1. Impressive cost reduction in space technologies.
In the past 15 years, rocket launch costs have dropped from $50,000 per kilogramme to under $2,000. They are expected to dip below $200/kg with Starship — a reusable, heavy-lift launch vehicle being developed by SpaceX.
This is a summary of the opportunities presented by the space economy.
As a factory floor, space offers a set of unique properties. Microgravity assists new assembling habitats that may enable breakthroughs. Pharmaceutical companies have studied protein crystallisation on the International Space Station... Certain alloys can also only be created in low-gravity environments while orbital solar panels can collect energy 24/7, unaffected by weather or nightfall. These could be the next leap in clean energy... The infrastructure that we build in orbit can directly benefit Earth. Space-manufactured semiconductors can power more efficient data centres. Orbital pharmaceuticals could treat previously incurable diseases. Space-based solar panels can provide clean energy... Data companies are training AI on satellite imagery. Hedge funds use this information for commodity trading while logistics companies optimise routes. Companies can use the data provided from satellite imagery to predict retail footfall, agricultural yields, subsurface water location and supply chain disruptions. US based start-up Locus Lock is producing satellite-enabled GPS receivers that maintain ultra-precise accuracy even in compromised environments — critical for autonomous vehicles in dense cities, military operations in contested spaces, and orbital spacecraft navigation.
2. Andy Haldane has a scathing description of the legacy of "independent" central bankers.
Unquestionably, we are in an era of fiscal laxity. Fiscal deficits across the G7 currently average around 6 per cent of GDP. These countries have collectively failed to run a fiscal surplus this century. That has caused government debt across the G7 to rise well in excess of 100 per cent of GDP, its highest for three-quarters of a century. This is expected to worsen further due to the effects of population ageing, climate change and President Donald Trump’s flagship “big, beautiful bill”. Whisper it quietly, but central banks have played an important supporting role during this era of fiscal laxity. Their direct purchases of government debt — quantitative easing — peaked at well over $10tn, around a third of the outstanding stock at the time. This was monetary financing in all but name. In the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, however, such measures were justifiable in preventing an inflation undershoot. Later-stage QE, including purchases made in response to Covid-19, is harder to justify. With fiscal policy highly expansionary, QE’s primary purpose was to placate fretful bond markets rather than boost inflation. In doing so, central banks’ holdings of government debt rose to approaching half of the outstanding stock in the UK and Japan, almost a third in the Eurozone and a quarter in the US. This was a mild, backdoor form of fiscal dominance.
The high deficits and rising debts creates incentives for more fiscal dominance.
In recent criticism of the Federal Reserve, Trump put a precise estimate on the size and source of the benefits from lower rates — $360bn a year in reduced government refinancing costs per percentage point. This signals a far stronger form of front-door fiscal dominance. Because central banks primarily affect short-term interest rates, the risk is most acute when government debt maturities are short and shortening. In the US, two-thirds of government debt outstanding is now under a five-year maturity. Last year, around a third of the debt issued was under a one-year maturity. These patterns are being mirrored internationally. UK government debt has a weighted average maturity of over 14 years. But that too has been falling, with forecast debt issuance averaging a nine-year maturity. The tilt to short-dated issuance has also been seen in Canada, Germany, France and other OECD countries. More than 40 per cent of the OECD’s $50tn-plus in outstanding sovereign debt will need to be refinanced in the next three years. In the face of steepening yield curves, these debt strategies make fiscal sense.
3. Tej Parikh has two graphics on how disconnected the US equity markets have become from its economy.
Meta has invested $15bn in Scale AI, a data labelling start-up that claims just 900 employees. Scale’s 28-year-old chief executive, Alexandr Wang, will take up a job at a new Meta lab devoted to creating AI “superintelligence”... Scale AI is both a talent and a data play. The company’s main business is providing high-quality annotated data for training AI models. Now that the big AI companies have scraped most of the internet, Scale’s labelling work can help them improve the quality of their models.
With an increasing number of Western multinationals shifting their core data-related back office functions to India through Global Capability Centres (GCCs), there's a golden opportunity for India to emerge as tthe software development centre of the world. This will create opportunities for startups to come up with solutions like that of Scale.
5. China's quiet infiltration of the UN system.
A study by Shing-hon Lam of the University of California and Courtney J Fung of Macquarie University found China had nearly 1,600 UN staff in 2022 compared with more than 5,000 for the US, though it is building new staff pipelines through internships... This year, China pledged $500mn to the WHO over five years. Part of this voluntary funding is expected to involve secondment opportunities for Chinese technical and advisory staff... While the ITU is currently led by American Doreen Bogdan-Martin, her predecessor was China’s Houlin Zhao. “The director-general is now American but China put — mostly African — people close to China in high positions, such as the current director of the Development Bureau,” the EU official added. Cosmas Luckyson Zavazava, formerly head of Zimbabwe’s telecommunications agency, is now director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau. According to the EU official, he was strongly backed by China, which has close ties with Zimbabwe, including Huawei-led telecoms infrastructure projects.
