Why the rise in global bond yields is a supply problem — and the single trade it puts at risk

A video published three years ago on YouTube can still be earning money today. Nobody had to make it again. No customer had to be reacquired. The production cost was paid years ago, but the cash flow continues. That makes old video libraries look a lot like annuities and financial buyers are starting to take notice.

A new generation of AI-powered brokerage tools promise to hand individual investors the automated trading capabilities once reserved for elite hedge funds, but the evidence tells a far more mixed story.

Smart glasses are being presented as the next smartphone. Yet their success may depend less on their technological capabilities than on the trust they manage to inspire.

When the world's largest asset manager predicts a futures market for computing power and an exchange launches one within a week, the signal seems clear: compute has become the AI era's scarce commodity. Yet the same industry straining against that shortage is engineering its way out of it, targeting cost reductions of up to two orders of magnitude.

Two things are true in 2026: innovation is advancing at an unprecedented pace, and the cost of deploying new technologies is falling rapidly.

Anyone who has hit the usage limit on an AI subscription knows the problem: intelligence may be digital, but it is not free. At enterprise scale, that limit becomes a question of profitability. If agents consume more tokens than expected, the cost of automation can quickly start to look less attractive than the human labour it was supposed to replace.

Europe built its economy on the assumption of mild summers. In a hotter climate, cooling becomes a productivity tool, a workplace safety requirement, and a new layer of building infrastructure.

Time for a break or a brake?

Alan Greenspan, who presided over the Federal Reserve for more than eighteen years and came to embody the very idea of central banking, died 22 June at his home in Washington at the age of 100. He leaves behind the legacy of a man celebrated as the “Maestro” of the global economy, before the crises that followed made his record more controversial.