As I wait for the September update of the OECD leading indicators—producing data for July and August—I thought I’d introduce another chartbook I've been working on, this time focused on equity sectors. It replicates a variation of a Bloomberg function I used to rely on when I had access to a terminal, the Relative Rotation Graphs - RRG. Since transitioning to Macrobond as the main source of data in my day job, I no longer look at this tool as frequently as I’d like. To that end, I’ve built my own version using the SPDR S&P 500 sector ETFs, and the SPY along with the VEU, to capture the relative performance of sectors and global equities. The total return data comes from Investing.com, where I have a personal premium subscription.
Read MoreI’ve been thinking about time recently. In economics and finance, time is central to our analysis. Most of the information we care about, after all, is spread and dispersed across time. As a result, the way we embed our models with information, and how we sort and organize that information, is often a question of time. The information embedded in time is powerful, often overwhelming.
Read MoreDani Rodrik is disappointed with the way the world is responding to Mr. Trump’s wrecking-ball foreign and economic policy. Professor Rodrik opens with the argument that Trump’s policies are “misguided, erratic, and self-defeating,” lamenting that the rest of the world is only feebly resisting—failing to recognize that “imperialism must always be challenged – not accommodated – and that [this] requires both power and purpose.”
Read MoreAdam Butler, head of ReSolve Asset Management, makes an interesting observation on AI in the wake of the publicised roll-out of ChatGPT 5. In effect, he argues that the AI cycle is over, for now.
Read MoreThe problem isn’t that the models stopped improving. It’s that the improvements we need are measured in orders of magnitude, not percentage points. Every step up the scaling laws now demands a city’s worth of electricity and a sovereign wealth fund’s worth of GPUs. You can still squeeze clever tricks out of mixture-of-experts or chain tiny specialists into something that looks like agency; that keeps the demo videos cinematic. It just doesn’t get us to super-intelligence. For that we need either an architectural miracle (unforecastable by definition) or a civil-engineering miracle (a decade-long sprint to build nuclear plants and 2-nanometer fabs). The first is luck. The second is politics. Both are scarce.