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Does it matter that Mark Carney wrote his excellent speech to Davos himself? In part, it matters because it is demoralising to me personally to learn that the list of jobs that I am worse at than Carney now includes not only central banker, political campaigner, prime minister, university ice hockey player but also writer. But it matters, too, because it is a reminder of a neglected truth, that writing is a core part of providing effective leadership.
Or, more accurately, writing first drafts. Margaret Thatcher delivered many speeches that, like Carney’s, quoted philosophers and drew from history to make points. And although she astutely presented herself as a no-nonsense figure, Thatcher was undoubtedly a first-class intellectual who took the time to engage similarly intellectual MPs, including discussing the work of Karl Popper with his biographer, the then Labour MP Bryan Magee. Her speeches reflected that.
Most of the actual writing was done by the playwright Ronald Millar, who built out her speeches from a rough skeleton of what she wanted to say. Leaders need not be the sole or even the main author of their speeches, but they do need to be the guiding mind behind them. That Sir Keir Starmer is mostly a supporting role in the construction of his speeches is not incidental to why his government is directionless.
US President Donald Trump’s chaotic, rambling speeches that are little more than a collection of grudges and hatreds in seemingly random order are a cause, not a consequence, of the fact he oversees a government that shares that character. Anyone seeking his favour has to work towards their guesses about what he wants — and we all see the terrible results.
There are lessons here for anyone who leads a large organisation.
An underrated part of being a good leader is that you shouldn’t have to tell people what to do all the time. Instead, they should be able to anticipate what you want and what doing a good job looks like. There are lots of ways to do this — leading by example is one — but the bigger and more complex the organisation you lead, the more important it is that people know what you want without having to ask.
The overwhelming majority of people who need to know what Carney thinks about foreign policy or what German Chancellor Friedrich Merz thinks about, say, transport policy, will never meet them. But whether you are a business, a public official, a charity campaigner or something else entirely, your job is easier if you know what it is that a leader wants and what drives them. Speeches are one of the best tools in a politician’s locker to do that. They allow a leader’s aides to shape what messages they might send out.
Beyond being re-elected and surviving in office, what does Starmer want? It is almost always unclear. He not only did not write the two biggest speeches of his first year in office — his “things will get worse” Rose Garden address and his “island of strangers” speech on migration — but has since disavowed them in conversation with his biographer. In government that is a recipe for confusion and backbiting, for the civil service to lapse not into governing but instead to focus on managing relationships between departments and stakeholders. No one can plan sensibly when the head of the government gives such mixed messages and confusing signals.
By a good speech I don’t mean one I agree with, but one that provides a clear argument and direction. I agreed with Carney’s speech, but what made it good wasn’t the precise content of his arguments but that he set them out clearly and lucidly in a way that anyone can follow and understand. Plenty of speeches have good jokes or tickle the prejudices of their audience, but what truly makes a good speech is one that people can read and then go out into the world with a better understanding of what their leader expects them to do.
For the leader of an organisation, their internal communications are their speeches, sometimes literally, or sometimes metaphorically through global emails or updates on Slack. Leaders who lack confidence in their writing skills should avail themselves of some kind of redrafting system, whether through an aide or by asking ChatGPT to spruce up their ideas. But they shouldn’t fall into the Starmer trap of outsourcing the entire process. The first draft has to come from what the boss actually wants their organisation to do and what they want those working for and with it to understand.
Not every prime minister or CEO needs to be able to weave in classical philosophers, but they do need to be able to set out a vision and a direction that others can follow.
Norway’s defence minister looks at one of his favourite maps — showing the world from the perspective of the Arctic.
Tore Sandvik points to Russia’s Kola Peninsula, home to one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, which sits inside the Arctic Circle just across the border from northern Norway.
The shortest flight path of a projectile launched from Kola towards major US cities on both coasts is over the Arctic, close to the North Pole and Greenland, he adds.
“An intercontinental ballistic missile comes down with a speed of 7km per second, it takes 18 minutes from launch until it reaches a major US city,” he said.
