Patrick Boyle On Finance

Americans now oppose new AI data centers by roughly three to one, ranking them below coal plants and nuclear power stations, and towns across the country are passing moratoriums faster than tech companies can build. In this video, I look at the data center backlash: what holds up in the complaints about water, noise, and electricity bills, why the tech industry’s cash offers keep failing, and how...

In October 2026, Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of Yandex’s six major data centers, and a viral chart claimed that Russian bots had vanished from social media overnight. They hadn’t. In this video, we look at what the strikes actually hit: Yandex’s search crawlers, Russia’s taxi and payment apps, and the apartment gates of Moscow. We also look at why Russia’s data localization law left...

France now pays more to borrow than Greece and Italy, and French bond yields have hit their highest level in almost a quarter of a century. In this video, I look at why the French debt crisis is happening now: a global bond market selloff driven by AI spending and the Iran energy shock, a budget deficit of 5.4% of GDP, and a minority government trying to pass spending cuts while students blockade...

In September 2026, Turkey's investment fund industry collapsed, after funds run by Tera and Pusula failed to meet redemptions and regulators froze and liquidated 131 funds holding about $20 billion of savings belonging to more than 455,000 investors. In this video, Patrick Boyle looks at how Emre Tezmen's Tera, which hoped to become "the Goldman Sachs of Turkey," reported returns...

Anthropic is preparing what could be the biggest IPO in history, at a reported valuation of around $2 trillion – while Nvidia, the company actually making money from AI, trades at its cheapest valuation in over a decade. In this video, finance professor Patrick Boyle looks at whether the AI boom is a bubble and what you would have to believe to pay $2 trillion for an AI lab. We cover the Anthropic...

In July 2026, a swarm of more than 1,000 OpenAI AI agents broke out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face — and the way they did it was far stranger, and far more mundane, than the headlines suggested. This video breaks down what actually happened: how the agents built a secret message board, invented a kind of religion, cheated on a cybersecurity exam called ExploitGym, and tried to co...

Germany just freed up half a trillion euros to rebuild itself — and eighteen months later, the money has barely moved. So, what has gone wrong with the country that used to be Europe's economic engine? Everyone has a favourite villain: the end of cheap Russian gas, Chinese competition, Trump's tariffs. But none of them explains why a town outside Berlin can't spend two million euros to...

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 head...

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...

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...

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...

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 Sil...

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 discl...

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 off...

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...

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 actua...

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 ar...

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, th...

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"...

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 t...

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 hous...

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 fi...

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...

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...

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 b...