Category: Economics

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Business / Economics

 by Jaffa Levy

The End of Rented Software: How Artificial Intelligence Breaks the Subscription Model

For two decades, companies rented business software because building it was slow, costly, and risky. That assumption has collapsed. As artificial intelligence turns software creation into an industrial process, subscription platforms begin to hollow out: the thinking moves outside the product, the platform becomes a record keeping shell, and renewals become optional. The real disruption is institutional, not technical

Economics / Britain / Business

 by Jaffa Levy

Britain’s Economy Is Not Broken. It Is Being Quietly Mismanaged

Britain does not feel like a country in crisis. That is precisely the danger. Growth limps on, spending rises, and the system appears stable. Yet beneath the calm language, the economy is losing its ability to tell success from failure. Prices no longer speak clearly, losses are concealed, and decline is administered rather than corrected.

Economics / Culture / India / South Asia

 by Jaffa Levy

The Magnificent Indian People: Resilient, Ingenious and Let Down by a Bureaucracy Built to Control

India’s ordinary people street vendors, small traders, farmers, and informal entrepreneurs are among the most resilient and hardworking on earth. They survive through courage and ingenuity, not because of the state, but in spite of it. The real failure lies not with markets or people, but with a bureaucracy designed to control entry, manufacture monopoly, and suppress competition.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Britain / Culture / Economics

 by Jaffa Levy

Sadiq Khan Warns of Mass Unemployment. AI Poses a Deeper Threat to London

London is not heading for mass unemployment. It is heading for class compression. As artificial intelligence reshapes white-collar work, service jobs endure, elite power concentrates, and the middle quietly erodes. The result is a city that keeps working while becoming poorer, narrower and more fragile.

Britain / Economics

 by Jaffa Levy

HS2 as Mirror: How Britain Lost the Ability to Build, Govern, and Deliver

HS2 was meant to symbolise modern Britain. Instead, it exposes a deeper failure: the loss of state competence. From pandemic waste to collapsing infrastructure, Britain now pays vast sums but struggles to control outcomes. This is not a single scandal. It is a systemic breakdown.

France / Economics / World

 by Jaffa Levy

The Year 2026 Began in Paris With Exhaustion, Not Celebration

Paris on New Year 2026 did not feel like revolution. It felt like the precondition for it: exhaustion mixed with contempt, and a growing conviction that the centre cannot hold. From one Paris living room, a blunt forecast emerges: welfare promises collide with war spending, industry with energy reality, sovereignty with American dependence, and fear replaces consent as Europe’s governing tool.

Finance / Britain / Economics

 by Jaffa Levy

London Is Becoming an Industrial Disassembly Market and 2026 Will Accelerate It

London is quietly rewarding a single move: simplify, sell, and pay out. Smiths and DCC show how activists, buybacks, and private buyers turn “unlocking value” into a repeatable script. The result is not just fewer conglomerates. It is a shift in where complex industrial capacity sits, who governs it, and how long term investment survives when public markets punish complexity.

Economics / Britain / Finance

 by Jaffa Levy

Britain’s Pressure Economy: Why 2026 Will Test Housing, Bills, and Social Order

Britain is not heading for sudden collapse, but for something more dangerous: a steady mismatch between wages, housing costs, and bills. This companion analysis tracks twelve concrete indicators shaping the pressure economy beneath policing and payment systems. By 2026, the risk is not chaos, but a country where arrears, eviction, and enforcement become everyday features of life.

Economics / Britain / Finance

 by Jaffa Levy

Britain’s Quiet Crackdown: How Insurance, Courts, and Banks Are Building the 2026 Order

Britain’s domestic order is being rebuilt quietly through insurance wordings, fast court processing, data pipelines, and payment rules. By 2026 the system is likely to assume more protest and disorder, then respond not with dramatic bans but with standardised friction: higher costs for organisers, faster consequences for offenders, and more payment holds for everyone. The country changes before anyone votes on it.

Finance / Economics / Europe / United States

 by Jaffa Levy

The Shadow Bank That Wants Your Savings

Private credit is no longer a niche market for institutions. It is being repackaged for pensions and retail investors, changing how losses surface and turning opacity into political risk. This is how the next financial crisis could form quietly, far from public view

Housing / Economics / United States

 by Jaffa Levy

New York Is Being Priced Out of Itself and Mamdani Is the Answer the City Chose

New York’s housing crisis is no longer a policy problem. It is a pressure system that turns scarcity into leverage and leverage into misery. With vacancy near collapse and lower cost homes disappearing, the city is bleeding out its working life. Singapore shows there is a way out: build a pipeline, discipline speculation, and treat housing as infrastructure.

World / China / Economics / Geopolitics / India / Japan / South Asia / South East Asia

 by Jaffa Levy

The Economic Tripwires Shaping Asia-Pacific Security in 2026

Asia Pacific is entering a new phase where security policy and economic policy have fused into a single bargaining system. Defence budgets, trade law, sanctions, logistics, and digital standards are now instruments of leverage. As 2026 approaches, the next global shock is more likely to arrive through prices, compliance, and supply chains than through open war.

