The truth about the American profit machine
https://www.ft.com/content/362ccc0a-d6e5-40df-817f-64aea4717cc8
Ruchir Sharma:
America’s profit machine seems extraordinary by historical and global standards. But look closer, and cracks appear. Rising government deficits explain a surprising share of recent US earnings growth. Moreover, the “profitless” dotcom era is a myth. Earnings growth is not dramatically stronger today than it was in the late 1990s. Since then, speculative excess has moved into private markets, making the public markets and the economy look more robust than they really are. In short, this expansion is more dependent on government and the earnings story is less exceptional than investors realize.
Faith and governance in the age of thinking machines
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/big-tech/2026/05/faith-and-governance-in-the-age-of-thinking-machines
Alys Key:
This contributes to another reason why we are getting these missives from on high about AI. It’s a nebulous reason, a public mood, best expressed by a Silicon Valley meme about the “permanent underclass”. Half-joking, half-serious, this term describes the idea that AI brings about an end to social mobility by replacing all human labor, and that there are only a few years left in which to accumulate wealth before that happens. Those AI shareholders will be fine. For the rest of us, it’s anyone’s guess.
This is an extreme scenario, but taps into a feeling that we might get left behind. More than generalized anxiety about inequality, this is a fear that the new wave of wealth and superintelligence will end everything about life as we know it. It is a feeling intermingled with disappointment over stagnant wages, the cost of living, the state of politics, the environmental crisis, the slow loss of newspapers/Saturday jobs/bank branches/whatever it was that made life feel real to you.
Jeremy Warner:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/30/a-year-from-now-nobody-will-be-talking-about-iran/
In the lead-up to the First World War, stock markets sailed blissfully on: not because investors were unaware of the ever-louder drum beat of impending conflict but because they collectively assumed none of the great powers would be stupid enough to stumble into the catastrophe of an all-out war.
That view was perfectly encapsulated in a highly influential book by Norman Angell, a British journalist, published a few years before the outbreak of hostilities. Angell’s The Great Illusion argued that the economic costs of war and the accompanying disruptions to trade were likely to be so devastating that nobody could possibly hope to gain by starting one.
Economic interdependence between industrial countries would be “the real guarantor of the good behavior of one state to another”, Angell argued. This had never stopped countries from going to war before but it was also true that the level of economic integration and interchange between elites in Europe at the time was without precedent. Sadly, it didn’t help. Yet markets refused to believe in bad outcomes right up to the point where troops were mobilized and borders closed.