Sheer Scale.
Some hiccups.
“(News Items) is the first thing I read every morning.” — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, Major League Baseball.
1. Women control around $32 trillion of worldwide spending, a recent study shows, and appealing to them has been pivotal for a number of companies in this year’s ranking of Europe’s Long-term Growth Champions. The companies’ focus on women could also be a smart bet on the future, according to the research from Nielsen IQ, a market research company. It estimates that up to 80 per cent of consumer spending is already influenced by women, but forecasts that women will actually control 75 per cent of discretionary spending in the next few years. (Source: ft.com/free to read)
2. The path for interest-rate cuts has been clouded by an emerging split within the central bank with little precedent during Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s nearly eight-year tenure. Officials are fractured over which poses the greater threat—persistent inflation or a sluggish labor market—and even a resumption of official economic data may not bridge the differences. The rupture has complicated what looked like a workable plan less than two months ago, though investors think a rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting is still more likely than not. (Source: wsj.com)
3. JPMorgan Chase (Part One):
The global data center and AI build-out will be an extraordinary and sustained capital markets event. Building out global data center and AI infrastructure and related power supplies could cost over $5 trillion in our view, with at least one consultant calling for $7 trillion of global AI-related capex.
Funding that extraordinary growth will likely require participation from every public capital market as well as private credit, alternative capital providers and even government involvement. The question is not “which market will finance the AI-boom”. Rather, the question is “how will financings be structured to access every capital market.”
The sheer scale of those investments has critical implications across the credit market landscape. Big picture, for various reasons public bond and syndicated loan market growth has slowed post-COVID recovery (shrunk in the case of High Yield Bonds). AI/Data Centers are likely to drive a re-acceleration of market growth. (Source: ft.com)
4. JPMorgan Chase (Part Two):
The bank’s analysts note: “It is hard to imagine the world deploying $5 trillion of capital without at least some hiccups.” (Source: ft.com)
5. JPMorgan Chase (Part Three):
The scale of demand for compute remains astronomical, with actual growth somewhat constrained by physical limitations. Our base case estimates call for 122 GW of global data center infrastructure capacity installations from 2026-2030, at a rapidly accelerating rate. We have written in the past about data center growth being constrained by real estate, energy and power, water, commodity prices and capital. Thankfully, that remains true, else the potential funding needs would be even higher. Our colleagues in Asia produce an intriguing bottoms up unconstrained forecast based on semiconductor orders that implies growth of 144 GW globally through YE2028 — i.e.basically the same amount of growth in the next three years as we forecast over the next five years once factoring critical constraints.
Power is the most important of those constraints. Current lead times for new natural gas turbines have ballooned to 3-4 years, and nuclear plants have historically taken 10+ years to build. Adding 150 GW of power in a timely manner is a remarkable challenge, particularly in light of grid upgrade requirements. Recent comments from certain power producers suggest some flexibility is possible from ramping up peakers more aggressively, but that has implications for retail prices. Balancing ultimate retail electricity prices (still stable as a percentage of income, at least in the US) is a politically important and sensitive aspect of managing the data center boom. (Source: ft.com. Italics mine.)
6. From the IEA World Energy Outlook (11/12/2025):
“Analysis in the World Energy Outlook has been highlighting for many years the growing role of electricity in economies around the world. Last year, we said the world was moving quickly into the Age of Electricity – and it’s clear today that it has already arrived,” says IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “In a break from the trend of the past decade, the increase in electricity consumption is no longer limited to emerging and developing economies. Breakneck demand growth from data centers and AI is helping drive up electricity use in advanced economies, too. Global investment in data centers is expected to reach $580 billion in 2025. Those who say that ‘data is the new oil’ will note that this surpasses the $540 billion being spent on global oil supply – a striking example of the changing nature of modern economies.” (Source: iea.org)
Despite its outsize international influence, we don’t hear a lot from DeepSeek. They don’t put out long “recommendations” manifestos or parade executives at global summits. The last public appearance of Chief Executive Officer Liang Wenfeng was during a February meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Since then, the company has skipped nearly all the major tech conferences.
So when a representative from the Hangzhou-based startup steps into the spotlight to sound the alarm about AI’s “dangerous” societal impacts, it’s worth listening. Especially if it encroaches on a topic Beijing has spent years trying to bury.
Chen Deli, a senior researcher at DeepSeek, warned at a convention last week that a severe labor market crisis is coming as automation wipes out most jobs, according to the South China Morning Post. This will “shake society to its core,” he added, and AI companies must act as “whistleblowers” to warn the public about the positions that will be the first to go. For now, Chen said, we are in the “honeymoon phase.”
