Weekly Reading List

This week's reading list is about labels that have quietly stopped describing the thing they name. American companies posted 57 per cent aggregate earnings growth last quarter, which sounds splendid until you notice that more than half of them reported earnings going...

This week's reading list is about lag, which is to say the inconvenient gap between an event and its consequences. Anthropic has done the arithmetic and found that robots are currently cheaper than people for 0.3 per cent of job tasks, and that on present trends ten...

This week's reading list is about crowding, and how seldom anyone actually decides to join a crowd. Wall Street's largest firms have ended up at the same few tables funding the same buildout, not because they agree but because the career cost of being the one who...

This week's reading list is about the difference between a law of nature and a decision that has been left alone long enough to look like one. Global imbalances are debated at G7 and G20 level as though they were weather, when they are simply every country's domestic...

This week's reading list is about the gap between a shock and its consequence. Long bond yields are up sharply across six major markets, but the most careful reading available says this is less a verdict on American institutions than the price of clearing a global...

This week's reading list is about costs that turn up in a different account from the one you were watching. The safest asset in the world may be where the next crisis starts, because the country that has always stabilised the system may no longer be willing to. A war...

This week's reading list is about arrangements we have mistaken for laws of nature. The tax treatment that makes debt cheaper than equity was a wartime improvisation, not a conclusion reached in a finance faculty, and a century of corporate capital structure has been...

This week's reading list is about the distance between a number and the thing that number is supposed to describe. Markets have spent August being reminded that a statutory loss is not a cash outflow, that a record profit can be a price outcome rather than an...

This week's list is not about markets. It is about the gap between the explanation you are handed and the machinery that is actually running underneath it. Most of us handle that gap badly, because the offered explanation is almost always tidier, and tidy feels true....

This week’s reading list steps away from markets and looks instead at some of the ideas shaping how we work, build, consume and think. We explore why the traditional route into a career may no longer be the most effective one, how entire ecosystems of manufacturing...