temporalities

  • Socialising financial exposure

    The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8 resulted in bailout for financial institutions. When the bubble burst, central banks and states stepped in to mop up. Cue lots of discussion about moral hazard, prudential regulation and so on. The AI bubble is perhaps the first bubble that is known to be a bubble before it bursts. Everyone seems to know that the music will stop, but so far there are still a lot of dancers.

    This article in the FT outlines a circular structure of financing of AI data centres and the chips they need to be built. The financial engineering is complex:

    David Dayen writing for The American Prospect asks a good question:

    The problem is that the industry is bound so tightly with the stock market that a change in feeling from AI investors could be all it takes to generate a market-wide crash, as we’re seeing to some degree. In other words, if AI is propping up the economy, who is propping up AI?

    Based on a paper by Drall and Granato (2026), he suggests that answer is the state:

    Private equity today owns at least $1.5 trillion in assets in life insurance companies. Apollo bought Athene in 2022; KKR got Global Atlantic a couple of years earlier. As explained in a research paper by Andrew Granato, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Pranjal Drall, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, these life insurers have mounds of available capital from policyholder payments that don’t need to be paid out until the end of their lives. Private equity firms have plowed this capital into risky private credit loans that could weaken the structure of the life insurer. But if the insurer goes insolvent, the private equity firm won’t have to pay; you will.

    That’s because instead of passing through bankruptcy, insolvent life insurers have all their liabilities—in particular the policyholder claims—paid for by state guaranty funds.

    That is, it looks very much like the financial engineering discussed by the FT is is backstopped by the US taxpayer, and it has been designed that way.

  • Housebuilding since 1950

    This article in the FT highlights the historical pattern of housebuilding since 1950. In short, since the 1970s, not enough has been built. The main source of shortage is the decline in local authority housebuilding. This reinforces that the 1970s are a critical juncture in UK political-economy, as the model of post-war social democracy began to be abandoned.

  • Neomercantilism in the b-school

    Martin Wolf has written two articles on neomercantilism in the FT, here and here. This underscores the importance of geopolitics and geoeconomics is to an understanding of business and finance, both contemporary and historical. The IMF has an interesting series of publications on this, dealing with finance and development, finance and national/international security, among other topics.

    As Josh Lipsky writes in the second of the articles from the IMF above:

    Today, the ability to silo economic and national security policymaking is gone. The US is rediscovering geoeconomics and doing so within a system that also serves as the beating heart of global finance. As we’ve seen over the past five years through the rise of industrial policies, government ownership in private companies, and sweeping sanctions that reorient entire sectors and banks, this evolution is—and will continue to be—a painful and sometimes costly process.

    How will the curriculum in business schools adjust to this changing landscape? My guess is that while some schools may swiftly adapt their curriculum, many will stick to the comfort of the vanilla version of b-school education.

  • David Eggers on AI

    “He [Eggers] told the staff that the “effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic,” adding that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”

    “If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write,” he added. “And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two.””

    – David Eggers addressing the staff of OpenAI in their San Fransisco head office, Futurism, 21 July, 2026

  • Gatiss on nostalgia

    “Nostalgia is such a trap. It’s partly the reason we are in the state we’re in politically, because it’s been so weaponised. Nothing’s as good as it used to be. There’s a whole generation of people shaking their fists because of the myth of the fucking golden age.” – Mark Gatiss, The Big Issue, 27 July 2025.

  • What I am reading – 22.07.2026

    Tony White, The Phantom at the Feast (No Exit Press, London, 2026)

    |an Kumekawa, Empty Vessel – The Story of the Global Economy in One Ship (John Murray, London, 2025)

    I’m writing a review of Kumekawa’s book for Business History, and I’ll post that here when it is published.

    White’s novel is a follow-up to The Fountain in the Forest (Faber and Faber, London, 2018), which I liked. White deploys the technique of Oulipo, the use of a mandated vocabulary. He takes the Guardian quick crossword from the time covered in his novels to provide the words embroidered into the text. Both of these novels cover a strange time in British history, the period in the 1980s as the effects of Thatcherism began to wash away the vestiges of British social democratic society and economy. In this White covers a similar ground to David Peace in various novels, but perhaps especially GB84 (Faber and Faber, 2004).

    The Fountain in the Forest used parallel temporalities to gradually unfold its narrative. This is a technique that business historians only occassionally use, and perhaps could deploy more often.