Weeknotes #343

As regular readers will have realised, I often try to start these with some comment on the news du jour but I don’t really have much to say at the moment. Last week the U.S. intervened (or implied they would intervene) to prop up the yen which I guess… thanks? (ABC News) I’m not looking forward to discovering the starting price of the upcoming iPhones 18 and anything Scott Bessent wants to do to help me with that is appreciated. Speaking of the news, I appreciated the most recent episode of Geopolitical Cousins (the podcast by two geopolitical analysts, Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic). I mentioned this podcast last year but to recap: it’s a podcast where geopolitical analysts Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic discuss recent geopolitical events from the perspective of analysts who write advisory notes to investment clients. They’re clear it’s not investment advice (and I don’t use it for that) but I appreciate that it gives their discussions a different flavour to what you tend to get from…