The battle for democratic republics Celebrations in the US for its 250th anniversary are in part a wake for a form of government in retreat Financial Times UK 8 Jul 2026 Martin Wolf martin.wolf@ft.com On July 4 2026, the US celebrated the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, whose opening words were: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Let us focus on what those words could mean in future, rather than what they meant over the past 250 years. Despite the bold claim about equality, the US created by the founding fathers was inevitably far from democratic. Some 60-70 per cent of adult white men had the vote in 1792. But women, slaves, many free Black people and Native Americans were excluded. Universal suffrage democracy was still almost unthinkable. Achieving it was a long struggle, in the US...
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Banking watchdogs issue stark AI warnings Financial Times UK 8 Jul 2026 OLAF STORBECK AND FLORIAN MÜLLER — FRANKFURT MARTIN ARNOLD — LONDON The Eurozone’s chief banking supervisor Claudia Buch yesterday wrote to 110 lenders giving them until the end of October to come up with a “comprehensive action plan” to combat the cyber risks posed by state of the art AI models. In a separate warning, the European Systemic Risk Board said modern AI models could undermine nancial stability across the Eurozone as hackers could use them to automate highly complex attacks cheaply, while banks remain bogged down by regulatory requirements, legacy IT systems and slow updates from software providers. The concerns were echoed by the Bank of England, which yesterday warned that rapid advances in frontier AI capabilities had “increased nancial stability risks related to cyber and operational resilience”. However, BoE governor Andrew Bailey said: “We are taking a different approach. We are working very close...
ELON GOES TO MARS.
Adam Jonas is in charge of Morgan Stanley’s Global Autos & Shared Mobility research team. He’s the bank’s lead analyst for 18 US-listed automotive stocks. Here’s his 2025 output: We were prompted to do the count after a second note from Jonas about Tesla arrived in as many days. Here’s how it begins: I was watching The Prestige (2006, Touchstone Pictures/Warner Bros) with my sons last Saturday night. Set in the late Victorian Era, I found many quotes by the character of Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie) elegantly capture the zeitgeist of today’s era of scientific discovery. All four quotes Jonas chooses to share with clients are from the same scene. This one: We’ll get through this in order of delivery. The bit in the scene about man’s grasp exceeding his nerve is repurposed by Jonas as a justification of Elon Musk’s $1tn compensation package, because it’ll keep the CEO interested in Tesla “at least until the 2026 midterms”. From that starting point, Jonas riffs on how a...