GOOGLE STOCK: THE WORLD’S FAVORITE DIGITAL LOTTERY TICKET An international dispatch from the frontlines of capitalism, where a search bar has become sovereign. Global markets woke up this week to discover that Alphabet—parent to Google, the search engine that taught us to ask questions we never wanted our mothers to hear—had added another 4% to…
The Great Global Pension Pick-Pocket By Our Man in Geneva, Nursing a Negroni and a Grudge GENEVA — Somewhere between the 12th refill of the UN cafeteria coffee urn and the 17th PowerPoint slide titled “Inter-generational Solidarity,” finance ministers from 40-odd countries reached a quiet consensus this week: retirement accounts are the new cookie jar,…
Metro Bank and the Fine Art of Lending Gravity to the World By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It begins, as all modern tragedies do, with an innocuous push-notification. Somewhere between the canapés in Davos and the humid back-alleys of Manila, Metro Bank—once the plucky British challenger that painted its branches in garish “store”…
The FTSE 100: Britain’s Glittering Relic in a World That Moved On By Our Correspondent in London, Where the Rain Never Stops and the Past Never Dies Stand at Canary Wharf on a Tuesday morning and you can almost hear the clink of champagne flutes echoing from 1987—back when shoulder pads were wide, hair was…
ASTS Stock: When Space Phones Become the New Oil, and the Irony Is Out of This World By Dexter Voss, Senior Orbital Affairs Correspondent It turns out the final frontier isn’t serenity or starlight—it’s a balance sheet. AST SpaceMobile (ticker: ASTS) has spent the past month rocketing up retail watch-lists like a drunk cosmonaut on…
Open Stock: The World’s Panic Pantry, or How We All Became Amateur Preppers By the time you finish this sentence, someone in São Paulo will have panic-bought their fifteenth roll of industrial-grade aluminum foil, convinced the grid is about to collapse. That, dear reader, is the sound of “open stock” going global—an innocuous retail term…
Scott Bessent, the man who once turned George Soros’s quantum-sized headaches into a tidy 10-figure profit, now finds himself auditioning for the role of global economic soothsayer. Treasury Secretary? Perhaps. Headline magnet? Absolutely. Either way, the world’s bond traders have already started practicing their deep-breathing exercises, because when Bessent speaks, sovereign yields have been known…
Joe Lewis, the tax-haven ghost whose name now circulates through every trading floor from Singapore to São Paulo, is not the boxer who once bruised history—he’s the British-born, Bahamas-domiciled billionaire who allegedly bruised insider-trading statutes instead. Last week the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, that marble-faced temple where financial sins go…
Personal Injury Attorneys: The World’s New First Responders They say every society gets the ambulance-chasers it deserves, but in 2024 the ambulance itself is optional. From Lagos to London, the humble personal-injury attorney has metastasized into a borderless species of legal velociraptor—equal parts grief counselor, venture capitalist, and late-night infomercial star. Slip on a grape…
From the trading pits of New York to the neon-lit ramen shops of Tokyo, one name keeps popping up in group chats that smell faintly of Red Bull and desperation: Timothy Sykes. The 42-year-old former penny-stock prodigy—who once turned $12,415 of bar mitzvah money into a self-proclaimed $7.3 million—has become the patron saint of laptop-warrior…
Highmark Stadium: Where the World’s Problems Take a Commercial Break By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Nursing a Warm Beer in Orchard Park Somewhere between the rusting hulk of Buffalo’s old steel mills and the maple-lined cul-de-sacs where snowblowers outnumber children, Highmark Stadium rises like a concrete confession: we may not have fixed climate change, but…
The Landman Cometh: How a Mild-Mannered Leasing Agent Became the World’s Most Wanted Middleman By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Mention the word “landman” in Houston and you’ll be offered a bourbon and a non-disclosure agreement. Whisper it in the Niger Delta and someone will check for drones. Say it at a Berlin climate summit and…