Western tech leaders have long cautioned about a future AI jobpocalypse, mainly for entry-level, white-collar roles. But in China, a recent graduate labor crisis is already here. Tensions have been building for years, giving rise to trends like pretending to go to work or “professional children,” who stay at home rather than take a job they are overqualified for. A new shock could endanger the nation’s already fragile economic growth. (Source: bloomberg.com. Italics mine.)
8. The financial health of China’s property developers is deteriorating, with shrinking assets and widening losses underscoring the severity of the industry’s multiyear downturn, a recent report showed. The combined assets of 33 sample developers listed on the Chinese mainland fell 11% year-on-year to 7.7 trillion yuan ($1.06 trillion) in the third quarter of 2025, according to a report by GF Securities Co. Ltd. The decline marks a steeper drop from the 10.4% contraction recorded in 2024. The decline began in 2022 and has since expanded each year. A more telling sign of this trend is the 15.6% year-on-year drop in their combined net assets. Among the 33 companies, only six posted year-on-year asset growth. (Source: caixinglobal.com)
9. Banks in China are asking clients to take out loans and then immediately repay them, with the bank covering the interest, in a practice known as “quick-lend-and-recover”. The practice is spreading as banks come under pressure to hit government-set targets that can’t be met by real demand, according to interviews with bankers. Regulators have vowed to prevent funds from circulating within the banking system instead of flowing to the real economy, and have previously found state-owned financial institutions issuing loans just before key assessment periods, only to withdraw them shortly after. (Source: bloomberg.com)
10. The U.S. Navy’s largest aircraft carrier arrived in waters near Latin America yesterday, expanding the American military’s buildup as the Trump administration seeks to ratchet up the pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. President Trump has expressed reservations about taking military action against Venezuela, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. But the arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group, with several destroyers equipped with Tomahawk missiles, will boost the U.S. military’s capability to attack targets in the country, including Venezuela’s air defenses. (Source: wsj.com)
11. Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López yesterday said in a statement that Venezuela is preparing to set a maximum level of alert amid rising tensions with the U.S. The objective is to place “the entire country’s military arsenal on full operational readiness,” Padrino López said. The preparations include “massive deployment of ground, aerial, naval, riverine and missile forces” with the participation of all security forces and militia. Padrino said on national television that Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, ordered a massive deployment of soldiers — “almost 200,000,” he said — as part of the special operation. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
12. Mohamed El-Erian
Affordability is not just about real metrics; it is also about perceived stability. It is particularly unsettling for households when they feel like they are running on a treadmill, working harder just to risk falling behind. This “vibecession”, where the lived experience of economic insecurity overrides positive macroeconomic headlines, was particularly problematic for the Biden administration.
Households also tend to judge themselves against others, with today’s uneven economy fueling a greater feeling of “relative deprivation”. This undermines the implicit social contract that was built on a promise of upward mobility: work hard, your children will be better off than you were, and you have a shot at the American dream. And when a society transitions from a state of collective aspiration to one of insecurity, the political implications can be consequential. It can fuel a profound sense of cynicism and distrust in the political establishment and big corporations. (Source: ft.com)
13. IBM announced on Wednesday it has built a new experimental quantum computing chip called Loon that demonstrates it hit a key milestone toward making useful quantum computers before the end of the decade. Quantum computers could someday solve problems that would take classical computers thousands of years. But due to the uncertain nature of quantum mechanics, the chips are prone to errors. Correcting those errors is the key focus of tech giants such as Alphabet’s Google and Amazon that are chasing quantum computers alongside IBM. In 2021, IBM proposed a new way of doing error correction: adapt an algorithm for improving cellphone signals to quantum computing and run it on a combination of quantum chips and classical computing chips. The downside of IBM’s idea is that the quantum chips become harder to build because they must contain not only basic building blocks of quantum chips called “qubits” but also new quantum connections between the qubits, Mark Horvath, a vice president and analyst at research firm Gartner, told Reuters in an interview. “It’s very, very clever,” Horvath said. “Now, they’re actually putting it in chips, so that’s super exciting.” (Source: reuters.com)
14. Fei-Fei Li:
Spatial intelligence will transform how we create and interact with real and virtual worlds—revolutionizing storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery, and beyond. This is AI’s next frontier. Read the rest. (Source: drfeifei.substack.com)
