Someone correct me if I'm wrong but the meaning of "doomscrolling" seems to have changed from "reading apocalyptic news and feeling unable to break away from it" (circa 2020-2021) to just "scrolling for a long time".

By the way, to the rail-heads here: I rode and reviewed the Travelski Night Express. voyages.substack.com/p/travelski-...

Austrian and German central bank heads say EU fully disconnecting from the US is not a viable proposition www.centralbanking.com/central-bank...

Worth the click for the Martin Lewis-iathan alone

Nothing quite like organising the meeting with someone in GMT (Good Meeting TIme) +11 and them no-showing.

"If GPUs deteriorate too quickly for AI in data centres, then we can just use them for the cloud" is the current position of high finance.

I've stumbled upon a five-post series of summer skiing in France and it's a fascinating read. www.skipass.com/news/antholo...

Very cute.

Good thread!

Just in time for a bit of Christmas reading: Central Bank of Luxembourg governor Gaston Reinesch publishes the ninth edition of his "On political economy" essay. It's 6,050 pages long, written in four languages, and seems to tackle... Everything?

More on the ECB's post-excess liquidity operating framework from Finland's Tuomas Valimaki. He envisions structural long-term lending and a securities portfolio alongside the MRO to provide liquidity to eurozone banks. Great follow-up after @isabelschnabel.bsky.social's speech earlier this month.

Great. It isn’t even the real WLF.

I would just like to know how Cycle to Work is getting knee-capped at this point.

Evergreen quote

But where's the seahorse?

We timed the launch to coincide with our autumn conference, which is currently taking place in the famously Spanish-speaking nation of [checks notes] Brazil

1. I need @dieworkwear.bsky.social to tell me if his outfit makes sense (even if his tie is horrendously tied) 2. We’ve come a long way since the *tips fedora* meme of the early 2010s

I’ve heard good things about Masa tortilla chips but £21.50 for a bag seems excessive.

Really interesting Schnabel speech today on the future of the ECB balance sheet. Here's @lkoro.es's write-up: www.centralbanking.com/central-bank...

Checking in on Europe's pro-natalist policies: Montenegrin central bank uses monetary financing to encourage childbirth this week

USDC/USDT create an "unprecedented level of concentration" in the stablecoin market, says ESRB

I think this is the weirdest story I've ever reported. www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball...

laughs in Swift, ICANNN, etc.

👀 Rutte: I sometimes make this joke that when you buy an F-35 or a Patriot system, it’s like the old Russian joke about the Lada and the refrigerator. It will arrive in 10 years, and then they ask, in the morning or the afternoon?

Strava considering to IPO - it seems to me that they have been trying to maximise what they could get out of their old codebase but I think this is actually a case of using it because there is no better alternative. Almost all good features are paywalled & the Garmin lawsuit is not good publicity.

Grab your popcorn! The @ecb.europa.eu pushed a not-too-thinly veiled correction to PwC's estimates of how much banks will have to spend on implementing the digital euro.

My conspiracy theory is that major marathon spots (in the US, UK, Germany, Japan and Australia) are limited to keep people aspiring for sub-3 so they get in through good-for-age qualification - and in case of conscription, in good fitness.

Inflation is a crime. Economists in shambles. Where are your monetary policy levers now?!

Fortune ran a story on Steve Hanke's contribution to saving Argentina, but the more interesting broader theme that he is hinting at is the explicit use of dollarisation as a foreign policy tool - and stablecoins are just one prong of attack. Echoes of the sterling area, anyone?

While many are still focused on whether Tisza can displace Fidesz in Hungary next April, their econ head gave an interview today where he said that he believed that the country would be better off in the eurozone. He also praised the idea of a potential wealth tax.

7/End result: Macron calls for a new enlightenment -- the end of dependence on US social media. Not because of economic argument (level playing fields) but because dependence threatens national security. Hate to say I told you so but @himself.bsky.social and I did. defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

Excellent reporting by Riley here

Triathlon has come a long way

The Hungarian numbers are quite something. One interesting aspect is that for the most part, HU farmers lived off state subsidies during the 2010s and few of them used those to upgrade their methods - so when the EU funds stopped coming, they had to push prices higher.

An observation while on sabbatical, living in CET Time Zone. I get a lot more academic content on this site. I'm wondering how much more I've been missing out on by sleeping in the US.

Pour one out for the 20-something PhD at the EBA who had to define what a "meme coin" was on their new flyer. www.eba.europa.eu/sites/defaul...

I love my friends so much, they got me the #1 fashion accessory for my birthday. (Also thanks @robinwigglesworth.ft.com / @alphaville.ft.com)

David Runciman reviewing @tommctague.bsky.social 's new book in the LRB is the birthday present I didn't know I wanted.

"A source that has seen materials related to sales has confirmed that, as of August 2025, Microsoft has around eight million active licensed users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, amounting to a 1.81% conversion rate across the 440 million Microsoft 365 subscribers."

@lkoro.es spoke to the ECB’s Evelien Witlox about the digital euro. Lots of really interesting detail in here about the sorts of design choices that are now getting close to being finalised www.centralbanking.com/fintech/cbdc...

Turkey has tied itself in knots trying to avoid having to do standard inflation targeting. The result has been some very innovative (and equally foolhardy) policies... www.nber.org/papers/w34287

Going pre-recorded certainly took some of the magic away but this is a view entirely explicable by the rest of the tech industry mimicking Apple's presentation style (and many failing, see Meta two weeks ago)

I spoke to some of the participants in the @ecb.europa.eu's Digital Euro innovation platform initiative. Many reported positive experiences with the simple APIs, and came away wanting more. Conditional payments are cool!

If AI survives, prompt engineering will be the equivalent of keyword searching of the pre-AI era

You've heard of the Greenspan put, say hello to the Navarro put:

How much time will €140bn actually net Ukraine? Maybe less than Merz thinks.

I was on the inaugural service and it truly would be a shame to lose it

Brutal and enjoyable piece from @willdunn.bsky.social on Clegg's return from Silicon Valley with Views to Share on standing up to the US and how to save the internet (errr) www.newstatesman.com/comment/2025...

Christine Lagarde told a Danish radio interviewer last Saturday that young people who can't afford housing should "see locally how they can exercise their voice, express their views and obtain probably more supply".

"few [SV CEOs would talk]. ....not a single slot was available for the next three weeks, four weeks, six weeks … One CEO notorious for logorrheic gabbing to reporters told me he was trying to “decompress” on politics. “But any time you want to talk AI or AI agents, please let me know!” he said.