Opinion

• Rising Bond Yields Are No Excuse for Central Bank Inertia
  Are the bond and derivatives markets doing the tough work for central bankers? Swaps are pricing a globally coordinated cycle of interest rate increased over the next 12 months, and longer-term bond yields are hitting multi-decade highs in the US, Europe and Japan. That, in turn, has prompted Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh and some policymakers from the Bank of England and European Central Bank to suggest they might not have to raise rates as much as expected because the debt markets are ma
• Trump’s Energy Midterms Will Be Worse Than Biden’s
  Four years ago, Americans were reeling from painfully high pump prices and pundits warned the incumbent government would face a protest wave in midterm elections. Sound familiar?
• Meta’s Muse Is Ending Its Honeymoon Phase on Solid Ground
  You can barely take a step on the New York subway lately without seeing the face of Meta Platforms Inc.’s furry Muse AI assistant. I’ve written already about how impressed I’ve been with the form and function of the breakthrough bot. Now, attention must move to assessing whether Muse has long-term staying power — or whether its launch will be just a flash in the pan.
• Florida’s GOP Governor Candidate Exposes His Party’s Emptiness
  When students at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee grilled Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds last month about his record, he promised to bring his finance background to the state’s top job. “The next governor has to have experience in how a company’s balance sheet operates,” said Donalds, who was a financial adviser before being elected to the Florida House in 2016 and the US House in 2020.
• Why Putin Says Russia Could ‘Cease to Exist’ If It Loses
  Ever since things in Ukraine first went sideways for Vladimir Putin back in the spring of 2022, the Russian president and his officials have said that, not only were they fighting Nazis and responding to NATO aggression, but that the stakes of the conflict were so high that Russia may cease to exist should they fail.
• Just Say Yes to Permitting Reform
  After decades of debate and innumerable false starts, Congress may be on the cusp of a major overhaul of America’s broken permitting system. Few reform efforts of recent years have been so dull — or quite so consequential. Both parties should get on board.
• Big Oil Goes Back to Iraq and Likes What It Sees
  “Buy to the sound of cannons, sell to the sound of trumpets.” The ancient stock market maxim resonates in today’s Middle East. While the US and Iran fight, Big Oil is heading into neighboring Iraq.
• It’s Time to Acknowledge English Girls Are Falling Behind
  The UK, for all its political instability and sluggish growth, recently got some good news: British students ranked in the top 10 across all tested subjects in the latest results from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The UK was one of just eight countries to achieve that feat — 92 countries and cities participated — and also managed to buck wider downward trends by improving its average science score and avoiding a decline in reading.
• Britain’s Richest People Have a New Champion
  “Blessed are the rich,” is an unlikely credo for a modern British politician, but Tory leader Kemi Badenoch dared to speak up for the highly taxed, affluent professional classes in her Conservative Party conference speech last week.
• Trump’s Hijacking of Ukraine War Funds Sets a Dangerous Precedent
  Imagine the uproar from Republicans: A future Democratic president takes a pot of money authorized to bolster Israel’s security and redirects the funds to another country, for another purpose.
• The Economic Shock That’s Almost Too Hot to Handle
  To say that central banks dislike making policy based on extreme weather is an understatement. But they can’t duck the economic reverberations of the powerful El Niño that’s roiling Asia.
• SoftBank’s Next $100 Billion Underscores Ray Dalio’s AI Warning
  Skeptics of the artificial investment boom are doubling down. Billionaire Ray Dalio warned last week that the bubble was near its bursting point, while Michael Burry of the Big Short fame brought forward the timeline for his bearish thesis. SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son’s attempt to set up another $100 billion AI-focused venture capital fund will only give the doubters more ammunition.
• The Hottest Thing in Crypto Is Shaking Up Singapore
  A crypto bro seeking to reinvent finance from first principles? That is nothing new. Many in the blockchain world want to loosen Wall Street’s stranglehold on wealth creation. But when Hyperliquid Labs Chief Executive Jeff Yan spoke on that topic in Singapore last week, there was a catch. That morning, the Financial Times had run an article on how the Asian city-state was trying to distance itself from the new-age bourse and its most revolutionary offering: perpetual futures, or perps, which the