6. Important distinction between ICE and EVs.
EVs are fundamentally different from internal combustion engine (ICE)-based cars in terms of where the value is captured. The production process for ICE cars is far more disaggregated, with value — and thus profits — being earned at various places along the supply chain. For EVs, value addition is more concentrated, for example, in the production of batteries. This has serious implications for India’s auto-component sector.
7. Private equity funds increase reliance on continuation funds in times of sharply reduced exits.
Buyout groups used so-called continuation funds — in which a private equity group sells assets from one of the funds they manage to a fresher fund also managed by the firm — to exit $41bn of investments in the first six months of 2025, according to a report by investment bank Jefferies. That was equal to a record 19 per cent of all sales by the industry, and 60 per cent higher than a year ago... Private equity groups sit on more than $3tn in unsold deals and are nearing four consecutive years in which they have returned only about half the cash investors traditionally expect... Continuation funds give investors the choice to roll over their investment or to cash out. For their private equity sponsors, they allow the firm to keep portfolio companies beyond the typical 10-year life of a fund, and to crystallise performance fees on the assets sold while collecting a steady stream of management fees from the new fund buying the investments.
8. Kavitha Rao makes some good suggestions on GST reforms. This about the revenue from different rates.
In response to another question in Parliament, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary reported 70-75 per cent of GST collected in 2023-24 came from the 18 per cent rate while just 5-6 per cent came from the 12 per cent bracket. Further, 6-8 per cent of revenues was from the 5 per cent slab, and the highest tax slab of 28 per cent contributed 13-15 per cent last financial year... compensation cess... contributes... ₹1.44 trillion in 2023-24 and ₹1.49 trillion in 2024-25, or 7.6 per cent of net GST.
9. Profile of Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, and the massive system of self-aggrandising crony capitalist system that has been built in the country.
10. It's beyond imagination how the world is reacting to the genocide in Gaza, and that for 21 months of being played out on live television.
The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, said this week that the hunger crisis in Gaza had reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.”... the number of children dying of malnutrition had risen sharply in recent days... The Gaza ministry of health has reported more than 40 hunger-related deaths this month, including 16 children, and 111 since the beginning of the war, 81 of them children... Throughout the war, U.N. agencies and independent aid groups have accused Israel of allowing far too little food into Gaza, warning of impending famine for its more than two million people... Hollow-eyed, skeletal children languish on hospital beds or are cared for by parents, who gaze helplessly at protruding ribs and shoulder blades, and emaciated limbs resembling brittle sticks. The haunting scenes are a stark contrast to the plenty that exists just a few miles away, across the borders with Israel and Egypt.
France's decision to recognise the Palestinian state will put pressure on others to follow suit.
11. The US equity markets are on a roll, and it now remains to be seen when and how the reversal will strike.
Backed by the Trump administration, crypto assets are clearly on a bubble.
The value of global crypto assets reached $4tn for the first time this month as speculators anticipated a deluge of money into the sector in response to new US digital asset legislation. That number again. Crypto’s achievement is astonishing given that it is devoid of intrinsic value and its contribution to the productive economy is minimal compared to that of Nvidia et al. Its chief utility appears to be to enable payments by criminals and to scammers, while gratifying the urges of gung-ho speculators. It is striking that crypto’s performance has even made gold, the traditional if volatile bolt hole for nervous money in dangerous times, look boring...The great 18th century Mississippi bubble, initiated by the Scottish economic theorist and gambler John Law, obtained exclusive rights to develop land in French-owned Louisiana, along with monopoly rights over the French tobacco and slave trades. Law’s company even took over the collection of French taxes and management of the note issue — all with the backing of the French regent, the Duke of OrlĂ©ans. Fomo fuelled the bubble until the whole edifice imploded spectacularly in 1720 amid rip-roaring inflation and spiralling government debt.
12. John Burn-Murdoch uses data from the World Happiness Report to point out that youth well-being in Anglosphere countries has been declining compared to stability in Europe.
The share of young adults regularly experiencing stress and anger has risen sharply over the past 15 years in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. But it has been largely stable elsewhere in the west, according to detailed data from the Gallup World Poll used in the report. It’s a similar story for young people’s faith in the ultimate social contract: that if you work hard you’ll be rewarded with security, stability and status. Outside the English-speaking world, confidence in this fundamental tenet of societal fairness is flat across the age spectrum. In the Anglosphere it is high only among the oldest, and in tatters among the young.
He points to a fascinating likely contributor, housing prices.
In Germany and Spain real house prices have climbed 32 and 44 per cent respectively since 1995. In the US the equivalent figure is 85 per cent, while the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all come in north of 200 per cent. The result has been a brutal snatching away of the particularly Anglophone dream of home ownership. Rates of ownership among people aged 25-34 in English-speaking countries have slumped by between 20 and 50 percentage points over the same 30-year period.