Reading Notes 29: Vibe Shift at the Founders Forum
With screenshots from Michael Haneke's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance(1994)
“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”
Read: N+1
In Turkey, Grok has been banned for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his late mother.
Read: Financial Times
the vibe shift this year was enough to give some Founders Forum attendees whiplash. Many of those tramping around the manicured fields seemed “giddy” with excitement about drones, said one wide-eyed Euro tech veteran. “Defence tech is the new crypto,” quipped another investor, with a queasy smile.
Read: Financial Times
再见 Tesla
Until recently, the main advantage Chinese EV manufacturers had over Tesla was that their products were significantly cheaper. But in February, BYD’s founder Wang Chuanfu stood on stage in Shenzhen and unveiled “God’s Eye”, an advanced driver-assistance system that is a precursor to fully autonomous vehicles. A month later, Lian, who now heads BYD’s automotive engineering research institute, was on stage with Wang to announce a new battery charging system capable of adding a driving range of about 470km in five minutes — a fraction of the time it would take a Tesla to charge to that level.
Read: Financial Times
China doubles down on global development
Chinese construction contracts and investments in BRI members totalled $124bn over 176 deals in the first six months of the year, greater than the total of $122bn for the whole of 2024, according to a study by Australia’s Griffith University and the Green Finance & Development Center in Beijing. “The surge in Chinese engagement this year is surprising, even against the backdrop of steadily growing BRI activity since Covid,” said Christoph Nedopil Wang, the study’s author. “What sets 2025 apart is the scale: multiple megadeals each exceeding $10bn.”
Read: Financial Times
Securing a future in the Chinese market
“Export controls as a pillar of national security and as a regime for global exchange are here.” The approval to resume shipments is a significant win for Nvidia and comes after an intense lobbying campaign by Huang in Washington, during which he warned that the US risked ceding its leadership in artificial intelligence to Chinese companies, such as Huawei, if American companies could no longer ship hardware to the country.
Stacy Rasgon, senior analyst at Bernstein covering the US chip industry, said the pivot by the White House would allow “Nvidia to compete in China” and “preserve their ecosystem advantages”. He noted that the policy reversal would boost the chipmaker’s profitability through to next year. “Jensen has been carefully cultivating Trump and members of the administration, as well as clearly laying out the risks of maintaining the ban,” he added.
Read: Financial Times
Plutocrats of the Populist Right
Brandon Lutnick, son of US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, is nearing a roughly $4bn deal with an early bitcoin supporter to buy billions of dollars in the digital tokens using a vehicle backed by Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Equity Partners 1, a blank cheque vehicle that raised $200mn in cash in an initial public offering in January, is in late-stage talks with Adam Back, founder of crypto trading group Blockstream Capital, to buy more than $3bn in the digital currency, according to two people briefed on the talks.
The deal, which mirrors a $3.6bn crypto buying venture Brandon Lutnick struck with SoftBank and Tether in April, would advance Cantor Fitzgerald’s strategy of using publicly listed shell companies to buy bitcoin as it aims to take advantage of a surge in digital currency prices amid US President Donald Trump’s deregulatory push. Howard Lutnick handed control of Cantor Fitzgerald to his children in May.
Read: Financial Times
Tiborcz, who married Orbán’s daughter Ráhel in 2013, nearly doubled his net worth to almost €500mn in the past year alone, according to the Hungarian rich list. Tiborcz declined to reveal his total assets — which other valuations place well above that figure — but did not deny being substantially wealthy and said the rich list editor had ‘‘put work’’ into his estimates. Tiborcz’s wealth and influence has drawn comparisons to Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose corporate empire expanded after he served as a senior adviser in the White House — though Tiborcz has never had a political role. “This is not a bug but a feature in both systems,” said Péter Krekó, director of the Political Capital consultancy in Budapest. “The way Trump uses his family in his political and business operations, so does, increasingly, Orbán.”
