Disinflation has stalled: implications for the second half
The IMF has revised 2026 global inflation up three times running, from 3.8 to 4.4 to 4.7 percent. Three revisions in one direction is a signal about the model, not the shock.
Insights
Analyst commentary
Shorter notes published close to events and retained as published. Where a prior assessment was not supported by subsequent data, the original note remains available and the correction is stated in the following one.
2026
Macro
Data centre load has become a consumer price issue
US residential electricity prices rose roughly twice as fast in 2025 as in prior years, and faster still in early 2026. The data centre link is no longer speculative.
Reconstructing the tariff schedule after the February ruling
The February decision removed one layer of a four-layer schedule. Importers who modelled a single average rate are now discovering how much the composition mattered.
Assessing the transmission of the March oil shock
Brent went from 71 dollars on 27 February to above 100 within a fortnight. The interesting question is not the level. It is how much of it reaches core inflation, and how quickly.
The compute buildout enters its capital-intensive phase
Four companies guided to roughly 630 billion dollars of 2026 capital spending in a single earnings week, a 62 percent increase on a record year. The technology question is well covered. The macro question is not.
2025
Agricultural productivity has ceased compounding
Agricultural total factor productivity now grows at 0.76 percent a year against a 2 percent requirement. That is not a rounding error. It is a structural change in how the food system meets demand.
Frontloading is overstating the 2025 trade data
World merchandise trade held up far better in 2025 than the tariff arithmetic suggested it should. Two effects explain almost all of the gap, and both of them reverse.
The housing shortfall is a supply constraint, not a financing constraint
Everyone agrees housing is unaffordable. Far fewer agree on which side of the market broke. The quantity data is more useful than the price data, and it points somewhere specific.