Latest Interviews

Global Rates & FX Views: Japan’s GPIF, Fed and ECB

Ralf Preusser, Sphia Salim, Meghan Swiber, Shusuke Yamada, Megan Zweiber, Sia Saleem

Speculation regarding Finance Minister Katayama's support for the GPIF to increase Japanese financial asset holdings has sparked market anticipation of a potential 5% reallocation from foreign to domestic bonds, which could inject roughly 21 trillion yen into the JGB market. This hypothetical shift is projected to exert significant pressure on European government bonds, particularly in France, Spain, and Italy, by triggering an estimated €37 billion in sales that could alter relative value dynamics. Concurrently, the event analysis suggests that while this reallocation presents a modest headwind for US Treasury demand, global central bank strategies remain focused on anticipated September rate hikes for the Fed and ECB before a projected cycle of meaningful cuts begins in 2027.

Meta Takes on OpenAI | Apple Sues OpenAI | SK Hynix’s $26BN IPO

Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings

Apple has sued OpenAI alleging trade secret theft by two former employees, a move that threatens OpenAI's hardware ambitions while the company simultaneously counters with its Spark 1.1 API launch, which introduces a pay-per-use pricing model specifically optimized for coding tasks. Concurrently, the broader infrastructure landscape is reshaping as SK Hynix executes a record $26.5 billion NASDAQ IPO amid rising memory costs that are cannibalizing traditional IT budgets and forcing a market-wide re-evaluation of AI spend ceilings. These strategic shifts are accompanied by a significant pivot in venture capital from early-stage betting to late-stage growth financing and SaaS roll-ups, as investors increasingly prioritize sustainable pacing and deal structures that account for the terminal decay of legacy software.

The Consumer’s Summer Spending Surge

T.J. Thornton, David Tinsley

In June 2026, aggregate U.S. consumer spending surged 6.3% year-over-year as discretionary services and retail sectors outpaced necessities, coinciding with a 1.7% acceleration in job growth that narrowed the income spending gap between high- and lower-income households. While Bank of America data indicates this convergence was driven by a 4.1% rise in lower-income wages and a World Cup-induced spike in host city restaurant sales, the event's temporary boost is already fading. Consequently, the personal savings rate dropped to 2.7% as households prioritized consumption over savings, raising concerns about sustainability despite a robust labor market that currently supports further Federal Reserve rate hikes.

How Falling Launch Costs and AI Are Driving the Space Economy

Michael Tarulli, Erik Sparks, Alison Nathan

Driven by a 95% cost reduction through rocket reusability, the global space economy has shifted from government dominance to an 80% commercial model currently valued at $625 billion. Key technological transitions to Low Earth Orbit constellations and AI integration are fueling growth toward a projected trillion-dollar market by 2040, though investors still prioritize order backlogs over profitability amidst high launch failure risks. While geopolitical tensions and collision cascade threats challenge sustainability, the sector is rapidly evolving toward autonomous manufacturing, commercial stations, and eventual off-world resource extraction as a universal utility by 2050.

The Presentations You've Been Waiting For

Anton Creel

Scheduled for September 12, the ITPM London Super Conference brings together founder Anton Creel and six senior mentors to guide retail traders toward long-term consistency through a business model framework and specific strategies for market conditions in 2026 and 2027. Featuring high-level performance records ranging from 360% to 900% returns, the curriculum includes exclusive sessions on macroeconomic outlooks, AI-driven trade generation, and the habit formation required to build wealth from zero. Admission to this all-inclusive event, which offers a VIP breakfast with Creel and detailed trade ideas, is positioned as a critical opportunity for traders seeking to replace speculation with structured, winning methodologies.

Will Hyperscalers Justify AI Spend?

Mark Wilson, Rich Privorotsky

Recent market analysis highlights an unsustainable U.S. equity equilibrium driven by AI spending for 70–80% of incremental GDP, creating a concentration risk where hyperscalers underperform against beneficiaries while credit markets face $250 billion in issuance stress. With Q2 earnings priced for 23–24% growth and retail positioning heavily leveraged in semi-hardware, the primary risk involves a failure to validate ROI that could disrupt the current AI capital expenditure cycle. Concurrently, a structural divergence between U.S. tech dominance and European industrial headwinds presents a potential trade where equities may drive macro expectations rather than traditional macro factors.

From sports to pop culture: Prediction markets $1 trillion bet

Julie Hoover, TJ Thornton

By early July 2026, prediction market volume surged to $13 billion weekly as incumbents like DraftKings and FanDuel launched vertical exchanges while Kalshi captured 4 million new users during the FIFA World Cup. The sector now approaches parity with traditional U.S. sports betting handle, driven by institutional adoption of earnings hedges, retail crypto trading, and a strategic expansion into non-traditional demographics through pop culture markets. Despite these gains, the industry faces significant regulatory uncertainty with active lawsuits in multiple states and a anticipated U.S. Supreme Court ruling on sports event contracts expected by 2027.

