1. Jesse Norman has this brilliant oped on the lessons from Francis Bacon for the Age of AI.
Bacon articulated a new attitude to nature. As he famously wrote: “Knowledge itself is power.” Nature was not to be revered but interrogated, understood and ultimately controlled... Bacon’s further insight was that the production of knowledge itself could be organised. In The Advancement of Learning, he advocated the creation of specialist colleges of research to gather intellectual and practical knowledge. In New Atlantis, written a few years before his death, he imagined a research institution devoted to collective scientific discovery, anticipating a world in which knowledge is systematically mobilised for practical ends...AI, in particular, is the industrialisation of Baconian induction: the extraction of patterns from vast bodies of data in order to generate prediction and control. It is, in a sense, the logical culmination of his method... AI extends our capacity to act without necessarily deepening our understanding. It risks separating power from judgment in ways Bacon himself would have recognised as dangerous... Bacon’s project demands continued scientific and technological ambition. But it also insists on discipline, humility and vigilance against error as correctives to human hubris. In New Atlantis, Bacon imagines a new kind of advanced research institution that he names Salomon’s House. Its members decide which discoveries to publish or withhold, believing that knowledge itself must be governed, not simply unleashed. It is a strikingly prescient image. Today’s AI laboratories face precisely this dilemma: how to manage the release of systems whose power is advancing faster than our ability to understand or control them.
2. Martin Wolf has a brilliant account of Viktor Orban's 16 year rule of Hungary.
3. Janan Ganesh on the Madman Theory of international relations, where leaders make extreme threats to bring opponents to the table.
4. Ruchir Sharma argues that the big difference between today and earlier oil shocks is that debt-laded governments are acutely short of policy ammunition to counter the shocks.
In the 1970s, the typical deficit in the US and other major countries was around 2 per cent of GDP. Today, the average deficit has more than doubled; as a result the average government debt level for the G7 countries has risen from 20 per cent of GDP to more than 100 per cent... Last year, driven by government borrowing, total global debt levels rose at the fastest pace since the pandemic surge, to a record $348tn, which is more than three times global GDP. That leaves very few governments in a position to roll out new stimulus. Central banks are in a similar bind. In recent decades they have worked alongside governments to extend stimulus at the first sign of trouble, but they can’t do so easily now. The US Federal Reserve has missed its 2 per cent inflation target every month for 60 months in a row. Lately, three of every four central banks in developed countries and one of two in emerging countries have been missing their targets, too. Even if the oil shock slows economies, central banks may not be able to act as the shock also pushes inflation upward. The most vulnerable nations are those with the highest government debt and deficits, and with a central bank missing its inflation target; in the developed world they include most prominently the US and the UK; in the emerging world, the most at risk are led by Brazil, Egypt and Indonesia.
5. John Burn-Murdoch points to an important difference between social media and AI, the former divides opinion whereas the latter may be converging opinions.
Social media companies make money from attention, which in practice means rewarding sensationalism and inflammatory content with little regard for truth... In contrast, as British philosopher Dan Williams argues, AI companies are competing to serve customers who are paying for accurate, objective and, well, intelligent, tools that deliver factual information, often for business-critical purposes... In Williams’s parlance, this makes them fundamentally “technocratising”, exerting the opposite force to social media’s radically democratising influence. American writer Dylan Matthews makes a similar case, arguing that where social media’s inherent mechanisms push towards personalisation and fragmentation, LLMs are innately “converging” — their underlying dynamics push them towards objective reality... Last year I used detailed data on the ideological positions of people who post on social media to show that they over-represent the radical right and left, confirming the polarisation hypothesis. Over the past week I have used the same dataset of tens of thousands of responses to questions on policy preferences and sociopolitical beliefs to test whether and how the most widely used AI chatbots shape conversations about politics and society. The results strongly support the theory of AI chatbots as depolarising and technocratising.
While different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances.
For the first time since the pandemic, individual investors were net sellers in the secondary market in the first 11 months of the financial year that ended in March... Much of the 19 per cent annualised, three-year return on the Nifty Smallcap 100 Index came from bumper performance in 2023 and early 2024. That will soon vanish. If the benchmark stalls at current levels, the new three-year return in March 2027 will be just 1.3 per cent... Last year, more than 60 per cent of the IPO fundraising in India ended up giving exits to firms’ original sponsors. The money didn’t create fresh assets. In fact, a lot of it may have left the country. Overall, overseas investors have sold $22 billion of Indian equities over the past year.
And this.
Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) executed an unprecedented sell-off in Indian equities during March 2026, marking one of the largest monthly capital outflows in recent history,” said Pabitro Mukherjee of Bajaj Broking. The total withdrawal was almost $12bn, he said, “reflecting a sharp shift in global investor sentiment towards a ‘risk-off’ approach”.
And rupee's crawling peg.
7. The rise and rise of private capital, touching $22 trillion in assets with $2 trillion in private credit.
Over the past two decades, private loans such as those made by the Blackstone debt fund and many others have helped finance a record frenzy in private equity takeovers struck at ever higher valuations, with annualised returns of nearly 10 per cent since 2004. Large and midsized banks have been happy to lubricate the activity by offering additional financing. Insurance companies, increasingly owned by private capital giants themselves after a wave of takeovers, have also entered the market, putting portfolios intended to provide safe income to retirees into opaque private assets. Taken together, private capital, once little more than a cottage industry, has grown into a giant part of the financial system, holding $22tn in assets, largely outside the purview of banking regulators... the “retailisation” of private capital continues, following Donald Trump’s decision to allow 401(k) retirement savings accounts to invest in such assets...
Moody’s has estimated that banks have lent $300bn to the private credit industry and another $285bn to private equity funds as of June 2025. The US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research reckons lending to private credit funds by banks and other lenders could now be as high as $540bn, while noting that the data showed “leverage risk overall appears limited”.
This is a sobering note on private equity.
Private capital’s difficulties with exiting investments have caused industry-wide returns to plummet since central banks started raising interest rates in 2021... Fundraising for private equity deals has now declined by about half from the 2021 peak... Roughly a quarter of private equity funds raised since 2015 have failed to earn the rate of return at which firms earn performance fees, according to the hedge fund Davidson Kempner.The problems are partly structural. Private equity groups have often used a standard template to consolidate assets as diverse as car washes, veterinary clinics and insurance brokerages, often using a single company to accumulate such acquisitions. Such businesses have proved too complex to sell to regular corporate buyers. The underlying financial health of private equity-owned companies has also been pummelled by higher rates and geopolitical turmoil. Over 10 per cent of such groups have chosen to increase their debt rather than making their interest payments in cash. The industry’s outsized exposure to software deals threatened by Al has already added to the malaise.
8. Batteries provided 12.3 GW of California electricity, a record 42.8% of demand on March 29.
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