Reading Notes 69: hehe
With stills from Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg (1986)
New analysis by WFP estimates that almost 45 million more people could fall into acute food insecurity or worse (known as IPC3+) if the conflict does not end by the middle of the year, and if oil prices remain above USD 100 a barrel. These would add to the 318 million people around the world who are already food insecure.
Read: World Food Programme
The United Arab Emirates said on Tuesday that it was leaving Opec, dealing a significant blow to the oil cartel and its de facto leader Saudi Arabia.
Read: Financial Times
Between February and March average petrol sales per station in the northeastern US fell 4.3 per cent in March, compared with 0.6 per cent growth in the same period last year, according to data from Upside, which tracks consumer spending at more than 23,000 petrol stations across the nation.
Read: Financial Times
Electric vehicle ownership has reached a “tipping point” that signals an irreversible shift away from petrol cars, not only in China but parts of south-east Asia and Europe despite stalling in the US, expert research finds. EVs accounted for a quarter of new car sales globally in 2025 and the pace of growth has continued into the first quarter of 2026.
Read: Financial Times
Investors are demanding a higher-than-usual premium to back a $14bn bond offering by an Oracle-backed data centre project, amid growing concerns over the huge amounts of AI-related debt coming on to the market. The sale, which has been privately pitched to a small group of institutions in recent weeks, is to fund a 1 gigawatt data centre in Saline Township, Michigan, as part of a $300bn agreement with OpenAI to provide the ChatGPT maker with 4.5GW of computing power, say people familiar with the matter.
Read: Financial Times
Meta will cut 10 per cent of its staff next month, or about 8,000 jobs, as the social media platform reduces its workforce to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s AI spending spree.
Read: Financial Times
Microsoft is offering voluntary redundancy to about 7 per cent of its workforce, in a first for the 51-year-old tech giant as it wrestles with headcount amid an expensive AI bet.
Read: Financial Times
Google outshone its rivals in first-quarter earnings with faster cloud growth as the search giant and its Big Tech peers upped their AI infrastructure spending plans again to $725bn this year. The big four “hyperscalers”, which include Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet, are together expecting to spend 77 per cent more in capital expenditures than a record $410bn last year.
Read: Financial Times
Trouble in Russian Afrikapolitik
Russian forces have withdrawn from a stronghold in northern Mali as the country’s Moscow-backed regime reels from a series of co-ordinated assaults that killed the defence minister and left the ruling military junta shaken. Mali, which turned to Russia for military assistance after a coup five years ago, has been grappling with a deepening security crisis for over a decade. In 2023, Russian and Malian forces scored a major victory in retaking Kidal, a symbolically important city near the desert frontier with Algeria. But the city, which had previously been the unofficial capital for ethnic Tuareg separatists, fell this weekend to the secessionist Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), a powerful al-Qaeda affiliate.
Read: Financial Times
There are now signs Russia is withdrawing from other outposts and bases across wide swaths of northeastern Mali, including along the borders with Algeria and Niger. Bamako has still not been fully secured: JNIM announced a siege of the capital on Tuesday and its fighters were reportedly still roaming its outlying suburbs.
Read: Financial Times
The offshore Renminbi
US banks led by Goldman Sachs have borrowed record amounts of renminbi this year as low interest rates attract more foreigners to China’s offshore debt markets, boosting the role of the currency in global finance. The jump in bank borrowing is part of a broader surge in the issuance of offshore renminbi-denominated debt, driven by huge demand among yield-hungry mainland Chinese investors as Beijing makes it easier for them to buy fixed-income products in Hong Kong. While yields in Hong Kong are higher than on the mainland, they are lower than those available to borrowers in most other global markets. As a result, total borrowing in so-called dim sum bonds — issued outside the mainland, mostly in Hong Kong, and denominated in renminbi — has hit Rmb300bn ($44bn) so far this year, more than twice the amount at this point in 2025, itself a record year.
“There’s a borrowing frenzy right now in offshore renminbi,” said John Woods, chief investment officer for Asia at Lombard Odier. “You’ve got everyone from the Indonesian government to Morgan Stanley issuing [renminbi] debt.” Goldman has become the largest foreign issuer of dim sum bonds and the second-largest overall after the state-owned Bank of China. It has borrowed Rmb32.1bn through the bonds this year, accounting for about 10 per cent of issuance.
Economists said the rise in renminbi borrowing by big international banks showed China’s currency was taking over a role once played by the Japanese yen — a role diminished by sharply rising borrowing costs in Japan over the past two years. The offshore renminbi “has become a major funding currency for lack of a better option”, said Alicia García-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis. “The yen is just not what it used to be in terms of funding costs, especially at the longer end.”