“This is homeland defence,” he added. “That’s why we’re putting this on the table for President Trump and when we meet allies. This is homeland defence [for the US], for London, for Paris, for Berlin, for all of the alliance.”
US President Donald Trump has put an aggressive and at times uncomfortable focus on Greenland in the past year with his forceful pursuit of the Danish Arctic island.
But in agreeing a “framework” of a deal on the world’s largest island with Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte last week, Trump has shifted the focus in the alliance to Arctic security — a subject Nordic countries have been pushing for decades.
“Nato must increase its engagement in the Arctic,” said Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister. “Defence and security in the Arctic is a matter for the entire alliance.”
For the five Nordic countries — all Arctic states — that represents a chance to get the geopolitical discussion back to where they want to: the threat coming from Russia.
Nearly all Arctic states, Russia included, cut back on their military presence after the end of the cold war, closing bases. The US shut several in Greenland and Iceland.
But Russia started the military and economic revitalisation of the Arctic much earlier than western powers, led by President Vladimir Putin in the 2000s.
Russia controls about half of the Arctic’s landmass and waters, giving it by far the largest footprint of the eight countries with a presence in the region, which includes the US and Canada as well as the five Nordics.
Today Moscow has more than 40 military facilities along the Arctic coast, including military bases, airfields, radar stations and ports.
The Arctic plays a critical role in Moscow’s nuclear doctrine. It is home to Russia’s Northern Fleet, based in Severomorsk on the Kola Peninsula, which operates six of the country’s 12 nuclear-armed submarines, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“The Northern Fleet, and in particular its submarines, is a pillar of Russia’s strategic deterrence. Because of its importance, the fleet is still being modernised,” said Ondrej Ditrych, senior Russia analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies.
Russia also maintains a high level of readiness at its nuclear testing site on Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic archipelago where last October it tested its nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile. It is also promoting the use of the Northern Sea Route, which runs over the top of Russia and offers the prospect of far shorter shipping times between China and Europe, although traffic numbers are below target.
The Nordic neighbours to Russia have watched this development with growing concern, urging Nato to become more involved, with relatively little success in part because of opposition from the likes of the US.
“We know that the Russians are having more activity in the north. The security situation is also that when the polar ice is melting, China is rising as a regional hegemon but with global interests. They have self-proclaimed themselves as a near-Arctic nation,” Sandvik said.
A senior official from another Nordic country added: “The concentration of military resources in our neighbourhood is rather huge.”
Nato’s most senior military officer, Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, told the FT in October that the Arctic was “of great interest” to the military alliance, which was committed to keeping it open for free navigation and nascent business opportunities such as mining and oil and gas exploration.
Several Nato members have intensified training in Arctic conditions in Norway, Finland and Greenland, including the US, UK and France. In March, about 25,000 soldiers from across the alliance — including 4,000 from the US — will take part in the Cold Response exercise in northern Norway, aimed to practise air, sea and land warfare in harsh winter conditions.
As well as trying to refocus US attention on the threat from Russia, the Nordics also hope renewed attention on Arctic security will allow them to show off their usefulness to Washington.
There are two crucial sections of sea where Nato and Russia would jostle for control in any conflict in the Arctic: the better-known GIUK gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK; and the so-called Bear Gap between the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and its mainland, ending close to the Kola Peninsula.
Sandvik said Norway uses P8 reconnaissance planes as well as satellites, long-range drones, submarines and frigates to monitor the Bear Gap and elsewhere. “This is the way Nato thinks about defending this area in the time of a hot crisis. But, most of all, we’re doing this to avoid escalation and to deter Russia,” he added.
A senior Nordic official added that the US depended on this intelligence: “It’s definitely a two-way street. We have good situational awareness about what Russia is doing on their side of the border. The US can also use our airspace to monitor Russia.”
Much of the interest in the Arctic is in monitoring what could be coming through the air or underwater, rather than preparing for action on land. “Greenland is impossible to ‘invade’. You could take Nuuk. But 95 per cent of it is snow and ice, and you can’t take that,” said a Danish official.
