1. European Large Cap Just Breaking Out Above Year 2000 Highs
J.C. Parets
2. Broadcom AVGO -25% Correction from Highs….Co-Founder Sells $250m Stock
Barchart
3. Last Week’s Net Selling of Tech was Largest in 10 Years….Not the Usual Action in Bubble?
Hedge funds vs. Tech. Last “week’s net selling in US Info Tech – in both $ and % terms – was the largest in more than 10 years (-4.0 z score).”
Robbie Stankard – Goldman Sachs
4. Sovereign Wealth Funds Buying Hard Assets
Dave Lutz Jones Trading Sovereign wealth funds and central banks managing $29 trillion in assets are turning to energy assets, and raising concerns about the dollar, in a portfolio reassessment driven by unprecedented geopolitical shifts, according to an Invesco survey published on Monday. The survey of 90 sovereign wealth funds and 54 central banks showed an increasing focus on diversification, and investment portfolios that can “take a hit and still hold it together” amid trade tariffs, closed shipping channels and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
5. Old Content Dominates Viewing on Streaming
Former glories
According to the recent and aptly-named “Retro Revival” report from entertainment industry analysts at Luminate, the “2026 is the new 2016” trend that dominated social media feeds earlier this year was perhaps more prescient than it seemed at the time, with that same sense of nostalgia seeping into everything from the music we listen to and the way we listen to it, to how adverts and branding look now. Unsurprisingly, the world of TV and movie streaming has not been immune to the backward-looking movement, as content from streamers’ back catalogs increasingly comes to dominate the hours that viewers are spending on the platforms.
Across the first quarter of 2026, Luminate data shows that every major streaming platform it studied, with the clear exception of Netflix, keeps viewers hooked with older classics from its catalog, rather than fresh original content; Luminate highlighted the staying power of comfort TV like “Friends” and “Suits” as key retention drivers.
Netflix, often an industry outlier, makes sense as the sole platform where original content even nearly matches up to catalog offerings: the company has spent big on licensing and original content, laying out $135 billion over the last 10 years while other platforms, in Ted Sarandos’ words, “pull back.” Zoom out though, and it becomes clear that even Netflix’s content, alongside its competitors’, has become a little less original compared to previous years.
6. Iran War-IRGC Use of CoinEx to Avoid Sanctions
Perplexity
7. More Women in Workforce than Men
Axios
8. Data Centers by State Virginia and Texas Lead
The New York Times
9. Technology and Jobs
You’re probably doing a job that didn’t exist in 1940. Will yours exist in 2040?
New research looks at the complex interplay between changes in technology and what we do for a living.
Changes in technology drive changes in work. Manufacturing jobs have slowed over the decades, while new professions such as Uber drivers and social media managers have emerged.
A recent paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics examined the role of technology in creating new jobs and reshaping our economy. The researchers created a database of job titles from 1940 to 2018 and used natural language processing to analyze new professions.
The researchers found that about 60% of jobs in 2018 did not exist 1940. Since 1940, the bulk of new jobs has shifted from middle-class production and clerical jobs to high-paid professional jobs and low-paid service jobs.
They also identified two different impacts of technology. First, augmentation creates new types of jobs (think social media manager) while automation reduces the need for workers of other jobs (grocery store cashiers being replaced by self-checkout). The researchers found that automation eroded twice as many jobs from 1980 to 2018 as it had from 1940 to 1980. While augmentation did add some jobs to the economy, it was not as many as the ones lost by automation.
As of yet, the researchers have no insight into whether or not AI will boost augmentation of jobs or automation. They listed this as a direction for further exploration.
“We’re in an era where we have this new tool and we don’t know what’s good for. New technologies have strengths and weaknesses and it takes a while to figure them out. GPS was invented for military purposes, and it took decades for it to be in smartphones,” lead author David Autor, a professor at MIT, told MIT News. He added: “We’re hoping our research approach gives us the ability to say more about that going forward.”