Read: Financial Times
The chip supercycle
Investors are betting on a prolonged boom for memory chipmakers amid voracious AI demand that has prompted customers to lock in multiyear contracts with SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker and a key supplier to Nvidia, said the “structural shift” differs from past booms because customers are prioritising security of supplies over price amid an acute shortage. That shift is reinforcing expectations that an industry long defined by boom-and-bust cycles may be shaking off its volatile past.
Analysts say the memory sector is facing a supply crunch as chipmakers, which also include Micron Technology, struggle to meet demand driven by a global data centre build-out, making memory a key bottleneck in the AI supply chain. Many view the shortage as structural rather than temporary because demand has shifted from cyclical consumer electronics to deep-pocketed AI hyperscalers rapidly increasing capital spending. Demand is also becoming more persistent as AI spreads into everyday applications, increasing the need for memory across devices and services.
the industry has become a seller’s market, with tight supply giving producers greater pricing power. Long-term contracts also allow companies to better manage output, unlike in the past when they were forced to react to volatile demand.
“The tables have turned,” said Kwon, noting that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron jointly control about 90 per cent of the market for DRam, which serves as the main memory for computers and smartphones. “Producers now have the upper hand.” Analysts believe this oligopoly, formed after decades of consolidation, will allow memory makers to sustain elevated margins as long as investment in AI infrastructure continues. SK Hynix reported a quarterly operating margin of 72 per cent, while Samsung’s memory margin is estimated to be well above 60 per cent, compared with Nvidia’s 65 per cent and TSMC’s 58 per cent.
Read: Financial Times
The benchmark MSCI Emerging Market index — a gauge of large companies across 24 developing economies — has climbed more than 15 per cent so far in April to surpass its previous peak in February, outpacing the 10 per cent gain in the S&P 500 index of US blue-chip stocks over the same period. Almost half of the MSCI EM’s gains this month have come from just three chipmakers that have become central to the AI boom and now make up nearly a quarter of the benchmark: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
Read: Financial Times
AI: The crux of state capitalism’s new narrative
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI model is driving a surge in software updates, risking exposure of critical national infrastructure to hackers and prompting cyber security chiefs to demand better co-ordination between government and business. Companies that have access to the San Francisco group’s new tool told the FT joint action “across the public and private sectors” was essential to support hospitals, banks and utilities vulnerable to the threats Mythos uncovered.
Read: Financial Times
Wisdom of the 3%
Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets — defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 per cent or less — on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 per cent in markets on military and defence actions. That compares with a win rate of 25 per cent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 per cent for all markets on the platform as a whole.
The company and Kalshi have long argued their platforms harness collective wisdom to accurately forecast events. But another recent study has found prediction markets reflect the “wisdom of an informed minority” rather than the “wisdom of crowds”. Only 3 per cent of all accounts generate the bulk of price discovery, according to a study led by Roberto Gómez Cram, assistant professor of finance at the London School of Economics.
Read: Financial Times
Amusements
Full Moon in Paris (1984)
I have this theory about a Eric Rohmer-induced wave of conservatism that hit right around the time everyone was watching him during the pandemic and this might be the most damning evidence yet. I’ve never been a “poly” guy but he really takes a hammer to that.
A Tale of Springtime (1990)
Beautiful women talking about Immanuel Kant. Lots of great shots of bookshelves. Robert Schumann. Has all the makings of a film I would love but never quite comes together.
Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996)
A stream of vignettes about Palestinian life and culture in the shadow of Oslo. At it’s best when its just the director using walkie talkies to fuck with the pre-Lavender IOF police state.
Gallipoli (1981)
With all the talk of ground invasion into Iran, I figured why not watch a film about another global hegemon trying to wrest a tight strait from a powerful regional rival. Did not realize I was watching what amounts to the founding myth of Australian nationalism. Maybe my beautiful home state of California can learn something from this ;)
In that 1980s tradition of white boys running to synthesizer soundtracks.
THE WOLF IS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES (2026)
My first experience at the New Theater Hollywood. Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant but also very funny.
The Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Didn’t think the global monkey revolution would start at the Westfield Century City Mall. Needed more scenes of Ceasar spreading Simian-consciousness
Rosa Luxemburg (1986)
Another story from the bleakest period in human history. Unfortunately, capturing such a giant is a tall order. Margarethe von Trotta’s depiction succeeds most when she drops the historicist monumentalization shtick and instead shows the many sides of Rosa overlooked by the mythology: Rosa the lover, the gardener, the librarian, Ornithophile, cat mother, etc. I really wish there was more of that.