Trump in particular seems to be eyeing Greenland for his proposed Golden Dome missile defence system, which would use sensors, satellites and interceptors to stop various projectiles from reaching the US.
The US runs the main military facility on the Arctic island, the Pituffik space base in the far north-west, used for early-warning radar systems.
Many in the Nordics worry, however, that there is an inexorable logic to the militarisation of the Arctic, hitherto one of the few regions of the world able to be classified as “low tension”. They stress that the region is home to millions of people, many of them indigenous as in Greenland.
“My concern is that security is dominating the Arctic agenda, and we forget that there are other issues that are just as important such as climate change, infrastructure, the rights of indigenous people,” said another senior Nordic official. “There’s not a lot to gain from the militarisation of the Arctic because it’s such a difficult area for activity.”
For now, there is also recognition that Russia’s war in Ukraine has slowed its military build-up in the Arctic. “The actual force presence in Arctic military sites has gone down as some of the Arctic brigades were deployed to Ukraine and sustained heavy losses,” said Ditrych.
But there is also a recognition that both Russia and China are willing to play a long game in a region where melting ice can change the military and economic calculus over decades. “It’s a race in strategic competition in the Arctic,” said Sandvik.
Cartography by Steven Bernard
Big Tech borrowing spree raises fears of AI
risks in US bond market
Big Tech companies are on track to dominate borrowing in the US bond market, in a shift that could expose some of the world’s safest securities to greater risk from artificial intelligence.
By 2030, half of the 10 largest borrowers in the US investment-grade corporate bond market will be so-called hyperscalers — companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle that are building colossal data centres — according to Apollo Global Management.
Until now, the major borrowers in the league table have mostly been big banks and telecom companies, meaning that credit investors are largely insulated from shocks in the tech-dominated stock market.
Investors have grown increasingly concerned that the gap between runaway capital expenditure on AI and the returns it generates could amount to a bubble that ultimately hits both equities and the credit market.
Market participants also worry that AI exposure is greater than it might at first appear because the investment boom has also boosted demand in associated sectors such as utilities and industrials.
“What appears diversified across issuers and sectors increasingly represents a single macro trade on AI,” Apollo analysts wrote in the firm’s 2026 credit outlook report.
Morgan Stanley estimates that hyperscalers and their adjacent companies will raise $400bn from the US high-grade market in 2026, a dramatic increase from $170bn last year and just $44bn in 2024.
By contrast, banks are likely to borrow less because of regulatory changes that allow them to hold less capital on their balance sheets.
JP Morgan says the AI and data centre-related sector now makes up 14.5 per cent of the JPMorgan US Liquid Index — a benchmark for the nearly $10tn US investment-grade bond market — bigger than the share accounted for by banks.
While the bank has only tracked the sector since last year, it is growing quickly and JPMorgan forecasts it could account for more than a fifth of the index by 2030.
Lauren Wagandt, a portfolio manager at T Rowe Price, added that hyperscalers’ rapid AI expansion could increase volatility in the previously sleepy high-grade bond market.
“It’s probably a bad thing if we’re more correlated to equity and becoming less of a diversifier than in the past,” she said.
The surge in AI-related bond issuance has already pushed up borrowing costs for the most indebted companies.
Oracle’s credit spread — the premium investors demand to hold its bonds relative to US Treasuries — jumped more than 0.75 percentage points after it borrowed $18bn from the bond market in September, according to S&P Global data.
“If [hyperscalers] have to borrow $10bn every quarter for the rest of the year, how is the market going to react?” said Dominique Toublan, head of US credit strategy at Barclays, which has an underweight stance on the US tech sector.
But Nathaniel Rosenbaum, strategist on the US high-grade credit team at JPMorgan, said that the hyperscalers’ strong credit ratings made the surge in issuance “a net positive for ratings in the investment-grade universe”.
Cash-rich companies such as Alphabet and Meta still have plenty of room to increase their borrowing without harming their credit ratings, added John Lloyd, global head of multi-sector credit at Janus Henderson Investors.
“If AI blows up, it will be bad for their equity, but their credit would likely still be very solid,” Lloyd said.
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