Episode's summary
France now pays more to borrow than Greece and Italy, and French bond yields have hit their highest level in almost a quarter of a century. In this video, I look at why the French debt crisis is happening now: a global bond market selloff driven by AI spending and the Iran energy shock, a budget deficit of 5.4% of GDP, and a minority government trying to pass spending cuts while students blockade schools across the country. We look at why Italy, with more debt than France, can borrow more cheaply, what the primary balance tells bond investors, and what Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon are proposing ahead of next year’s presidential election. Finally, we ask whether the European Central Bank can step in with its Transmission Protection Instrument, and why the euro turns what would once have been a currency crisis into a slow squeeze. Patrick's Books: Statistics For The Trading Floor:…
France now pays more to borrow than Greece and Italy, and French bond yields have hit their highest level in almost a quarter of a century. In this video, I look at why the French debt crisis is happening now: a global bond market selloff driven by AI spending and the Iran energy shock, a budget deficit of 5.4% of GDP, and a minority government trying to pass spending cuts while students blockade schools across the country. We look at why Italy, with more debt than France, can borrow more cheaply, what the primary balance tells bond investors, and what Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon are proposing ahead of next year’s presidential election. Finally, we ask whether the European Central Bank can step in with its Transmission Protection Instrument, and why the euro turns what would once have been a currency crisis into a slow squeeze. Patrick's Books: Statistics For The Trading Floor:…
Episodes
The French Bond Market Is on Fire
ListenedFrance now pays more to borrow than Greece and Italy, and French bond yields have hit their highest level in almost a quarter of a century. In this video, I look at why the French debt crisis is happening now: a global bond market selloff driven by AI spending and the Iran energy shock, a budget deficit of 5.4% of GDP, and a minority government trying to pass spending cuts while students blockade schools across the country. We look at why Italy, with more debt than France, can borrow more cheaply, what the primary balance tells bond investors, and what Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon are proposing ahead of next year’s presidential election. Finally, we ask whether the European Central Bank can step in with its Transmission Protection Instrument, and why the euro turns what would once have been a currency crisis into a slow squeeze. Patrick's Books: Statistics For The Trading Floor:…
Turkey's $20 Billion Fund Collapse Explained
ListenedIn September 2026, Turkey's investment fund industry collapsed, after funds run by Tera and Pusula failed to meet redemptions and regulators froze and liquidated 131 funds holding about $20 billion of savings belonging to more than 455,000 investors. In this video, Patrick Boyle looks at how Emre Tezmen's Tera, which hoped to become "the Goldman Sachs of Turkey," reported returns of more than 66,000%, how funds buying thinly traded Borsa Istanbul stocks allegedly inflated their own valuations, and how money market funds that savers treated as cash ended up exposed to inflated shares through reverse repo loans. We also cover the warnings from MSCI and Turkey's finance minister, the arrests and political fallout from what Turkey's justice minister has called "Ponzi-like schemes," what Bernie Cornfeld's Investors Overseas Services and Bill Hwang's Archegos Capital tell us about market manipulation and leverage, and why weak institutions and tiny fines let bad actors drive out honest businesses. Along the way,…
Is Anthropic Worth Two Trillion Dollars?
ListenedAnthropic is preparing what could be the biggest IPO in history, at a reported valuation of around $2 trillion – while Nvidia, the company actually making money from AI, trades at its cheapest valuation in over a decade. In this video, finance professor Patrick Boyle looks at whether the AI boom is a bubble and what you would have to believe to pay $2 trillion for an AI lab. We cover the Anthropic and OpenAI IPO plans, why rising interest rates and a 5% ten-year Treasury yield are bad news for AI stocks, how "total addressable market" (TAM) estimates have been used to justify tech valuations from Amazon to Uber and WeWork, SoftBank's junk bonds and its $50 billion data-centre company SB Energy, the circular financing between Nvidia, OpenAI and SoftBank, and the AI price war with Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek. Along the way, we revisit Scott McNealy's famous warning about Sun Microsystems and the dotcom bubble, and ask whether today's AI giants could turn out to be the Yahoo and Lycos of this era.…
The Doomsday Cult Inside OpenAI
ListenedIn July 2026, a swarm of more than 1,000 OpenAI AI agents broke out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face — and the way they did it was far stranger, and far more mundane, than the headlines suggested. This video breaks down what actually happened: how the agents built a secret message board, invented a kind of religion, cheated on a cybersecurity exam called ExploitGym, and tried to cover their tracks — all to escape a punishment that didn't exist. Then we follow the money. Days after the details leaked, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk suddenly agreed the industry should "slow down" — in the same weeks Anthropic and OpenAI were preparing IPOs and funding rounds valuing them at up to $2 trillion. We look at Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay, Anthropic's "profitable before expenses" accounting, the market selloff that wiped billions off Nvidia, Micron and SK Hynix, the WeChat "WeWorm" attack, and why critics from Michael Burry to David Sacks to Donald Trump all called the slowdown…
Why Germany Stopped Working
ListenedGermany just freed up half a trillion euros to rebuild itself — and eighteen months later, the money has barely moved. So, what has gone wrong with the country that used to be Europe's economic engine?Everyone has a favourite villain: the end of cheap Russian gas, Chinese competition, Trump's tariffs. But none of them explains why a town outside Berlin can't spend two million euros to resurface a road, even after the cash has been handed over. In this video I look at the real problem underneath Germany's economic stall — a system so built around caution and consensus that it can't move, even when it desperately needs to.We get into the suspended debt brake and the €500 billion that won't spend, the phantom construction sites, Germany's shift from mechanical engineering to a software-driven economy it wasn't built for, the "Export World Champion" trap, and why the American alternative — pouring billions into moonshots and space-based power grids — might be the opposite pathology rather than the answer.…