Patrick Boyle On Finance

Last month Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion dollars to settle claims that it knowingly harmed teenagers — a number the press immediately called Big Tech's "tobacco moment." Wall Street responded by sending the stock up.In this video I read the actual 130-page consent judgment so that you don't have to, and work out what Meta really bought for its money. It turns out the headline figure is worth about two days of revenue, ...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is trying to force down US Treasury yields with surprise bond buybacks — and it isn't working. In this video we break down Bessent's activist debt management strategy, why doubling the Treasury's long-dated buybacks is a bet on falling interest rates funded by short-term bills, and why his old boss Stanley Druckenmiller publicly tore the plan apart in a Wall Street Journal op-ed ("Let the Bond...

Two chip stocks recently drove seventeen percent of the entire global stock market's return in a single month — which tells you just how concentrated the AI trade has become, and how exposed the average investor now is without realising it. In this video we look at how much wealth an AI crash could actually destroy, with estimates from Dean Baker, former IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath, and Oliver Wyman running into the ten...

In July 2026, the US Treasury did something it hadn't done since 1998: it intervened in the currency markets to prop up the Japanese yen — and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former Soros hedge fund manager, ran the trade in the strangest way possible, selling euros instead of dollars without telling the ECB. But this was never really about Japan. It was about protecting American borrowing costs at a moment when the US is...

Last week, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner — former FTX staffer, ex-OpenAI researcher, and author of the viral 165-page essay "Situational Awareness" — managed to lose roughly two-thirds of his $45 billion hedge fund in a matter of weeks. The margin calls arrived during his wedding weekend.In this video I break down how a trader with no professional experience raised billions from Silicon Valley, why his AI "hedge" wa...

Nikkei Asia recently reported that the five biggest US tech companies are carrying an estimated $1.65 trillion in "hidden," off-balance-sheet debt — and a lot of commentators have reached for the word "Enron" to describe the issue. In this video I look at whether that comparison holds up. It doesn't: unlike Enron, this debt isn't concealed through fraud — it's disclosed in the footnotes, it breaks no accounting rules, a...

When the United States took control of Venezuela's oil exports in early 2026, it collected an estimated $13 billion in crude sales — but the official ledger in Caracas records almost none of it, and six months on there is still no public accounting of where the money went. In this video we look at what happened to Venezuela's sovereign wealth: the missing oil revenues now sitting in an offshore account in Qatar, the four bill...

South Korea has the best performing stock market in the world for the second year running — and it's also in the middle of one of the worst bear markets on earth. The KOSPI is down around 27% from its June peak, more than 1.2 million retail accounts have been hit with margin calls, and hundreds of thousands of Korean investors have been wiped out entirely. But this isn't a story about meme stocks or worthless companies. Samsu...

Russia's war economy is running out of road. Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out roughly a third of Russia's oil refining capacity, forcing an energy superpower to ration petrol at home and import gasoline from India — while Crimea sits under a state of emergency with the air-raid sirens switched off so the tourists aren't disturbed. In this video we look at what the numbers actually say: a contracting economy despite re...

Europe's automotive industry is facing a historic crisis as Volkswagen weighs unprecedented factory closures and massive job cuts. However, the root of the problem isn't just high energy costs or European bureaucracy—it's China Shock 2.0. With Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers building cars significantly faster and for thousands of euros less, traditional German automakers are rapidly losing market share both at hom...

Ten years on from the 2016 Brexit referendum, the UK is about to appoint its seventh Prime Minister in a decade — so was Brexit worth it? In this video we break down the real economic impact of Brexit: how much it actually cost the UK economy, why the doom-laden Treasury forecasts and the Leave campaign's £350 million NHS bus were both wrong, and what the data really shows about GDP, trade, the City of London, and business in...

Last week, shortly after Anthropic launched its most powerful AI models, the U.S. government imposed export controls restricting foreign nationals from accessing them - and rather than try to verify the citizenship of every user on the planet within ninety minutes, Anthropic shut the models down for everyone. In this video we look at what actually happened: the Commerce Department's "is informed" letter, the deemed-export rules tha...

Yesterday SpaceX became the largest company ever to go public, in an IPO that values Elon Musk's rocket-and-AI conglomerate at $1.78 trillion. But SpaceX is just the first. Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed to go public, Alphabet has just raised a record $85 billion in new stock, and Meta is reportedly considering doing the same. Goldman Sachs expects as much as $675 billion of new equity to hit the market this year.For two deca...

A three-bedroom "dunger" in New Zealand with peeling paint and boarded-up windows sold for 1.81 million dollars at the peak of the boom. A few years later, prices had fallen by as much as a third in real terms, recent buyers were trapped in negative equity, and thousands of construction firms had gone under. In this video we look at how a national housing boom turns into a bust, why house prices became so unaffordable in the first ...

US 30-year Treasury yields just hit 5.2% — the highest level since July 2007. UK gilt yields are at levels not seen since 1998. Japanese bond yields are at record highs. Something is happening in global bond markets, and it's not just about inflation.In this video I explain what's driving the global rise in long-term borrowing costs, why the era of free money is probably over, and what fiscal dominance means for central bank ...

This week, SpaceX filed the prospectus for what is expected to be the largest IPO in history. The document is extraordinary — part financial disclosure, part science fiction, and part governance structure that a corporate law professor has described as offering shareholders "no votes, no sales, and no suits." We look at the numbers, the products that don't yet exist, the AI business that SpaceX's own engineers won't use, the ...

As Donald Trump and Xi Jinping wrap up their summit in Beijing with little more to show for it than a few awkward handshakes, the media is left wondering where the big breakthrough went. But as we explore in this video, the failure of the "beans and Boeings" summit wasn’t a political failure—it was a certainty. Relying on the insights of economist Michael Pettis, we break down why trade surpluses and deficits are driven...

GameStop — the meme stock famous for selling physical video game discs to people who no longer buy physical video game discs — has made an unsolicited 56 billion dollar offer to acquire eBay. GameStop is worth approximately 12 billion dollars. The offer is non-binding, the financing includes a highly confident letter from a Canadian bank, and the shares required to complete the deal have not yet been authorised by share...

Today, Manoj Pradhan of Talking Heads macro and Fundamenta capital returns to the show to discuss his new book, co-authored with Charles Goodhart, which serves as a highly anticipated sequel to their prescient work, The Great Demographic Reversal. If you thought the recent era of high interest rates and sticky inflation was just a temporary post-pandemic blip, Manoj is here to explain why the future will be nothing like the past. I...