1. Dame Sarah Mullally, 63, becomes the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to serve as the senior-most bishop of the 85 million-strong Anglican Communion since the role's creation for Augustine of Canterbury in 597 AD!
2. Kevin Warsh as Fed Chairman may pursue significant changes to the way the Fed sets monetary policy.
The Fed’s vast bond-buying programmes, which Warsh initially supported as a Fed governor during the financial crisis, are at the centre of the Trump administration’s allegations that the central bank is acting far beyond its remit to keep prices in check and maximise employment. The... quantitative easing, expanded the Fed’s balance sheet from less than $900bn in 2008 to a peak of almost $9tn. The balance sheet now stands at $6.6tn, following a three-year reversal of QE — dubbed “quantitative tightening” — that the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee has recently paused amid signs banks were falling short of reserves. Warsh has said he would like to shrink it much further... Warsh in April said successive QE programmes meant politicians found it “considerably easier appropriating money knowing that the government’s financing costs would be subsidised by the central bank”...Warsh’s claims that the response to the pandemic “was the biggest monetary policy error in 45 years”... Along with shrinking the balance sheet, Warsh would like to change the Treasury-Fed Accord, a 1951 agreement seen as the foundation for the US central bank’s freedom to set interest rates free from political pressure. Warsh has said he wants a “recommitment” to the accord that would entail a smaller, less powerful central bank, with some control of its balance sheet handed to the Treasury... Trump’s nominee will push the Fed’s staff to gather more “real-time information” to rely less heavily on official government data that comes on a longer lag... He could also deploy economists to find out whether his view is right that an AI-led productivity boom can boost US workers’ pay without stoking inflation — a move that could potentially pave the way for more interest rate cuts.
This is Warsh's WSJ op-ed of March 2023, where he called for an "economic regime change", including stopping the practice of providing forward guidance and stopping the provision of forecasts of the path of interest rates. The expectation now is that Fed may dispense with its widely followed dot plot showing the interest-rate projections of each participant of the FOMC, and end the tradition of press conferences by Fed chair following every FOMC meeting.
3. Soumaya Keynes points to new research that links commerce and markets to the shaping of cultural norms.
One 2010 study ran money-sharing experiments across a diverse mix of communities, including smaller ones where people foraged or hunted for food. In those less marketised societies, norms around fairness towards strangers seemed weaker... A new study by Max Posch of the University of Exeter and Itzchak Tzachi Raz of Hebrew University takes a different approach, exploring the US economic transformation between 1850 and 1920. Thanks in part to a vast expansion of railroads, internal commerce became much easier. Mail-order catalogues served remote communities with items including shoelaces, suitcases and booze. The researchers compared places and people gaining more and less market access. Unsurprisingly, they found that in the places that enjoyed juicier connections, work shifted to involve co-operation with more distant partners...Compiling many metrics, they found that on at least three dimensions, new markets did seem to affect culture. First, commercial opportunities made people more outward-looking. In places that became more connected, Americans became more likely to marry someone outside their local community and parents more likely to pick out nationally common names for their children. Second, access to markets raised tolerance levels, as measured by higher religious diversity and greater variation in family size, as well as mothers’ ages at their first birth. (The logic being that more dispersion should reflect more of a “you do you” attitude.) Third, greater market access came with higher trust towards others, as extracted from language in local newspapers. This measure wasn’t perfect, but reassuringly matched trends in more recent survey data, and fell during wars... Instead, they emphasised a story of rapid cultural adaptation among people who were most engaged with impersonal, anonymous exchanges. The changes in naming practices, for example, were concentrated among migrants working in industries that were more exposed to trade with other parts of the country. For those working in construction and entertainment, the market access had no effect.
