1. The solutions proposed by Andy Haldane to address housing supply in the UK is universally valid.
Public land developed for public purpose but privately operated; co-financing by municipal bonds and private capital; a bespoke planning regime; and a transformative method of new construction — these are the base elements needed to ease the constraints suffocating the UK’s housing market and to tackle the housing crisis in every postcode.
2. Talk about a company mobilising debt for others to buy its products, and look no further than Nvidia.
The world’s largest financial groups are working with Nvidia to assemble a funding package of more than $500bn for AI infrastructure development, in one of Wall Street’s most ambitious lending efforts to date. A consortium of groups including Apollo Global, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR is entering a partnership with Nvidia to invest in the AI build-out... Nvidia said on Monday afternoon that it has signed memorandums of understanding with the six Wall Street firms to “mobilise over $500bn of third-party capital for the build-out of AI infrastructure over time”. Under the deal, which is still subject to final agreement, the firms will create dedicated pools of capital to finance Nvidia’s AI ambitions “at attractive rates for Nvidia customers”... Morgan Stanley projects so-called hyperscalers will spend $3.5tn between 2026 and 2028.
3. India manufacturing output trends.
Weeks into the latest conflict, defence minister Israel Katz invoked a different approach, one used with devastating consequences after Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack: the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun model”, a reference to Israel’s wholesale levelling of cities in Gaza. “All homes in Lebanese villages near the border will be destroyed,” Katz said. By July, Katz claimed his threat had been carried out. “Twenty-four Lebanese villages, hundreds of years old, we destroyed all the buildings,” he said, boasting that up to 20,000 homes had been demolished. “Not house by house, but entire villages.”...Israeli evacuation orders forcibly displaced some 1.2mn people in the war’s first 10 days, the vast majority from Hizbollah-dominated southern Lebanon, as Israeli forces advanced. Fighting raged for weeks, but most of the destruction documented by the FT and Lighthouse came after an initial Israel-Lebanon ceasefire on April 17. While the truce did not hold and some clashes have continued even past the latest ceasefire in June, Israeli forces — who had already established control over many emptied villages — continued to lay waste to the south through air strikes, controlled detonations, bulldozers and the use of white phosphorus. Israel’s occupation is now deeply entrenched, the area under its control demarcated by what it calls “the yellow line”. The zone covers about 6 per cent of Lebanese territory and stretches roughly 10km inland from the two countries’ informal border...Israel has also done extensive damage to historic monuments and Unesco-listed sites, including 16th-century mosques, 19th-century libraries, religious shrines, ancient Roman ruins and Crusader castles. “It is an attempt to make the areas unrecognisable . . . to sever people’s connection to their land and their history,” said Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly of Biladi, an organisation dedicated to preserving Lebanon’s cultural heritage. “How can they rebuild their communities if everything is gone?”... Lebanon’s environment ministry and rights groups have documented Israel’s widespread use of white phosphorus — an incendiary chemical that triggers fires and can leave contamination in soil and water — in both populated and agricultural areas. Israel says it uses white phosphorus lawfully to clear brush and create smokescreens, but use over populated areas can violate international law.
5. Janan Ganesh is on to something.
If a politician could decouple socialism from the set of cultural ideas known as “woke”, he or she would be difficult to stop... The one place that might have produced a culturally conservative or at least culturally neutral socialism is continental Europe, but even the French left has absorbed American woke jargon, perhaps recognising in it the authorial stamp of Michel Foucault. And so capitalism glides on, never quite facing what would be its sternest political test. The question is why the left allows it to happen... Woke has been such a godsend for capitalism — making its enemies look ridiculous — that it can seem almost engineered for that purpose.
6. Purchase commitments of the hyperscalers jumped from a trillion dollars to 1.5 trillion from Q1 to Q2 of 2026. These are debt in another form.
7. Guy Chazan describes elite capture of the political system in the US.
In America’s Gilded Age, millionaire robber barons operated from the shadows, bribing pliant lawmakers to do their bidding. Under President Donald Trump, billionaires have gone one better. Some are in his cabinet... No longer content to lobby from afar, ultra-rich tycoons — especially from Silicon Valley — have infiltrated the capital’s ecosystem, taking on advisory roles in government, cultivating ties on Capitol Hill and weighing in on the most important issues of the day, from AI to industrial policy. They attend glitzy dinners, donate millions to White House fundraising projects and are photographed with Trump promising eye-popping investments in the US. Many have enjoyed regulatory relief, policies that benefit their businesses and, in some cases, lucrative government contracts worth billions of dollars. But unlike the robber barons of the past, who were often charitably minded and gave generously to public institutions, the tech billionaires of the present show a “complete indifference” to any kind of “social contract” and any need to “compensate people for the disruption they have brought into their lives”, says Quinn Slobodian, a historian of capitalism at Boston University...