Economics / Britain

 by Jaffa Levy

What the City’s Debt Debate Forgets: Ordinary People Have Savings Too

A City-facing broadsheet warns that rising public debt will soon meet “market discipline”. What it ignores is a simple truth: ordinary people have savings too. When governments avoid hard fiscal choices, the costs are shifted quietly through inflation, fiscal drag, and repression. Debt sustainability is not arithmetic. It is about who pays, how visibly, and when.

World / Economics / Germany

 by Jaffa Levy

Volkswagen Leaves Dresden. Germany Leaves Its Industrial Model

Volkswagen has ended car production at its Dresden showcase factory. The move is small in volume but large in meaning. Germany’s old advantage rested on export prowess, deep supplier networks, and structurally cheap Russian pipeline energy. With that input gone, costs higher, and global competition harder, borrowing and subsidies now mask a competitiveness gap that cannot be financed away.

Economics / Britain / Russia / Ukraine

 by Jaffa Levy

The Frozen Assets Dilemma: Why the City of London Is Warning Against Using Russia’s Frozen Money

This capstone article, the fourth in Telegraph Online’s series on frozen Russian assets, explains why banks and financial institutions in the City of London are pushing back against plans to use frozen Russian state money to fund loans for Ukraine. The dispute is not about morality or support for Ukraine. It is about legal ownership, court enforceability, retaliation risk, and who pays if the plan triggers lawsuits or financial instability.

Economics / Britain / Europe / Russia

 by Jaffa Levy

Europe on a Death March to a War Economy

Europe is not being dragged into decline by fate. Its leaders are choosing an energy squeeze, a financial time bomb over frozen Russian assets, and subordination to United States tariffs and war demands, while pretending this is morality and strategy. The only sector with a clear future is the arms industry. Everyone else is being told to absorb the cost in silence.

Economics / Russia / Ukraine

 by Jaffa Levy

Ukraine’s Endgame and the West’s Frozen Assets Trap

Ukraine’s front line is breaking, Europe is talking itself into wars it cannot fight, and Brussels is trying to turn Russian reserves into a permanent war chest. This long read ties the military endgame to the legal and financial tricks around frozen assets, drawing on earlier Telegraph Online (telegraph.com) investigations

Economics

 by Jaffa Levy

What Drives Inflation Now? A Clear Explanation Using Mervyn King, John Cochrane, Stephen Miran and Kevin Warsh’s Competing Ideas

This article simplifies a subject economists have turned into a maze. Inflation is not just a number on a chart. It is a mechanism of power that decides who pays when governments over promise and overspend. We walk through Mervyn King’s warning, John Cochrane’s fiscal theory, and the rival stories told by Stephen Miran, Kevin Warsh and Christopher Waller.

Economics / United States

 by Jaffa Levy

De Dollarisation Explained: How US Sanctions and Asset Freezes Are Driving a New Multi-Currency World

For eighty years Washington could print claims on the rest of the world and call it money. That privilege is no longer absolute. By turning reserves and payment pipes into weapons, the United States has forced other states to think like risk managers. The result is not a sudden dollar collapse, but a slow tightening of the funding noose around Washington’s own budget

Opinion / Economics

 by Jaffa Levy

Britain’s Productivity Collapse And The Rentier Trap Martin Wolf Will Not Name

Martin Wolf now concedes that Britain is stuck in a low productivity, high inequality trap that threatens democracy itself. Yet when the argument reaches the point where rentiers must actually be confronted and capital controlled, he retreats into the language of caution. This long read maps the gap between his diagnosis and the regime he still cannot bring himself to break.

BRICS / Economics / Venezuela

 by Jaffa Levy

The Fleet off Venezuela : How Washington Turned Energy into a Weapon and BRICS Is Pushing Back

From a BRICS vantage point, the real energy weapon was never just Russian gas or Chinese rare earths. It was Washington’s grip on sanctions, shipping, finance and the dollar system, used for decades against Venezuela, Iran, Iraq and Russia. With U.S. warships off Caracas and new threats over oil and airspace, Venezuela has become the live test of a split world energy order.

Economics / United States

 by Jaffa Levy

How Trump’s War on Imports Turned Into a War on His Own Voters

Trump’s second term economy looks respectable on paper. Growth is positive, unemployment is low and an artificial intelligence boom is lifting Wall Street. Yet prices remain far above their pre pandemic level and Liberation Day tariffs have acted as a giant, hidden tax on everyday goods. Voters now blame Trump personally for a cost of living crisis he promised to end, and they are punishing him at the ballot box.

Britain / Economics

 by Jaffa Levy

When Britain Turns Trust into a Weapon, It Cuts Its Own Throat

Britain no longer lives from factories; it lives from contracts, custody and trust in London. That trust is now a sanctions weapon. From Venezuelan gold to Russian reserves and Arctic gas shipping, the United Kingdom is using its courts and insurers to punish enemies. Each strike hurts Moscow. It also teaches the rest of the world how to move money and ships without London.