Exxon on pausing a blue hydrogen plant: "There's been a continued challenge to establish committed customers who are willing to provide contracts for off-take" due to higher blue H2 costs, industrial slowdown, economic uncertainty in EU www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Hillary Clinton blames TikTok and “totally made up” videos for young people’s views on Israel and Palestine. She says social media influenced “not just the usual suspects” but also “young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand.”

China State Council: "market-driven, government guided/steered" Biden DOE: "private sector led, government enabled" Subtle and big differences at the same time.

"State Street’s approach to climate stewardship demonstrates that it is possible for a large global equity index manager to meet the Systems’ climate expectations in ways that BlackRock has not demonstrated it is willing to do."

"...a pattern of increased lending denominated in renminbi over recent years. The cumulative expansion in CNY cross-border bank credit to EMDE borrowers (mainly in the Asia-Pacific region) since Q1 2021 reached $373 billion, amid a cumulative decline in dollar credit amounting to $257 billion"

"financial surpluses themselves don’t induce trade deficits. Accounting identities are not causal linkages. In the heterodox view of global imbalances, US financial and trade imbalances derive from the centrality of the dollar and US market in global financial and trade networks"

Bessent or Mazzucato: "Well, the equity stake, when you think about Intel, Intel was just the conversion of a grant... why don’t we have a stake? Why don’t we have the upside? We don’t have any governance there."

Setser: "reserve growth finances the US deficit when the dollar is going down, not when the dollar is up. It finances the US when US rates are low relative to the world, not when US rates are high relative to the world"

"Because of increasing insurance costs, what a homeowner might have thought was a fixed 30-year mortgage on a house that increases in value is turning into an adjustable-rate obligation covering an asset that might not find a buyer at the price the homeowner believes is fair."

"We show that rising insurance premiums, driven by changing reinsurance prices that reflect increasing catastrophic risk, are being capitalized into house prices, and may further reduce demand for properties exposed to increasing disaster risk."

"While US policy has effectively shut out Chinese vehicles from US market, the rest of the world is becoming more integrated with Chinese value chains. This could potentially leave the US auto industry more isolated and less competitive if no strategy is adopted to adapt."

Germany’s steel industry is facing an “existential crisis”, Chancellor Merz warned, as he signalled a shift toward greater economic self-reliance in Europe. Soaring energy prices made German steel increasingly uncompetitive compared with imports. ➡️ https://l.euronews.com/Mv19

Sneak peek on EU CBAM steel benchmarks (tCO2 per tonne): BF/BOF: 1.530 DRI/EAF: 1.033 scrap-based EAF: 0.288 www.fastmarkets.com/insights/lea...

These two pieces (essay from @newlefteviews.bsky.social and conversation/debate from @danielagabor.bsky.social pushing back some orthodoxy from Haldane with clarifications) pair really well together on central banks and their "independence" jacobin.com/2025/08/cent... www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

We warned you that self-driving cars would just create self-driving traffic jams, and here they are. The car industry has no solution to the shortage of space in cities. Public transit, cycling, and walking are all part of the answer, but cars are not.

Global steel capacity is forecast to exceed demand by 38 per cent. UK Steel: "It is clear that free trade in the steel industry is dead. Governments are being forced to protect their industries by China’s market-distorting subsidies and colossal overproduction." www.ft.com/content/768a...

“The 2008 crisis proved that the idea of central bank independence was at least partially a myth. When push came to shove, states and central banks would work in a coordinated fashion to ensure the stability of the financial system.”

Glad Mike is posting FMS here, it's a great way to gauge consensus, which is very important for setting prices. It's also funny how hard it diverges from objective measurements though. (Check alt text for explanations)

When states like Colorado passed policies requiring employers to disclose salary information in job postings, what happened? It increased competition, and raised wages, without harming employment or changing skill requirements. Improved functioning of markets, helped workers.

A very insightful analysis (more reports would benefit in having T-account mapping!). And highly recommend pairing it with the Odd Lots episode on AI being multiple bubbles into one.

The problem from their point of view is that rapid decarbonization requires public, collective decisions about the organization of production, in a way that threaten capital-owners' authority over both the production process and the political system.

This IMF paper finds that during and after the 2022 global inflation surge - largely driven by supply shocks - inflation outcomes in inflation-targeting countries were no better than in non-targeting countries, despite the former implementing more aggressive interest rate hikes.

BREAKING: The #StateOfClimateAction 2025 finds the world is failing to act fast enough to combat the climate crisis and secure a livable future, with no indicators of global climate action currently on track for 2030. 🌏🌡️ Read the report to learn more: bit.ly/4o6hPwm

Interesting dataset of RE cost of capital across the world www.nature.com/articles/s41...

10 out of 13 grants awarded for domestic Heat Pump manufacturing (the IRA’s Heat Pump Defense Production Act Program) are also listed. 🔌⚡ Awards for Gradient, Mitsubishi, and York International appear to be safe.