Sector Rotation Has Flipped the Script | At The Desk Ep.1

Ben, Phil

Capital is rotating out of speculative AI data center stocks into defensive sectors as the Federal Reserve signals potential rate hikes amid cooling inflation and a divergence between crypto assets and equities. Mega-cap tech firms like Nvidia and Broadcom saw share price declines despite record revenues due to guidance missing elevated expectations, while hyperscalers face scrutiny over massive capital expenditure projections and diminishing profit margins. Consequently, investors are shifting toward diversified long-short strategies and non-tech industries as concerns mount regarding the long-term unit economics of unprofitable AI enterprises.

Enterprises Fear Frontier Models | Sam Altman Offers Trump 5% of OpenAI | DeepSeek Builds Own Chips

Sam Altman, Trump, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings

OpenAI and the U.S. government are exploring regulatory frameworks involving pre-approval processes and potential equity stakes, while major tech firms like Meta and SpaceX pivot toward selling excess compute infrastructure to reshape market dynamics. In the enterprise sector, adoption bottlenecks arising from talent shortages are slowing diffusion rates despite aggressive service deployment strategies by Microsoft and Amazon. Concurrently, venture capital is normalizing high-dilution financing and secondary liquidity events as geopolitical tensions accelerate a bifurcation between U.S. closed-source models and China's advancing open-source alternatives.

Has the AI boom entered a manic new phase? | The Economist

Henry Curr, Mike Bird, Josh Roberts

US equity markets have reached near-record capitalization levels driven primarily by massive AI-focused "giga IPOs" like SpaceX and anticipated offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. This concentration, now comprising nearly 40% of the S&P 500, coincides with unusual retail participation and inverted options pricing that signal a shift toward speculative mania. Simultaneously, major technology firms have redirected capital expenditure toward infrastructure, causing a collapse in free cash flow and transforming the sector into a dominant force in global corporate debt markets.

Must Read Research: Shifting Econ Outlook; Concentration Bubble Risk; Semis; Prediction Mkts

TJ Thornton

The BofA Global Economics team projects a hawkish pivot with three rate hikes in 2026 driven by resilient inflation and labor growth, while equity markets show early signs of rotation away from concentrated AI valuations toward cyclical sectors. Concurrently, the semiconductor industry is securing long-term contracts to underwrite a projected $2.7 trillion market by 2030, even as DraftKings absorbs hundreds of millions in losses to compete for dominance in the rapidly expanding prediction market. These divergent trends highlight a complex economic environment where central bank policy shifts, sector-specific rotation, and intense corporate competition redefine growth strategies across global assets.

Socialists Sweep NYC, China Catches Up in Coding, AI Memory Crunch, Micron's Blowout Quarter

Gavin Baker, Travis Kalanick, David Sacks

Socialist candidates secured three key New York primary victories by leveraging strong support from young, affluent voters to defeat establishment figures like Dan Goldman, driven largely by the Israel-Gaza conflict and internal Democratic fractures. Parallel to this political shift, the podcast analyzes the rapid advancement of China's open-source AI through the GLM-5.2 model trained on domestic chips and forecasts a semiconductor market constrained by record HBM demand that is reshaping data center economics. These sectors face a convergence of massive capital flows toward upcoming trillion-dollar AI IPOs and infrastructure challenges that may necessitate a pivot toward orbital compute solutions.

What does the next training paradigm look like?

Current AI labs are betting on scaling reinforcement learning to achieve AGI, though the field faces significant stagnation in "computer use" tasks due to the lack of deterministic, replayable web simulators. While proponents argue that extended context windows can substitute for weight updates, critics point to performance degradation in long-horizon scenarios and the inefficiency of discarding inference data without feedback loops. To overcome these barriers, researchers are exploring On-Policy Self-Distillation and simulated "dreaming" to accumulate tacit knowledge from real-world deployment, aiming to shift future progress from pre-training toward continuous, weight-based learning.

America at 250 – Innovation, Market Leadership and the Power of Compounding

Derek Harris, Jared Woodard

Presented on June 16, 2026, this analysis details the United States' 150-year economic dominance, driven by superior corporate earnings growth, a $1 trillion annual R&D investment, and the dollar's enduring role as the primary global reserve currency. The report challenges the traditional 60-40 portfolio strategy by demonstrating the historical lack of consistent negative correlation between U.S. equities and long-term Treasury bonds, which have often moved in tandem during recent market cycles. Ultimately, the discussion underscores structural advantages in governance and innovation efficiency that sustain U.S. outperformance despite the current challenges posed by an overvalued currency and global reindustrialization trends.

The data black hole at the center of AI

The event analyzes the prevailing AI paradigm where massive data volume and compute-intensive reinforcement learning drive progress rather than sample efficiency, creating a booming market for human expert labeling. This approach contrasts sharply with human learning capabilities, as current models require millions of times more data to master tasks like driving or robotics, yet still achieve rapid open-source convergence by leveraging public data. Looking ahead, the discussion projects that while white-collar roles will expand due to AI complementing human work, the ultimate path to solving efficiency bottlenecks may lie in automating the AI research process itself.