If there was a trigger for the growing influence of the ultra-rich in America’s political system, it was the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which held that independent political spending on elections by business was protected by the First Amendment. The judgment opened the floodgates to big money in politics. America’s rich had spent $31mn in the 2010 elections, according to liberal advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). In the 2024 election cycle, the 100 largest billionaire donor families gave $2.6bn. A huge proportion of that came from just a handful of individuals. Three billionaires — Elon Musk, Miriam Adelson and Timothy Mellon — accounted for more than a third of the roughly $1.5bn spent to elect Trump.
8. C Thi Nguyen has a brilliant essay on the value of doing something for its own sake or as labour of love (play, as he describes it), and doing something as part of a requirement (work, as he describes it). He channels Aristotle (through Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper) to describe it as the core of a meaningful life.
For Suits, play is not just a side dish for the main meal of work. Play is at the core of a meaningful life. Underneath the hood, Suits’ argument is Aristotle to its bones. For Aristotle, a good life — a truly meaningful life — lay not in the creation or accumulation of stuff or the achievement of outcomes, but in the process of doing itself, in the rich exercise of our full human capacities. Suits found the deepest illumination of Aristotle’s point in the simplest human activity: playing games. Suits provides, and defends, his definition. To play a game, he says, is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the struggle to overcome them. To play a game, therefore, is to be inefficient on purpose. When you run a marathon, you are trying to get to a particular spot in space, but you avoid the most efficient ways to get there. You do not take a subway or a taxi or a bicycle. You force yourself to run, and you try to run as quickly as possible. Which means, for Suits, that the struggle must be an essential part of the true value. What you care about can’t just be the bare outcome by itself. You can’t just care about being at that spot in space. Otherwise you’d just take the most efficient path. But if you took the subway then it doesn’t count — not for the game of marathon-running, anyway...To understand games, distinguish between two things: the goal of a game and your purpose for playing it. The goal is what you pursue inside the game; the purpose is why you played it... For some people, the goal and purpose are one. They want to win, period. Call those people achievement players. The Olympic runner wants to win the marathon by running it — but they do truly care about winning it. But for other people, goal and purpose come apart. We try to win because we are interested in the struggle, and it is the struggle itself that we truly care about. Call us striving players. It’s all right if we try and we lose, if the attempt was beautiful. In ordinary, practical life, we take the means for the sake of the ends. In striving play, we take the ends for the sake of the means. What is the point of life? Is it to make stuff? Or is it to take difficult actions, think rich thoughts, weigh subtle decisions? Is it having a pile of stuff — or does the stuff just support our quest for interesting action?... Suits argues... that play itself is the point, and that we work in order to survive so that we might play...Rephrase Suits’ definition this way: play is wasting resources for fun. But also: the whole point is that, deep down, it’s not a waste. A truly wasted life would be one spent working hard, stockpiling goods like the ant and never using them to support joyous play. And to truly waste humanity would be to push people so hard to work productively, to make more stuff, to the point where nobody had time to play. Let me try my own fusion of these two definitions. “Work” isn’t distinguished from “play” by difficulty, suffering or practicality. You can make pottery, knit scarves or grow a garden as play. The true difference between work and play is the reason you have, and the control you have, over what it is you’re doing and why. Here’s my suggestion: to “work” is to perform activities to create outcomes that are set by something external. When you work, you are making what the world tells you to make. Maybe you’re gathering food, because biology tells you you have to eat. Maybe you’re earning money, because the world says you need money to buy food and shelter and medicine. Maybe you’re making products, because the world wants something specific from you — planks of wood, a ride to the airport. But “play” is different. You still have goals and struggles, but your goals are up to you.
9. Two important graphics on the Chinese economy. One, the great job squeeze resulting in the rise of the gig economy, whose workforce has increased by 10 million in just two years.
Second, the persistence of negative household sentiment for the fifth successive year.
10. Andrew Puzder, the US ambassador to the EU, draws attention to the substantive equivalence between US tariffs (50% tariffs on primary steel) and the EU's CBAM on their respective steel and aluminium imports.
Protesting against US national security measures while erecting protectionist barriers reveals a striking double standard... The US approach is direct and transparent. Primary steel faces a 50 per cent tariff (with some rates recently increased), and aluminium a comparable duty. To stop circumvention through finished goods, the tariffs extend to derivatives... CBAM differs in form but not in substance. Importers of iron, steel, aluminium and related products must report embedded emissions and relinquish a corresponding number of CBAM certificates priced at the EU’s carbon price — currently around €80 per tonne of CO₂... At root, both policies are adjustments to protect domestic producers from unfair competition, whether from lax environmental rules or subsidised excess capacity. US Section 232 tariffs address foreign overcapacity that threatens to hollow out its metals sector; CBAM is designed to combat carbon leakage, when production shifts to jurisdictions with less stringent climate standards... In both cases, the measures raise the cost of imports to safeguard local production. The parallels are unmistakable. A shipment of steel-containing machinery faces extra US duties based on metal content. In the EU, the same goods face fees based on production emissions under CBAM. One is framed as security policy; the other as climate policy. Both increase the price of targeted imports relative to domestic options.
11. The US equity market today in perspective.
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