Join us in New York City this September for the annual Fast Company Innovation Festival. Advanced-rate tickets are available now through Sunday, July 12. Grab your festival passes today.
10. A Reality Check on the Inequality Panic
Alarmist narratives shape public opinion and encourage policymakers to pursue sweeping interventions that may do more harm than good.
This article appeared in Washington Examiner on March 23, 2026.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for far higher taxation in a recent blog entry, arguing that current wealth concentration is higher than that of the Gilded Age and is about to get worse globally. The chart-topping singer Billie Eilish implored billionaires to give away their money, while New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has gone further, opining, “I don’t think we should have billionaires” because we live in “a moment of such inequality.” If anything is having a moment, it is the conviction that inequality has grown urgent enough to justify a muscular policy response.
But the facts don’t support this. Not only has global income inequality fallen over the long run — contrary to the popular narrative — but inequality has also declined in education, health, and a host of other areas. The world is now more equal across a range of factors, from lifespan and childhood survival to internet access and schooling. The more broadly one examines inequality, the more encouraging the data appear. It turns out that even the shock of COVID-19 failed to erase decades of progress toward a wealthier and more equal world.
Indeed, the data show a pronounced decline in global inequality over the past few decades, driven largely by rising prosperity in poorer countries. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, progress slowed sharply. Some indicators stalled and a few modestly worsened. But the gains accumulated before the crisis were not undone.
In short, the damage to human well-being was more limited than many feared.
Alarmist narratives shape public opinion and encourage policymakers to pursue sweeping interventions that may do more harm than good.
Another recent analysis published in The Economist finds that global inequality in consumption spending is falling. In 2000, the richest 10% of humanity spent 40 times more than the poorest 50%. In 2025, they spent around 18 times more. Using data from World Data Lab, they find that the poorest 50% now out-consume the richest 1%, breaking from past trends.
Yet many think that only large-scale redistribution can stop runaway worldwide inequality. Figures as diverse as Amodei, Eilish, and Mamdani are far from alone in embracing this view. Over the past few years, calls for a worldwide wealth tax, a vast increase in foreign aid spending, and other unprecedented measures are gaining steam across academia, non-profits, the press, and international organizations like the United Nations.
That conclusion is premature. Getting the facts straight is essential, because misunderstanding global inequality can push policymakers toward harmful solutions.
The record on foreign aid is far less encouraging than its advocates suggest: decades of evidence show that aid frequently fails to deliver sustained development and bears no reliable relationship to long-term economic growth. Worse, the fixation on ever larger aid flows often crowds out the harder work of domestic reform. In some cases, foreign aid has been shown to weaken political institutions, entrench bad governance, and slow the process of democratization.
Wealth taxes have their own problems, from high administrative costs and enforcement challenges to low revenue production and invasion of financial privacy. These problems help explain why so many of the countries that have implemented wealth taxes in the past — such as France, Germany, and Sweden— later abolished the tax. Perhaps the worst of all, by discouraging risk-taking, wealth taxes suppress investment and growth, effects that would be felt in both rich and poor countries and would likely prove especially damaging to development in the world’s poorest economies.
Recent work on multidimensional inequality suggests that the world has not been drifting toward ever greater gaps, but that the rich and the poor have been converging in material comfort. Calls for global wealth taxes or massive new aid programs often rest on the assumption that international trade and economic freedom have failed to deliver broadly shared gains. Yet the long-term evidence suggests the opposite.
The pandemic offers two lessons here: First, it highlights just how sensitive progress is to disruptions in markets. It depends on conditions that allow growth to occur and persist, including functioning markets and stable institutions. Many of the proposed policy solutions risk undermining that progress.
The second lesson is that while the pandemic represented a hurdle in the path of progress, the long-term trend toward lower global inequality is holding strong.
Alarmist narratives shape public opinion and encourage policymakers to pursue sweeping interventions that may do more harm than good. A clearer view of the data counsels caution rather than panic.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/reality-check-inequality-panic
