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Artificial intelligence is attracting capital on the scale of a mature industry while still being measured like an early-stage startup. Private model developers publish incompatible revenue run rates. Public technology companies make vast commitments outside their conventional debt. Investors struggle to tell whether AI investment is earning an adequate return. Even national statistics have trouble recording the technology’s costs and benefits.

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Modern central banking rests heavily on an intellectual compromise. New Keynesian economics kept Keynes’s concern with unstable demand, accepted the monetarist warning that careless stimulus produces inflation and rebuilt both ideas from the choices of consumers and firms. The Nobel prize awarded to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford crowns that framework, but it arrives just as war, debt and financial instability are exposing how difficult it is to turn an elegant model into policy.

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France’s widening bond spread has revived memories of the euro crisis, but the article’s warning is aimed less at governments than at traders. A sound diagnosis of weak public finances does not guarantee a profitable bet against sovereign debt. Markets move through a sequence of economic, political and financial events, and being right about the final outcome can still mean going broke along the way.

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Ukraine’s largest bank has learned that resilience in wartime is partly financial and partly psychological. PrivatBank must judge when borrowers deserve flexibility, keep branches operating through power and communications failures, and prepare for a reconstruction effort far larger than the country’s banking system can finance. Its performance is impressive, but it also reveals the gap between surviving the war and funding the peace.

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The Iran war has created a shortage in a commodity most people rarely notice. Sulphur is recovered while refineries strip impurities from oil and gas, which makes it a by-product of fuel production rather than something suppliers can quickly produce on demand. With Gulf refineries cut off from world markets and Ukrainian strikes disabling Russian capacity, the same disruption driving up diesel prices is also squeezing sulphur supplies.

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China wants households to spend more, yet its banks are becoming less willing to lend to them. Consumer credit fell sharply in 2026 even as the government subsidised lower interest rates on loans for cars, home improvements and other large purchases. The contradiction points to a deeper problem: borrowers are growing riskier just as lenders are finding it harder to recover money from those who default.

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Millennials entered adulthood with unusually good reasons to be pessimistic. The global financial crisis destroyed jobs just as many joined the labour market, wages stagnated in several rich countries and soaring house prices pushed ownership further out of reach. Their frustration helped energise anti-establishment movements on the left and made permanent economic disappointment seem like a defining feature of the generation.

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Two cryptocurrency billionaires have offered Reform UK an extraordinary political windfall: Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each promised the party £36m. Their backgrounds and Reform’s own conduct make suspicion understandable. Delo was convicted in America of failing to implement anti-money-laundering controls before receiving a presidential pardon, while Reform recently suspended two senior figures who appeared to encourage a prospective donor to evade the rules.

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Ukraine is holding Russia at the front, but the war is widening behind it. Russia’s new long-range drones and missiles are increasingly able to reach cities, railways, ports, warehouses and factories that once sustained a measure of normal life. The article’s central warning is that a nearly static map can conceal a deteriorating strategic position: Ukraine may prevent a major territorial breakthrough and still lose the economic depth needed to keep fighting.

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Artificial intelligence now presents democracies with two dangers that pull policy in opposite directions. The technology may become powerful enough to cause catastrophic harm, whether through loss of control or deliberate misuse. Yet slowing development could also hand a strategic advantage to China, an authoritarian rival that could turn superior AI into leverage over cyberwarfare, surveillance and military power. The article argues that neither danger can be dismissed, and that treating only one as real would be reckless.