4. Paul Blustein questions claims about the dollar's dethronement.
Participants in this market are international banks, securities firms, multinational corporations, insurance companies and pension funds — the biggest private actors in the financial system. Their globe-girdling operations require the movement of immense amounts of money across borders on a constant basis. They use the market to hedge themselves against currency fluctuations by trading a pair of currencies (say, the dollar and Japanese yen) twice, first at the current exchange rate and then swapping back later at an agreed rate. Japanese life insurance companies, for example, invest their portfolios heavily in US Treasuries and other dollar securities. Because they have obligations in yen to their policyholders, they need to protect themselves against movements in the yen-dollar rate and they use swaps to do so. These sorts of transactions occur at such a huge scale that, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements, the amount of outstanding swaps currently stands above $100tn. Some 90 per cent involve the dollar, reflecting the myriad ways it is used. Unwinding all of this activity and subbing in another currency would be staggeringly costly and difficult.
The $12.6 trillion European holdings of US Treasuries confer less leverage to the Europeans than they appear.
Europe’s US government debt holdings don’t translate into usable leverage, because most of them can’t be politically co-ordinated and selling would be self-defeating. The reason is simple. “Europe” may hold a lot of US assets, but that doesn’t mean Europe can control them or deploy them as a co-ordinated political tool. Much of Europe’s exposure actually sits in private portfolios — pension funds, insurers, banks, and asset managers — not in a single public balance sheet that can be mobilised strategically.
But while a deliberate and coordinated weaponisation is difficult, "a slow, decentralised buyers' strike, as investors gradually stop adding to US assets" is a distinct possibility.
5. Singapore's acclaimed public housing model.
More than three-quarters of its citizen and permanent resident population live in 1.1mn government-built flats, bought at subsidised rates... Rising property costs, notably in the resale market, have sparked concern over affordability, while the lottery system for allocating flats, which favours traditional nuclear families, is being tested by changing social norms. Over the longer term, property values are also being eaten away by the 99-year leases on which they are sold. “The main thing that worries me is that . . . as the lease clock ticks down and as the stock ages, housing equity drops to zero,” Gee added...When Singapore introduced national service after gaining independence in 1965, home ownership was also encouraged as an incentive for conscripts to fight for their country. Today, more than 90 per cent of Singaporeans live in an owner-occupied home — among the highest rates in the world. Properties are allocated to would-be buyers via a lottery system to applicants who are typically required to be married, engaged or older than 35. Prices are eased through a raft of government subsidies based on personal circumstances. Singaporeans can also dip into their mandated savings and pension plans and obtain mortgages and loans from the HDB directly. But critics have said that the lottery system is unfair to singles and non-traditional families, for whom it is harder to get a flat. Singapore’s marriage rate has been steadily falling in recent decades, dropping from 57 per 1,000 unmarried males in 1994 to 42 in 2024. The HDB system has also been used by Singapore’s government to promote multicultural integration by setting limits on the proportion of different ethnic groups in the same estate. However, this policy has caused problems for some in the resale market by restricting potential buyers... Construction ground to a halt during the Covid-19 pandemic... Wait times to move into a property rose from three years to as many as six. As a result, more buyers turned to the resale market, where HDB owners can sell properties after five years of occupancy. This led to a sharp rise in resale prices, especially in more desirable estates.
6. FT has a long read on Latin America's rightward turn.
“Crime and violence is clearly the top concern of Latin Americans today,” says Jean-Christophe Salles, Latin America chief executive at pollster Ipsos. “It is the biggest concern in almost every country.” Some 55 per cent of Latin Americans name crime and violence as their prime worry, according to Ipsos data, against just 34 per cent worldwide. In Chile, the figure rises to 62 per cent. Fear of crime propelled arch-conservative José Antonio Kast to a landslide presidential election victory last month in Chile over a Communist opponent, Jeannette Jara. His broader rightwing message had failed in two previous elections, but this time he won by focusing on pledges to erect border fortifications, deport illegal migrants and reduce crime...
