The Ratings Oligopoly: How Three Firms Hold a Veto Over Sovereign Borrowing
When a government wants to borrow, it must first submit to a private judgment. Before a finance ministry can place a bond, before a pension fund or a…
Intelligence Briefings
Category: Reports
The Aviation Bottleneck: How Engine Shortages Are Stalling the Global Economy
On 9 December 2025, the International Air Transport Association told its 350 member airlines that supply-chain dysfunction had cost the sector $11 billion in the calendar year. The…
The Index Fund Empire: How Passive Investing Concentrated Corporate Power
The democratisation of investing produced one of the most concentrated structures of corporate power in modern capitalism. The index fund was sold, accurately, as a tool of dispersal:…
The Carbon Schism: How CBAM Is Splitting the Global Industrial Order
On 7 April 2026, the European Commission published the first official Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism reference price: €75.36 per tonne of carbon dioxide. The number, set as a…
The Sanctions Paradox: Why Coercion Reshapes Trade More Than Behaviour
Economic sanctions are the preferred coercive instrument of the modern Western state precisely because they sit between the diplomatic note and the cruise missile: cheaper than war, more…
The Tokenisation of the Treasury Market: A Capital-Markets Revolution Hiding in Plain Sight
On 29 April 2026, the aggregate value of tokenised US Treasury products crossed 15.07 billion dollars. Eighteen months earlier the same figure was a rounding error in the…
The Patient Capital Problem: Why Some Countries Can Build for Decades
Capital has a clock, and the speed at which it runs is one of the least examined determinants of national power. Two economies can hold roughly equivalent savings,…
The Argentine Reset: Milei’s Two-Year Experiment and the Politics of Disinflation
On 11 April 2025 the IMF Executive Board approved a forty-eight-month Extended Fund Facility for Argentina worth USD 20 billion, equivalent to 479 percent of quota, with USD…
The Middle-Income Trap: Why So Few Nations Make the Leap from Poor to Rich
The most consequential economic fact of the modern era is not that some poor countries got rich, but that so few of them did. Escaping absolute poverty turns…
The Standard Setters: How Obscure Technical Committees Govern the Global Economy
Power in the modern economy is most effective when it is least visible. The treaties that reshape commerce are signed with fanfare and contested in legislatures; the documents…