Media worth consuming – April 2026

Top five articles

Separate studies from Canada and Norway both found that the revenue maximising income tax rate is 27%, with tax rates higher than this resulting in lower revenue collection by governments.

If America’s politicians don’t slash government spending, American middle income earners will need to pay much higher taxes, like their European counterparts.

There’s great irony that the defeat of Orban’s somewhat authoritarian government allows the EU to become increasingly authoritarian.

Canada has made housing more affordable by fixing its migration settings, showing the Australian government how to fix its housing problem.

A London court sentenced a thief to 27 months jail for stealing a handbag that included a Faberge egg valued at more than £1 million, which he promptly sold for drugs.

Finance

Trump is proposing a $500 million bailout of Spirit Airlines, which was blocked from merging in 2024 and then went into bankruptcy in 2025. Journalist John Carreyrou has named Adam Beck as the creator of Bitcoin, but Beck has denied it. China’s banks and borrowers are having to deal with a surge in underwater residential mortgages. When a small group of Merrill Lynch wealth advisors left to start an independent advice firm, scores of their colleagues and clients chose to follow them with $10 billion in assets added in six months.

9.2% of borrowers privately rated by Fitch defaulted in 2025, with smaller issuers recording a 15.8% default rate. 40.9% of shareholders in a Blue Owl private debt fund asked to redeem in the most recent quarter, with the manager opting to limit redemptions to 5%. US leveraged loan defaults are steady, but restructurings are falling, helped by lower interest rates and a solid economy. Private credit has been reducing the cyclicality of credit provision by stepping in the gap when banks and the leveraged loan market step back. Pimco has lent more than $10 billion to Gulf states since the start of the Iran war via privately placed bonds.

The current wave of PE continuation funds traces back to a failure to revalue assets in 2022, with fund investors being short changed as a result. Investors have good reason to question valuations on private debt funds, but the same issues apply to private equity funds. Private credit may face a downturn in the medium term, but it doesn’t have the systemic issues seen with subprime mortgages in 2008. Institutional investors haven’t panicked like retail investors have in private credit, but many still expect a shake-out on leverage, valuations, covenants and restructuring practices.

Politics & culture

Viktor Orban’s interventionist economic policies made Hungary poorer, so it’s not surprising voters got sick of him.

The inability of the mainstream media to report accurately on the Iran war is obscuring the positive outcomes. The Artemis moon mission was a public relations success, but it was well over budget and far higher risk than generally understood. The bizarre story of a British man temporarily jailed, fined and deported from Qatar over a factual Tripadvisor review of a hotel.

Tariffs encourage corruption with the Trump Administration providing several high profile examples. Trump has pardoned several wealthy nursing home owners who were convicted of fraud, angering the families of residents who suffered under their mismanagement. The detention and release after five days of an illegal immigrant who recently married a serving US soldier highlights the complexities of enforcing immigration policies when the law has been ignored for decades. Trial by jury is dying out in Western countries, with different attitudes to truth and justice making it harder to reach unbiased verdicts.

Germany’s housing minister is proposing legislation that would block people suspected of holding extremist political views from purchasing a house. The US Supreme court has struck down a Colorado law that sought to stop counsellors from supporting clients who asked for help with unwanted sexual and gender feelings. The State of New York is ignoring Supreme Court precents and threatening to fine, delicence and jail a group of nuns who offer free palliative care to all, if they won’t adopt the state’s gender identity policies. The Chicago Bulls have been called out for hypocrisy after sacking a player who publicly gave his dissenting opinion on Pride Month.

Several US states have passed laws that effectively ban third parties from communicating with government employees that union membership is optional. A fourteen year old boy has earned a spot on the ballot for Governor of Vermont, with the state having no minimum age requirement to be a candidate even though the minimum voting age is 18. A San Francisco homeowner was fined $50,000 for trimming the trees at the front of his property that were touching powerlines, even though the local council had failed to do its job and clear the hazard.

Economics & work

The US government has the largest deficit as a percentage of GDP amongst OECD nations, with profligate politicians the problem. China’s government debt is now larger than Europe’s, but is still well behind the US. Argentina’s Milei has overseen dramatic falls in poverty and inflation, in large part due to slashing government spending and money printing. Ten lessons from economist Adam Smith, still relevant after 250 years.

Elon Musk’s call for UBI for people who lose their jobs to AI ignores hundreds of years of history, in which humans have become richer and created new jobs as productivity improvements flow through the economy. The US migration crackdown has resulted in a smaller labour force but also lower unemployment and higher participation for prime age adults. Australia’s list of skilled jobs for migrants contains hundreds of occupations where no shortage exists.

The World Bank’s report on industrial policy is a surrender to populist policies and a rejection of free market policies that bring productivity and prosperity. China became a middle income country by partially embracing free markets, but if it wants to become a high income economy it will need far more economic freedom. Trump’s tariffs could be the gateway to a national sales tax for the US. If the Australian CPI included an estimate of the cost of purchasing housing, it would be much higher.

Miscellaneous

Big Tech is having a legal and PR crisis with many comparing it to Big Tobacco. With cookies being phased out, websites have turned to browser fingerprinting to track users and maximise advertising revenue. Portable drug tests widely used by US police are estimated to have a 15-38% false positive rate, resulting in tens of thousands of people being wrongly arrested each year. Ten widespread inventions that were accidentally discovered. In 2017, 120 employees of Plex went on a Survivor themed corporate retreat that went badly wrong.