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is the inspiration for many rightwing challengers across the region. His extraordinary success in transforming El Salvador from one of Latin America’s most murderous countries to one of its safest — albeit through mass incarceration and authoritarian rule — is firing up anti-establishment conservatives across the region just as it enters a major election cycle... Bukele’s newly built giant prison, the Centre for Confinement of Terrorists (Cecot), which has capacity to hold about 40,000 inmates, many detained indefinitely... Even Costa Rica, a country so peaceful that it decreed the abolition of its army in 1948, has been shaken by record levels of drug-related murders. Ahead of elections on February 1, its outgoing president, Rodrigo Chaves, appeared with Bukele to lay a foundation stone for Costa Rica’s own version of Cecot, a $35mn maximum security jail project with capacity for 5,100 prisoners... In Peru, which is set to go to the polls in April, leading presidential contender and former mayor of Lima Rafael López Aliaga is promising to fight what he calls “urban terrorism” with life sentences for serious crimes... In Mexico and Uruguay, leftwing incumbents are cracking down on violent crime to curry favour with voters.
7. The rising share of debt raising by hyperscalers (companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle) to finance their AI infrastructure rollouts.
9. Ed Luce has this description of the breadth of the Jeffrey Epstein network.
This includes the sitting US president and a previous one, big Wall Street figures, a network of Ivy League luminaries, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, foreign government officials, Democrats, Republicans, a Maga influencer, a far left scholar, British and Norwegian royals, wives and girlfriends of powerful men, government lawyers, heads of law firms, movie directors and endless celebrities. Epstein’s network is an MRI of the establishment. The idea that anyone did not know about Epstein’s conviction as a sex abuser is absurd. Some people spurned his social approaches. Having been invited in 2010 to an Epstein dinner with Woody Allen and then Prince Andrew in New York, the magazine editor, Tina Brown, replied: “What the fuck is this . . .? The paedophile’s ball?” Brown’s reaction should have been everyone’s. So should that of Melinda Gates, the now ex-wife of Bill Gates, who stepped into Epstein’s home once and immediately regretted it. Alas, their reaction was all too rare.
10. Fascinating account of the egregiously one-sided US-Japan trade deal.
Proposed projects are screened for “strategic and legal considerations” by a committee of US and Japanese members, according to a joint MOU and a document prepared by Japanese officials. Projects are then sent to an investment committee headed by US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who chooses which proposals to send to the US president for approval. Donald Trump has the final say on which projects are “deemed to advance economic and national security interests”. Japan and its state-backed bank can delay or refuse to proceed but face potential penalties, including higher tariffs. Funds for approved projects — from JBIC or with guarantees from Japan’s insurance corporation — then flow into an SPV alongside “the provision of land, water, power, energy, offtake agreements, regulatory support, etc” from the US. Free cash generated by projects will be split equally until the Japanese loans are paid back, according to officials. After that, the US will receive 90 per cent. Officials believe Japanese companies outside the project can also make agreements with it separately, with terms negotiated that are different from the US-Japan split of cash flow... The way the agreement with the US is structured also means that if Japan delays or refuses to fund a project recommended by Trump, it could be liable for “catch-up” payments or an increase in tariff rates.
11. Elon Musk may have pulled off the biggest bluff of the century by merging SpaceX with xAI to create the most valuable private company at a combined valuation of $1.25 trillion. xAI, which had revenues in the low hundreds last year and is burning through $1 billion a month, was bought by SpaceX at an eye-popping valuation of $250 billion. Musk says that the move was needed to launch data centres into space, build factories on the moon and colonise Mars. Musk controls both the private companies, whose combined valuation has increased by over $1 trillion in 18 months. To pay for the deal, SpaceX will issue $250 bn in new shares, thereby diluting the existing shareholders.
This from the comments section sums up the deal
You set your own price for a company you own, sell it to another you own and, miraculously you can then leverage the hell out of it.
South-east Asia’s second-largest economy has been stuck at about 2 per cent growth for the past five years, with its pivotal drivers of consumption, manufacturing and tourism all in decline... Making matters worse are prolonged political instability and frequent changes in leadership. The royalist-military establishment has been locked in a stand-off with reformist parties that have won the past two elections but have been blocked from power. Thailand has had three prime ministers in as many years... Signs of economic malaise are increasing. Banks worried about defaults are lending less, the property market is in its worst slump in three decades and headline inflation turned negative last year, signalling weak demand. Thailand’s stock market has been the worst performer in Asia over the past 12 months, declining 10 per cent in 2025 in local currency terms. The government has projected 2 per cent growth this year, but the IMF has forecast just 1.6 per cent, the slowest among major south-east Asian economies...
