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,…
Intelligence Briefings
Reports
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…
The Memory Wall: How HBM Shortages Will Define the AI Hierarchy in 2027
On 21 January 2026, Micron’s chief business officer told investors the company was “sold out” of high-bandwidth memory for the entire 2026 calendar year, with the bulk of…
The Offshore Architecture: Why Tax Havens Can’t Be Removed Without Breaking Global Finance
There is a comfortable story about tax havens in which they are a moral aberration: sun-drenched islands where the rich hide money from honest tax collectors, and where…
The Patent Cliff: $250bn at Stake and the Bidding War Behind the Curtain
On 1 January 2026, Medicare’s negotiated price for Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer’s anticoagulant Eliquis fell to $231 a month, down from a $521 list price, a 56%…
The Reinsurance Backstop: How a Handful of Firms Quietly Underwrite the World
When a hurricane flattens a stretch of the Gulf Coast or an earthquake levels a city block, the homeowner files a claim with a primary insurer whose name…
The Plumbing: How Money-Market Brittleness Returned in 2026
On 31 December 2024, U.S. banks borrowed a record $74.6 billion through the Federal Reserve’s Standing Repo Facility, eclipsing the prior $50.35 billion intraday print from 31 October.…
The Sahel After France: How Russia Bought the Coup Belt with a Mercenary Tariff
On 22 December 2023, the last French military aircraft lifted from Air Base 101 in Niamey, completing a withdrawal that had begun, in formal terms, with Operation Barkhane’s…
The Drone Inversion: How Ukraine’s Unmanned Industry Rewrote the War
Just over a year ago, in these pages, we examined a war that appeared to be decided by donated hardware. Our April 2025 analysis weighed the Gepard against…
The Era of the Trillion-Dollar Startup
On Thursday, May 28, Anthropic announced a Series H funding round that raised $65 billion at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. The figure sits a rounding error…