Orbán’s son-in-law faced claims of political favouritism after an EU investigation found in 2017 that his street lighting company Elios — which earned him his first millions — manufactured a market for itself with the help of the government, benefiting from dozens of overpriced tenders that were tailor-made for Elios. Hungary’s government, which wanted to use about €40mn of EU funds to pay for the lighting upgrades, opted to pay for the Elios projects from the national budget instead.
Read: Financial Times
Right populism arrives in Japan
“European summer holidays stretch into weeks”, roared Saya Ohgi at her Monday night rally in central Tokyo, “and around the world, people take Christmas breaks that run from December into January. “But we work so hard . . . isn’t it crazy that their economies are growing and ours isn’t?” ended the 43-year-old jazz singer: hoarse with the oratory of injustice, primed to be voted into the upper house of Japan’s parliament on Sunday and with an audience hanging on her every sentence. Saya’s “Japanese First” speech — xenophobic, quasi-Trumpian, conspiratorial and exhilarating — bemoaned many hardships endured by ordinary Japanese, but did not explicitly mention the yen exchange rate.
Its prolonged stint below ¥140 to the dollar is producing various effects, including the sense of national diminution that comes with seeing that your currency is no longer the mighty force that once shook the world. Developed country comparisons of average incomes make Japan’s look risibly low in dollar terms; the suggestion that Japanese wages now trail those higher-end earners in Thailand and Indonesia is an even harder blow. The more politically potent impact is inflation. After years of deflation, Japan has had three years of sustainably rising prices but for the wrong reasons: cost-push inflation driven by the weak yen and the fact that it imports a high proportion of its raw materials, food and energy. The strain on households is real. Japan’s Engel coefficient, which measures food as a proportion of household spending, is at a 43-year high and inflation-adjusted wages fell for a fifth straight month in May. The most consequential policy battleground of the election — a cut to VAT — attests to real household pain.
Read: Financial Times
The Copperheads were right
“Months ago, copper traders worldwide took a punt that Trump’s tariff pitch for their market was real, not bluster. They were right, and their collective pay-off has been spectacular,” said Tom Price, analyst at Panmure Liberum. “Because so much metal has been sent to the US, you have sucked dry the rest of the world’s copper market,” said one trader. While exact profits vary widely depending on the structure of the trade, a conservative back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the four firms’ collective 600,000 tonnes would yield profits of $312mn. Taking the average differential between the LME and Comex prices since February, when US copper imports picked up, and subtracting an estimated total cost of $500 per tonne, yields a profit of about $520 per tonne, according to FT calculations and information from market participants.
Read: Financial Times
In the background of the gold boom
Poderosa, a mining company, says 39 workers have been killed in Pataz in the past three years. Two mass graves have been discovered there since October. In January the prosecutor’s office in Trujillo was bombed.
Many gangsters are worried that cocaine may become less profitable, so they are piling into the illegal gold market. The two criminal activities complement each other. In the Amazon, coca farms and illegal gold mines often share the same infrastructure, such as landing strips for aircraft. Gangs invest their earnings from drug-trafficking in mining projects, whose output can be laundered and sold as though it had been dug up legally.
Read: The Economist
The proliferation of catastrophe bonds
An industry-wide Swiss Re index of total returns from catastrophe bonds has risen 14 per cent over the past year and by more than 50 per cent over the past five years.
Catastrophe bonds are a form of reinsurance, through which insurers or companies give investors regular payments to assume some of the risk from events such as extreme weather. If such a disaster occurs, bondholders can lose their money. The 2025 issuance surge encompasses both public and private deals and has so far included billion-dollar bonds from big US insurers such as State Farm and Florida’s state-backed Citizens, which have come under pressure from a string of hurricanes and wildfires. “The risks taken by insurers are constantly increasing for certain perils, which inevitably leads them to cede more and more risks,” said François Divet, head of ILS at Axa Investment Managers’ alternatives unit, who added that catastrophe bonds have now been issued covering earthquakes in India and floods in the UK.
Read: Financial Times
Is our ‘Minskyan Supercycle’ coming to an end?