For 2 years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, not one Palestinian voice has been featured on NBC, ABC or CNN’s Sunday shows. @ahjohnson.bsky.social writes about how the U.S. media has debated Palestinians’ annihilation without letting a single Palestinian speak. inthesetimes.com/article/gaza...

China's central bank targeted lending facilities as part of industrial policy www.cepweb.org/wp-content/u...

Good background here from @tracyalloway.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social about why tech and AI companies are backing away from net zero commitments: there is no way to build Machine God quickly without natural gas. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/j...

"At its peak, the RFC’s balance sheet dwarfed the combined balance sheets of Wall Street banks... By 1934, the RFC held voting rights in thousands of American firms and was the single largest investor in the country"

Using reasonable assumptions, "a $10 billion housing construction fund could generate somewhere in the order of 300,000 units by leveraging $40 billion in private capital. A $50 billion housing construction fund could generate more than 1.5 million units." publicenterprise.org/wp-content/u...

The first point is an underrated reason for global south countries to scale renewables: by reducing fossil fuel imports dependence, their balances of payments improve, improve FX reserves, reduce inflationary pressures from energy imports and FX pressure. A virtuous cycle for further development.

Trump kills EV tax credits > reduces EV demand > Ford EV business struggles > delays in the JV battery plant > $140mm electrolyte plant in Tennessee is now cancelled www.kedglobal.com/batteries/ne...

"China’s model relies on 'a lot of state power, a lot of consumer power, but not very much financial investor benefit'" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Through GuarantCo's partial credit guarantee (65%) of a green bond issuance by a renewable energy developer, the bond credit rating increased four notches to AA+ guarantco.com/news/indias-...

"the largest banks in aggregate reported more fees from green deals than fossil fuel deals. In other words, the banks that 'bet' on the low-carbon transition netted more fees (USD613mn) from it than the banks that bet against it (USD544mn)." anthropocenefii.org/blog/the-box...

"Argentina has also long struggled to generate the foreign exchange needed to rebuild reserves and repay external debts ...a strong peso — intended to be an inflation anchor — has led to a deterioration in Argentina’s trade accounts and an erosion of Argentina’s reserves." www.ft.com/content/5f4b...

"It’s a simple recipe, really: a scorching economic message delivered by political outsiders standing up to the powerful. The villains in this narrative are the elites at the top of a broken system ... Going back to a Bernie-2016-style campaign" www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/o...

TPG, the IFC, Gates and Bono trying doing well by doing good in healthcare. You won't believe what happened next.

A really good read: analyzing the different sides of Bidenomics, what worked well, and presenting a vision forward. Many good insights: "the capital stock and the capital stack of the economy largely define what jobs there are, and the kinds of goods and services that can be made and how."

Eye of Sauron pivots from Brasilia to Seoul *TRUMP: SEEMS LIKE A PURGE OR REVOLUTION GOING ON IN S. KOREA *TRUMP ON S. KOREA: WE CAN’T HAVE THAT AND DO BUSINESS THERE

Africa Is Buying a Record Number of Chinese #SolarPanels - www.wired.com/story/africa... "Chad has imported enough solar panels to replace their country’s entire current power generation capacity." amazingly good news #renewables

Who is against building solar and wind energy? www.pewresearch.org/science/2024... www.mcgrawcenter.org/stories/acro...

Several interesting remarks from banking professionals in this workshop on how banks actually engage with their clients on net zero. It was under chatham house rule but I'm sure @ilmi.bsky.social was nodding emphatically on the 2nd point 😅 ccsi.columbia.edu/content/reth...

Very interesting conversation, many insightful remarks. "insurance is behaving as the adaptation policymaker of last resort." "Actors in the financial industry who are doing adaptation 'correctly' are basically speculators sucking us dry."

Crazy there's not even a mention to Gaza or Israel on Samantha Power's exit interview with CFR. In the FP interview, this is her answer to the question: "you wrote in your book 'my only regret is that I don't work at the State Department, so I can quit to protest policy.' So why didn't you quit?"

Housing experience in Korea includes massive supply of multi-family apartments but housing affordability is still an intractable issue. Likely better than many counterfactuals. Unclear if supply is enough to meet demand. Would be good to include Korea when comparing against US, Vienna, New Zealand.

BYD gross margin is around 20% while Tesla is 16-17% cleantechnica.com/2025/07/14/t...

RE developers fear that retroactive changes to above-market feed-in tariffs in Vietnam will "restrict the developers’ cash flow, delayed maintenance, missed loan obligations or even bankruptcies". They are planning to "take legal action against the utility, including international arbitration"

"[Brazil] would initiate a blended finance fund to mobilize private capital for the state, rather than for private owners [...] the merit of this initiative is that it appropriates the language and logic of derisking without privatizing, instead aiming to direct resources to public authorities."