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In 2024 US health spending came in nearly $1tn below the 2010 projections. The announced explosion never happened, yet cuts are still made in its name: the cost of a narrative never updated.
Bought to flee US concentration, the emerging markets index has become a bet on TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix, nearly 30% between them. The promised diversification carries the same risk: AI.
Amid an announced nuclear revival, the world's top uranium producer restrains its 2026 output by about 10%, for lack of long-term contracts. OPEC-style supply discipline reaches the fuel: whoever holds the mine sets the pace.
AI's bottleneck is no longer the chip but the grid connection. Cryptocurrency mining already holds the socket: you buy the farm for its hook-up, not its machines.
193 billion euros of Russian assets are frozen at Euroclear, yet the EU would rather borrow 90 billion than seize them. Freezing is not confiscating: the true price of the trust that underpins a reserve currency.
In Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, the guaranteed cocoa price was meant to shield farmers from volatility. By betting on the 2024 record prices, it became a losing bet: prices collapsed, unsold beans, arrears, then a brutal correction.
For the first time since the dot-com bust, bonds yield almost as much as stocks: the equity risk premium has collapsed toward zero. Yet equity inflows keep breaking records. Anatomy of a paradox.
A group had a language model write the malware launched against power grids. The cost, skill and time to attack are collapsing: the offense-defense asymmetry widens, and attribution blurs.
Internal documents show the plastics industry promoted recycling for fifty years while knowing it did not work. A virtuous gesture turned alibi: externality, responsibility shift from producer to consumer.
A bank turns deposits into loans; a stablecoin does not lend. Sold as a payment innovation, it pulls money out of the credit circuit and threatens up to $1.5 trillion in loans: disintermediation, deposit transformation.
Cloning a voice now takes only three to five seconds. What collapses is not a password but the trust we place in our senses: signaling theory, the liar's dividend, and the reversal where we must prove to machines that we are human.
Appointed to the Federal Reserve to cut rates, a governor chooses to hold the line against 4.2% inflation. Independence is only worth something the day it disappoints the one who appointed it: time inconsistency, the conservative central banker, fiscal dominance.
Every budget promises debt that comes down "next year." But interest that compounds (r > g), austerity that kills growth and distrust that raises rates undo the effort: the virtuous path contradicts itself.
At Hormuz, with no physical blockade, the surge in war-risk insurance premiums after the February 2026 strikes was enough to scare ships away. Insurance as a tool of irregular warfare, and a risk sensor.
Since Russia's reserves were frozen in 2022, gold — the asset 'without a counterparty' that no state can freeze — has overtaken Treasuries in global reserves. But it yields nothing: a dilemma.
A giant deposit can ruin a country by inflating its currency and corrupting its institutions: 'Dutch disease' and the 'resource curse', of which Guyana is today the laboratory.
Antimony, an obscure and cheap metal, governs the making of Western munitions. A single country dominates its refining and has just turned it into a weapon: anatomy of a chokepoint.
The carbon border adjustment (CBAM) makes imports pay the EU carbon price to prevent 'carbon leakage'. By its form, it is a customs duty that weighs above all on developing countries.
The 'liar's dividend': as everyone learns that anything can be faked, merely asserting 'it's a fake' can discredit authentic evidence. Doubting is free; proving authenticity costs dear.
The 'term premium', the extra yield demanded to lend long to a state, is reappearing after a decade erased by central banks. Fiscal discipline shifts from the central bank to the market.
Taiwan's 'silicon shield' rests on concentrating advanced chips on the island. By offshoring to reassure Washington, TSMC erodes the very leverage that made the island indispensable.
Private credit looks calmer than listed markets because its loans never trade: its value is not observed but estimated by the lender. Anatomy of a calm manufactured by opacity.
The money-fund 'wall of cash' cannot pour into equities: in aggregate, for every buyer there is a seller, and money changes hands without ever 'entering' the market.
A handful of index managers own nearly every competitor in a sector. With no cartel and no merger, they rebuild the effect of a 19th-century trust: the invisible trust.
"Harvest Now, Decrypt Later": encrypted secrets are already being stored to be cracked once quantum computers exist. And the same data hoard opens two futures, comfort or surveillance.
By holding rates below inflation, an indebted state lightens its debt at the expense of cautious savings. A tour of the invisible wealth vacuums: inflation tax, financial repression, fiscal drag.
Inflation slows, but prices do not come back: only a deflation, much feared, would push them down. Between opportunism and honesty, who profits from the rise.
The more efficient and cheaper AI becomes, the more its use explodes, and the more it consumes. The Jevons paradox strikes the defining technology of our age.
S&P 500 companies thinned out their shares at a record pace. Earnings per share rise, yet profit has not moved: the anatomy of manufactured scarcity.
Since 2022, the South pays its creditors more than it receives. Debt service crowds out health and education: a debt of aid turned into servitude.
Commerce is sliding from one price to a price per person, computed from your data. Born in airline tickets: legal discrimination, or abuse of weakness?
The world is rearming on credit, and a second market is born from the ruins: rebuilding. Behind the moral postures lie contracts over who gets to destroy, then rebuild.
By protecting its scarcity with endless price hikes, luxury pushed away the very buyers who gave it volume. It is sold for the rich, but kept alive by those who claim to be.
Millions of households locked in a near-free rate. That individual privilege became a collective trap: it freezes the market, holds up prices and disarms monetary policy.
As SpaceX becomes the largest IPO in history, low Earth orbit turns out to have a de facto owner. A commons taken not by conquest, but by occupation.
Buy-now-pay-later is the fastest-growing credit. But its danger is not its size : it is its invisibility. A phantom debt that blinds risk models and blurs the measure of household leverage.
Buying the index meant owning the whole market. But when seven stocks weigh a third of it, the supposedly prudent investment becomes a tight bet on a handful of AI giants. Anatomy of a record concentration.
Insurers are pulling out of entire regions. But the risk they abandon does not vanish: it migrates from the insurer to the financial markets, then to the taxpayer. Who holds it in the end?
Vital to electrification and AI, copper is sliding into shortage. A decade of underinvestment dug the fault line; China, which refines over half of it, now wields it as a lever.
Japan's long-dormant bond market has become a systemic fault line: when its yields rise, the cheap funding that fed the world withdraws.
Nvidia, Apollo and xAI: the investor who foresaw the subprime crisis warns about a structure that shifts credit risk onto retirement savings.
Why 1.4 billion Chinese consumers are forced to save rather than spend, and what this imbalance means for global markets.
Automating work boosts margins but dries up the incomes that sustain consumption: the contradiction at the heart of algorithmic capitalism.
How generative AI removes technical barriers and redefines who can build decentralized financial tools.
Trade tensions, great-power rivalries and energy transitions are redrawing the global economic landscape.
Decoding the global geopolitical shift and what it means for French growth in the decade ahead.
Why the ETF revolution broke Bitcoin's historical cycles and is reshaping the structure of the crypto market.