Manufacturing has been on the decline for years, weighed down by weak domestic demand, an influx of cheaper Chinese goods and intense competition from newer manufacturing hubs such as Vietnam. That has also taken a toll on Thailand’s once mighty auto sector. The country was a regional hub for car manufacturing but Nissan, Honda, Suzuki and others have shut down factories or scaled back production in recent years... Household debt-to-GDP is close to 90 per cent, among the highest levels in Asia, as wages have remained stagnant. And Thailand’s population has been shrinking for four years, with the birth rate hitting a 75-year low in 2025... Tourism, another economic engine, is sputtering and this has had a knock-on effect on retail, agriculture and hotel construction... Thailand recorded 32.9mn foreign visitors in 2025, a 7 per cent fall from the previous year and still below the pre-pandemic peak of 40mn tourists in 2019.
13. US federal debt is at pre-war highs.
14. With the purge of General Zhang Youxia and Gen Liu Zhenli, Xi Jinping has removed all the six members of the Central Military Commission (apart from himself), 35 out the 43 generals in leadership positions of the PLA.
While the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs recommends 40-60 buses per 100,000 people, India’s cities together have only about 47,650 buses, nearly 61 per cent of which are concentrated in just nine mega cities.
16. Primer on Project Vault, the $12 bn US program to procure and develop a reserve of critical minerals for civilian and other purposes through a public-private partnership involving the US federal government and US companies.
Project Vault is a public-private partnership that will buy and store critical minerals and rare earth elements. These include gallium and cobalt, which are essential for modern technology and defence equipment. It will combine $1.67 billion in private seed funding with another $10 billion from the US government’s Export-Import Bank... Companies will make an initial commitment to buy materials later at a fixed inventory price. They will also pay some upfront fees. Based on these commitments, companies can give Project Vault a list of the materials they need. The project will then purchase and store those materials. Manufacturers will pay a carrying cost that covers loan interest and storage expenses.
16. Mihir Sharma has an excellent op-ed that raises the questions about the emerging international order arising from the US National Security Strategy released in December and the more recent National Defence Strategy. Both are anchored around an America First approach that narrowly defines its interests in terms of drug trade, energy security, immigration, etc.
The rest of the world matters only as a market or as a source of certain raw materials that are not specifically available in the US. This is not a status-quoist view of the world, nor is it radical or aggressive. It is essentially defensive. US interests are defined far more narrowly than earlier, and are more localised. But they will be as aggressively and unilaterally defended as ever, perhaps more.
I'll blog on this in due course.
17. Some staggering numbers in the Big Tech capex plans announced this week, along with their quarterly earnings which have spooked the markets.
Big Tech stocks sold off heavily after unveiling plans to spend $660bn this year on AI, as investors fret that the “breathtaking” capital expenditures are outpacing the earnings potential of the new technology. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are set to lose a combined $900bn in market value since filing their quarterly earnings over the past week... Along with social media giant Meta, their proposed outlay on data centres and specialised chips needed to train and run advanced AI models would mark a 60 per cent rise from the $410bn they spent in 2025 and a 165 per cent increase from $245bn in 2024... Even a 14 per cent boost to their combined annual revenue to $1.6tn was not enough to overcome the pessimism.
18. Big infrastructure deal in the UK, as Canadian pension fund majors CPPIB and Omers announced sale of their 34% and 33% stakes in Associated British Ports (ABP) in a deal estimated to value the UK's biggest port operator, owning 21 ports in the UK, at more than £10bn. ABP was taken private in 2006 by a group of investors including Goldman Sachs' infrastructure arm and Omers, for £2.8bn. Ownership has chaged over the years, with CPPIB taking stake in 2015, along with others like Singapore's GIC and Kuwait Investment Authority's Wren House Infrastructure. CPPIB manages C$777.5bn ($568bn) of assets and Omers manages C$141bn of assets.
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