28 September 2026
13 new episodes (11 hours listening) published by the 50 podcasts on the list. 9 highlight clips below (26 mins total).
Investment 28 September 2026 · 9 clips
Rational Reminder
Victor HaghaniElm Wealth
Founder of Elm Wealth and co-author of The Missing Billionaires, with more than 40 years in markets since starting on Wall Street in 1984. A founding partner of Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998.
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explainer
Victor Haghani shows that if every investor held a fixed 50/50 mix, company buybacks of 10% of the market would have to lift stock prices by 20%, twice the size of the buyback.
Static holders can only sell to the companies, so the price has to rise until their remaining shares are back to half the portfolio. Elm's estimate of the price impact is about half the Gabaix and Koijen figure.
Alpha Exchange
Brij KhuranaWellington Management
Fixed income portfolio manager at Wellington Management, where he runs an unconstrained, go-anywhere bond strategy across rates, credit and currencies. He joined Wellington about ten years ago and has traded markets for around 25 years.
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explainer
Brij Khurana says hyperscalers expecting 30% to 40% returns on AI will borrow at 6% or 8% regardless, and other corporate issuers pay for it.
For a bondholder 200 basis points on a 20-year duration is a heavy loss, a cost the issuer barely notices. Debt-funded spending on this scale also makes a nominal growth slowdown less likely, which weakens the hedge bonds offer and lifts the stock-bond correlation, a second way of crowding out.
Hidden Forces
Logan WrightRhodium Group
Director of China macro and financial sector research at Rhodium Group and author of Broken China, the book the episode is built around. He moved to China in 2001 and wrote his dissertation on China's exchange rate reform.
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explainer
Logan Wright says a Communist Party economic official told him in 2009 that if Beijing announced 5% growth, cadres across the system would read it as zero.
Wright reads Chinese statistics as messages between the centre and local governments: another official called the target a fiscal and financial stability target, since cutting it would signal that stability mattered less and bring in less tax revenue. Abroad the same number carries the claim that China's rise is inevitable, so other governments should deal with China sooner.
a16z
Sarah Wang, Alex Immerman, Santiago Rodrigueza16z
Partners on a16z's growth team, presenting the firm's annual State of Markets synthesis of trends in technology, AI, infrastructure and markets.
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current issue
a16z puts the five largest hyperscalers' 2026 capex at about $780 billion, up from $416 billion in 2025, with expectations of more than $1 trillion a year from 2027.
Microsoft, Google and Amazon hold about $1.7 trillion of combined cloud backlog, the demand the spending rests on, and some data-centre components cannot be had until 2028. Free cash flow is depressed through the build, with consensus forecasts showing it recovering from 2028.
Forward Guidance
Aidan GarribPGM Global
Head of global macro strategy and research at PGM Global, recently acquired by National Bank of Canada, where his team publishes cross-asset trade ideas for institutional investors.
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current issue
Aidan Garrib reads the BLS consumer expenditure survey as showing the bottom 30% of US households account for under 15% of spending, about what the ninth decile spends alone.
The wealthy spend out of stock prices more than wages, he argues, so equity prices become a policy instrument: keeping the market up keeps a consumption-led economy turning, which he calls trickle-down markets.
Excess Returns
Ed YardeniYardeni Research
Yardeni Research, independent since 2007, serves institutional and individual subscribers. Ed Yardeni coined the term bond vigilantes in 1983 and has argued for a Roaring 2020s since putting it in writing in August 2020.
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contrarian
Ed Yardeni calls the US economy G-shaped, split by generation, not K-shaped: about a third of households are 65 or older and hold some $120 trillion of net worth.
Retirees earn more on money market funds when rates rise and have no wages tied to the labour market, so tightening that squeezes younger households can leave their spending intact. Retirees are also helping adult children who face affordability problems.
Insightful Investor
Todd AhlstenParnassus Investments
Todd Ahlsten is CIO of Parnassus Investments, which he joined as an intern in 1995. The firm was founded in 1984 and managed about $41 billion at 30 June 2026.
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framework
Todd Ahlsten counts the AI infrastructure build, token use, adoption and chip sales as settled, and puts the open questions in whether data centres crowd out the capital that homes and the rest of the economy need.
A data centre that can underwrite 15 to 20% returns outbids a household mortgage for the same capital, and with governments borrowing as well, Ahlsten suggests that could push rates up. Memory chips already priced out of entry-level PCs and phones are his early sign that AI may prove inflationary where it is usually sold as deflationary.
AI 28 September 2026 · 9 clips
The Cognitive Revolution
Jeremie Harris, Edouard Harris, Steve Hou, Joel Borgen and Daniel McKinnonGladstone AI; Silicon Data; Gamow Labs
Jeremie and Edouard Harris, of Gladstone AI, drew on interviews with about a dozen State Department diplomats who have negotiated with China. Steve Hou leads research at Silicon Data, which builds price indexes for rented GPU capacity and model tokens.
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current issue
Gladstone AI's Jeremie Harris reckons, by his own account without intelligence-community vetting, that the only demand the US could verify of China after a serious AI incident today is shutting down every compute cluster above a certain size.
Large data centres are not yet built to hide, and their heat shows from space, which makes them checkable with existing national technical means. Better verification would let the ask shrink to something like half a cluster, worth billions, but intelligence agencies on both sides take years to vet such tools, so the vetting has to start before a crisis.
No Priors
Walter GoodwinFractile
Goodwin founded Fractile in the summer of 2022 to build fast inference chips for the largest models; the company has about 150 people and plans to ramp a new platform in the second half of next year.
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contrarian
Walter Goodwin argues frontier labs cannot afford to bet alone on proprietary chips: if a rival finds a 5x efficiency gain that only runs on its own silicon, a lab could die in the nine months it takes to catch up.
The large players' in-house chips are architecturally close to Nvidia's, so Goodwin reads them partly as a bargaining chip on Nvidia's price and a claim on capacity. The asymmetry pushes labs onto common platforms, which in his view keeps room for independent vendors offering something the shared designs lack, such as speed.