Using a Partial Least Squares (PLS) index and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), we identify three distinct phases: a long expansion from the 1980s to 2007–08; a state-sponsored General Ponzi phase extending through the 2010s; and a post-COVID contraction marked by inflationary pressures. This approach reveals both the quantitative persistence and qualitative transformation of financial expansion relative to income generation.
Isabella Weber and the case for global buffer stocks
The economic case for buffer stocks has its origins in Chinese statecraft with the ancient so-called ever normal granary. The basic operating principle of such a public stockholding facility was for the state to participate in the market in order to stabilize the price of grain. The public granaries were meant to buy in times of good harvests when prices are low and re-sell on the open market when grain supplies decline with the seasons and prices increase or to address poor harvests and disasters that trigger price spikes (Weber, 2021b, 2021a). The ever normal granary became a model for buffer stocks envisioned as part of the stabilization policy toolbox when modern macroeconomics emerged in the interwar period (Fantacci, 2012; Woods, 2022). Roosevelt’s New Deal administration implemented what was called an American ever normal granary (Bodde, 1946).1 In a rare agreement, both Keynes and Hayek endorsed aspects of a plan for a global buffer stocks system laid out by Benjamin Graham that was envisioned as a cornerstone of the postwar global governance system (Graham, 1944; Hayek, 1948; Keynes, 1974 [1942]).2 Although ultimately not implemented under the Bretton Woods system, proposals for global buffer stocks remained an important pillar of macroeconomic stabilization in the work of leading economists of the postwar era like Nicholas Kaldor and Jan Tinbergen (Hart et al., 1980 [1963]; Kaldor, 1976).
Buffer stocks at multiple levels of governance present an alternative to the binary of free trade and protectionism. They provide a middle ground between the position that expanding international trade is the best way to ward off against instability and the position that expanding and diversifying local food production is the best mechanism to achieve this goal. Buffer stocks for a few essential food commodities could be held at the global level. This would stabilize trade in these commodities and ward against the incentive for national governments to pursue their own price stabilization strategies at the cost of others (von Braun et al., 2009). At the same time, international rules should be adjusted to allow regional and national buffer stocks to be combined with public procurement programs and other measures to support and protect a diversification of local food systems. Negotiations about the creation of such a multi-layered buffer stock system should include provisions to curb the use of national buffer stocks to promote agricultural exports to the detriment of other countries, for example by implementing rules against dumping
Read: Towards a Post-neoliberal Stabilization Paradigm
Historicizing the polyalignment paradigm
the non-alignment of the past and today’s polyalignment differ in fundamental ways. The former was a collective project, rooted in transnational Third World solidarity. Its ambition was to assert a radical alternative vision of development, to transform global capitalism through mechanisms like the New International Economic Order, a set of proposals put forward in 1974 to transform the international economic system in favour of Third World countries on the basis of economic justice and self-determination. By contrast, contemporary polyalignment, for the most part, consists of unilateral attempts by developing countries to improve their relative position in a competitive world economy. To put it bluntly, where non-aligned countries wanted a seat at the capitalist table in order to collectively flip it, contemporary polyaligned countries want something qualitatively different: a larger slice of the pie on the way to a green capitalist future.
Read: Breakdown
Oligopoly power and “oil shocks”
oil companies spent more than $3.9 billion on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the US between 1955 and 1966 – more than any other industry and equivalent to 15 per cent of all manufacturing M&A over this period. As such, the oil sector sat at the leading edge of a profound concentration in corporate control and ownership that occurred during this time: more than a third of all acquisitions between 1948 and 1968 were made by just twenty-five companies – and eight of these were petroleum firms, a greater proportion than any other sector.
The increased control of the largest firms over downstream sales also reduced the number and market strength of smaller retailers, including their ability to offer lower prices for oil products. These smaller retailers (known as private branders) had played an essential role in the suburbanisation of the US by setting up service stations on the major highways and selling petrol cheaper than the big oil majors – they even introduced the now ubiquitous practice of self-service as a means of reducing their operating costs. As we shall see below, the collapse of these private branders through the late 1960s was to have wide-ranging ramifications for how the oil shocks of the 1970s were experienced in the US.
Read: Crude Capitalism by Adam Hanieh
