Media worth consuming – October 2026

Top five links

A Boston office tower bought for $806 million in 2019 has just been sold to the same purchaser for $260 million in a foreclosure auction.

Lawsuits have begun against several of the largest American private credit firms alleging they overcharged fees based on inflated marks.

Germany is proposing that social media sites will be forced to show at least 20% of content from a government approved list.

A house in Florida sustained substantial damage after a crane installing a termite tent fell onto it, then a second crane sent to retrieve the first also fell onto the house.

A Malaysian influencer spent $18 to buy shares in a public company, which allowed him to enjoy the buffet lunch at the AGM.

Finance

France is now tipped to be the first major European nation to default on its debts, but it would be a harsh lesson that needs to be learnt. The French population keeps rioting for more “free stuff”, but bond markets have had enough of the debt and deficits, driven by excessive government spending. French government debt now trades at the same yield as BBB corporate bonds, making its current credit ratings of A+/Aa3 looking highly optimistic.

The second most popular French Presidential candidate wants to either cancel or freeze payments on government debt. If the French think their schools are inadequate, the answer must be government mismanagement because government spending to GDP in France is the highest of the G10 nations. A breakdown of what the governments of different OECD countries spend on. African countries don’t like the credit ratings they get from the big three rating agencies, so they are starting their own one.

A former Fed economist was sentenced to 38 months in prison after he passed information to a Chinese spy for ten years. 45 people have been arrested, and a string of fund managers have been shut down in Turkey amid allegations of fraud and stock market manipulation. The debate over whether providers of stock indices have too much power when they demand basic financial market standards for including countries in emerging market indices.

China has long been suspected of shenanigans with its economic data, but its population data is suspect as well. North Korea is being blamed for the record $6.3 billion crypto hack of the Binance exchange. American trusts now provide the secrecy that Swiss Banks used to.

AI companies thought there would be unlimited capital to support their growth, but the debt markets are proving otherwise. Demand for compute has stopped growing in the last two months, with the return on capital for data centres falling. The CEOs of Broadcom and Intel admitted it may take several years to determine if the return on investment on AI spending is positive. The potential benefits of AI aren’t showing up so far in the revenue and margins of non-tech S&P 500 companies. Amazon and other data centre operators are known to be buying AI hardware they don’t have installed power to run, inflating demand for AI hardware.

OpenAI released proofs and workings on 372 major math problems. Americans are building far more AI but many European nations are ahead of the US for adoption. Anthropic is banning “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behaviour” against their AI models. If no charges are laid against AI companies for hacking into external systems, hacking is essentially legalised.

Politics & culture

The claim that fundraising is the key to winning American elections is a myth, with incumbency and gerrymandering bigger factors. The questions that Ilhan Omar needs to answer about her immigration history, her name, and to respond to the allegations that she and her family members engaged in fraud, and that she married her brother. Workers at the Obama Presidential Center aren’t happy with their employment conditions and are forming a union.

The Trump Administration is cracking down on predatory lending for college degrees, which should be a win for taxpayers and nudge students towards courses with better financial outcomes. They have also announced a program that pays a 1% commission to people who report fraud, but the conditions for payment are unclear. The European Parliament is expressing their displeasure with Trump by displaying a naked statue of him named “The Orange Plague”.

The BBC is again facing bias allegations after producing a game that encourages school children to choose open borders and net zero policies. California’s government created the Made in California Product Directory that allows consumers to search for products using race, gender and sexuality filters, but excludes filters for straight, white and men.

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has received a wide range of responses, with some hailing Navi Pillay for overcoming apartheid to have a career focussed on human rights and international justice. However, critics say she is a judge who hates Israel, runs a kangaroo court, who was complicit in the UN identifying 50 Uyghur dissidents to the Chinese government and ignored the abuse of citizens by many governments.

Western sanctions and Ukrainian attacks have left 19% of Russia’s civilian airliners grounded with the remainder dealing with fuel rationing. Australia is heavily reliant on imported diesel but has amongst the lowest reserves of it. The Canadian government is threatening legal action against an American steel firm that is laying off Canadian workers after the Canadian government’s failed tariff negotiations killed their profitability.

The proposed Australian online duty of care laws provide substantial room for the federal government to punish content they don’t like under harm provisions, with the government being clear they want to combat “misinformation, disinformation and increased polarisation”. A foreigner living in Singapore has been charged and could end up in prison for creating and posting an image of a crocodile in a popular reservoir, setting off a search for non-existent animal. A 15 year old British boy was arrested for online posts that mocked a local politician.

A Virginia man is facing abduction and assault charges after he taped his wife to a chair in their basement so he could watch football uninterrupted upstairs. French soccer star Mbappe has been dropped by several Chinese sponsors after he said he found memes involving himself and Mao Zedong to be funny. Hitler Mussolini Simeón Flores has been elected mayor of a small town in Peru.

Economics & work

The Nobel Prize committee found a strange link between the two winners for the economics prize this year, but they are both deserved winners nonetheless. A wide ranging interview with Philip Lowe, where he speaks far more freely about the need for reform and restraint of government spending than he was willing to do when RBA Governor. Taiwan’s government has showed remarkable spending restraint this century, which has helped power its economic growth to a level that surpasses many European nations. Government incentives to have more children have little impact on birthrates, but a focus on making housing more affordable might help.

More Australian residential rental properties are being leased to multi-family households, due to rents rising faster than wages. Despite a national residential vacancy rate of 1% in Australia, rental growth stalled in the September quarter with some arguing tenants simply can’t afford any more. UK landlords are being offered more than double the existing rent if they lease their properties to taxpayer funded migration agencies instead of local councils.

Just as expected, the UK raised taxes on the wealthy and saw many of them flee to Switzerland, the UAE and Monaco. Australia’s high level of job vacancies after four years of record migration points to a lack of in-demand skills amongst those migrating to Australia. Tighter requirements for student visa applicants seeking to study in Australia has resulted in a decline in the number of student visas granted. The standard way of thinking about the economic impact of ageing is wrong, especially as we age better and work longer.

Miscellaneous

A Milwaukee woman pretended to be a substitute teacher, was allocated two classes to teach and then proceeded to insult and swear at the children. A Minneapolis restaurant that operated on a pay what you want model is closing after being unable to find a way to be financially viable. Europe’s salmon farmers are switching to chicken meal as the cost of fishmeal has risen sharply. The advanced technology used to sort, store and transport cherries around the globe.

A brawl broke out in the Armenian parliament for the second time in a month. The elite American marathon runner who does most of his training miles on a treadmill. Avis billed a Canadian man for driving a rental car 17,978 miles in a week, which equates to driving 107 miles per hour for every hour, and refused to refund the overcharge until media outlets started asking questions.