What is being said? What is being assumed?
6 observations
Core inflation remains persistent in key categories. Governments continue to increase spending. Money supply is still growing.
Inflation is falling and being brought under control.
Inflation may be structurally higher due to energy transition, demographics and debt levels.
What is the real velocity of money? How do off-balance sheet liabilities evolve? What happens if rates stay higher for longer?
Central bank gold purchases and bilateral non-dollar settlements have increased. The dollar's share of global reserves and trade invoicing has declined slowly and remains dominant.
The dollar's collapse as reserve currency is imminent.
Diversification at the margin is observable; replacement is not. The story may be both directionally real and dramatically overstated.
What settlement share would indicate a structural break? Which alternatives can absorb reserve-scale flows? Over what timescale do reserve transitions historically occur?
Large employers cite collaboration and culture when mandating office returns. Several of the same employers hold long commercial real estate obligations and have announced headcount reductions in the same period.
Remote work failed. Offices are essential for productivity and culture.
Mandates may serve multiple goals at once: real estate utilisation, soft attrition, and managerial visibility, alongside genuine collaboration concerns.
What does within-firm productivity data actually show? How do attrition patterns differ post-mandate? Who benefits from each framing?
Vacancy data, short-term rental counts and investor ownership shares vary widely between cities, yet the explanation offered is usually a single national 'shortage'.
There are simply not enough homes. Build more and prices will fall.
Supply matters, but financialisation of housing, zoning incentives and where homes are built relative to jobs complicate a single-variable story.
How many units are held vacant, and why? What share of stock is owned by entities that never intend to occupy? Does new supply reach the price segments that are short?
Survey instruments measuring loneliness changed several times over the periods most cited. Some long-running measures show flat trends; the most alarming figures come from the newest instruments.
Loneliness is at unprecedented crisis levels across society.
Something real may be shifting in social life, while the 'epidemic' framing may reflect measurement changes and media incentive as much as underlying change.
Which measures are comparable across decades? How does reported loneliness differ from time spent alone? Who funds the most-cited studies?
Effect sizes in large studies linking screen time to teen wellbeing are small and contested among researchers, while public discussion treats the link as settled and large.
Smartphones broke a generation. The evidence is conclusive.
The harm may be real but concentrated: specific uses, specific ages, specific vulnerabilities, rather than 'screens' as a category.
Which uses of which platforms drive which outcomes? What explains cross-country differences in the trend? What would falsify the dominant claim?