House prices, shipping stocks, and the S&P 500 in a world that never learns Sometimes the global economy feels like a neighborhood where the same house keeps catching fire. Different years, different neighbors, but somehow the same smoke. Here I look at three markets that react to stress with three different personalities: U.S. house prices, a basket of shipping…
The End of Money as We Know It? In the grand theater of economic history, money has always been a social construct—a collective agreement on value. From the Lydian coins to the gold standard, and from the Nixon shock of 1971 to the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, the medium of exchange has constantly evolved. Today, we stand at a…
The global dollar system is no longer limited to the visible balance sheets of the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks, or the U.S. Treasury. Over the last four decades, a dense offshore dollar system has emerged: a network of tax havens, lightly regulated financial centers, special purpose vehicles, and dollarized balance sheets that sit outside traditional monetary statistics and democratic…
Executive Summary Artificial intelligence (AI) has transcended the realm of experimentation to become one of the most profound transformative technologies of the 21st century. Fueled by exponential gains in computing power, data availability, and algorithmic sophistication, AI—particularly generative AI (genAI)—is re‐ shaping industries, redefining the nature of work, and altering the structure of the global economy. This report provides a…
Let me tell you about something happening right now. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the global economy. But not in the way most people think. This is not about machines taking jobs. This is about how institutional structures determine whether AI amplifies inequality or reduces it. The Numbers Are Not What They Seem The IMF tells us that AI will impact…
When we talk about AI today, we should talk about energy. How much power do we use to train models, and how much to serve them every day? How this demand shifts the world energy balance? And can we design a cleaner path? These are not simple questions. But we can put numbers. And we can design better systems. I…
For fifty years, something has been quietly breaking. Nobody talked about it much. It was boring. It was technical. It was happening in Japan. But maybe this boring thing in Japan was actually the most important thing in the entire global financial system.
Something strange happens with silver when the world gets into trouble. The price moves up before the crisis becomes official news. It is like silver knows something we don’t yet see. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is just looking at the data from the last fifty years. Silver moved up before the 1970s inflation disaster. It moved up…