funds Rate in a target range of 4.25-4.50% until its 17 September (2025-Q3) meeting, when it is expected to cut the rate by a quarter percent. Beyond that date, the FedWatch tool anticipates additional quarter point rate cuts on 10 December (2025-Q4) and on 28 January (2026-Q1), which is a little less aggressive than its projections from a week earlier, and is why we think 2025-Q4 is still the dominant focal point on investors' time horizon.

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool projection of real GDP growth in the U.S. during the current quarter of 2025-Q2 dipped to +2.6% from the +2.9% level forecast the previous week.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull celebrating the S&P 500 hitting new record highs".