15. A group of Stanford University scientists posted a paper online in mid-September, describing a feat that could have been plucked from the pages of science fiction: They used artificial intelligence to design new viruses capable of killing bacteria. In a world where AI keeps creeping in on uniquely human territory by composing sonnets, writing songs or forging friendships, this seemed to be crossing a new Rubicon. Depending on your belief system, AI was doing what evolution, or God, or scientists working with genome-engineering tools aim to do. “Machines are rethinking what it is to be human, what it is to be alive,” said Michael Hecht, a chemistry professor at Princeton University focused on designing novel proteins and artificial genomes. “I find this very unsettling and staggering. They are devising, coming up with novel life forms. Darwin 2.0.” (Sources: washingtonpost.com. biorxiv.org. Ed. Note: What’s remarkable about this story is that it doesn’t seem remarkable. )
16. Google DeepMind’s Weather Lab was by far the best model for predicting hurricane track and intensity this season. (Source: gizmodo.com)
17. LRB:
People are living longer than they used to. They are also having fewer children. The evidence of what this combination can do to a society is growing around the world, but some of the most striking stories come from Japan. For decades the Japanese health ministry has released an annual tally of citizens aged one hundred or over. This year the number of centenarians reached very nearly a hundred thousand. When the survey started in 1963, there were just 153. In 1981 there were a thousand; in 1998 ten thousand. Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants. There is a burgeoning industry for the cleaning and fumigating of apartments in which elderly Japanese citizens have died and been left undiscovered for weeks, months or years. Older people have far fewer younger people to take care of them or even to notice their non-existence. That neglect is a brute function of some simple maths. In 1950, Japan had a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4, which represents the average number of children a woman might expect to have in her lifetime. Continued over five generations, that would mean a ratio of 256 great-great-grandchildren to every sixteen great-great-grandparents – in other words, each hundred-year-old might have sixteen direct descendants competing to look after them. Today Japan’s TFR is approaching 1: one child per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). That pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as sixteen great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head. (Source: lrb.co.uk)
Quick Links: The IEA’s World Energy Outlook was released yesterday. The executive summary is here. Headline: Oil and gas demand to rise for 25 years without global change of course, says IEA. The most important question in Europe: Can anything halt the decline of German industry? Milei wants to turn Argentina into a mining powerhouse. Employers have been using the RTO (return to office) push as a strategy for back-door layoffs. Holiday hiring: Large companies say they are likely to add far fewer seasonal workers than in other recent years. The private aviation industry had its best month in nearly 20 years, according to industry numbers. Amazing: Video shows part of newly built bridge in China collapsing in seconds.
Financialization: UBS boss is right on private credit rating risks. Egan-Jones Ratings Co., a small credit ratings firm, graded over 3,000 investments in 2024 with a team of just 20 analysts. (That’s 150 investment ratings per analyst, or one every two days, roughly speaking). JPMorgan Chase has started rolling out a deposit token called JPM Coin to institutional clients. Keep it off the balance sheet: Novel approaches to financing in OpenAI, Meta and xAI deals show risks and rewards of the AI frenzy. Fewer than half of 280 finance executives surveyed by BCG this year could quantify returns on AI investment at all. US law firm McDermott Will & Schulte weighs sector’s first private equity tie-up. In 2018, Americans legally wagered less than $5 billion on sports annually. Last year, they bet $150 billion.
Political: Kash Patel’s ‘effin wild’ ride as FBI Director. How federal agents sent by Trump helped slow crime in Memphis. Supreme Court extends pause on SNAP funding order. Americans’ trust in various U.S. federal government institutions remains mired near five-decade lows. 59% of Americans now hold an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, up from 51% in early 2024. UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting denies plan to challenge PM Keir Starmer. Turkish prosecutors seek 2,352-year sentence for Erdoğan rival.
Science/Technology: Four surprising cancer symptoms you should know about, according to an oncologist. The rarest element on Earth could revolutionize cancer treatment. Chinese team reports first recovery of rare earth minerals from living plant. China’s ‘unprecedented’ plan to reengineer its universities. Rising star mathematician Wu Meng returns to China from Finland. America’s chip restrictions are biting in China. Meta chief AI scientist (and Turing Award winner) Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own start-up. The computers that run on human brain cells. The Apple sling is very….not News Items.
War: Houthis signal halt to Red Sea shipping attacks. What the looming fall of a Ukrainian city says about Putin’s war. Put it this way: “peace talks” aren’t a high priority. Pakistan points finger at India over suicide blast. Trump pushes to expand Abraham Accords after Gaza ceasefire. Inside the CIA’s secret mission to sabotage Afghanistan’s opium.