The news was certainly dramatic. But financial and commodity markets have shrugged following the news that the US, in a daring raid on Saturday, captured Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, and brought him to New York to stand trial on drugs and weapons charges.
Monthly Archives: January 2026
US Economy Expected To Cool In Q4, Based On Latest Nowcasts
After two straight quarters of strong growth, US economic output is on track to downshift in the upcoming report on 2025’s fourth quarter, according to the median estimate for a set of GDP nowcasts compiled by CapitalSpectator.com. The expected growth downgrade is substantial, but is unlikely to trigger a recession warning, based on the current numbers.
Total Return Forecasts: Major Asset Classes | 5 January 2026
Long-term expectations for the Global Market Index (GMI) remained steady at a 7%-plus pace for the annualized total return outlook, based on data analytics through December. The forecast has been relatively stable at this level recently, rising fractionally over last month’s estimate.
Book Bits: 4 January 2026
● The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World
Samanth Subramanian
Review via Los Angeles Review of Books
Nearly twenty years ago, during a congressional debate over net neutrality, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska described the internet as a “series of tubes.” The remark became an instant meme, a rhetorical relic that suggested an antediluvian age when telecommunications depended on switchboard operators, wires, and cables.
In retrospect, Stevens’s statement was far from absurd. For, as Samanth Subramanian’s excellent new book The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World makes clear, the internet does indeed consist (at least in part) of a vast network of glass tubes—fiber-optic cables. We think of the internet as an abstraction, a view reflected in the lexicon of the data economy—the cloud, AirDrop, even the Ethernet cable. But, though cyberspace may be virtual, it relies on earthly infrastructure. The apparent weightlessness of the internet depends on very physical cables, the most important of which run deep under the world’s oceans. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s data zips through these filaments, which are only three inches wide. These threads on the seafloor are the world’s information superhighways. They are also tremendously fragile, exposed to natural disaster, marine accident, and sabotage. Indeed, the most vulnerable part of the global data infrastructure may well be the part that has been submerged.
Major Asset Classes | December 2025 | Performance Review
Global markets endured a volatile run in 2025, but when the last trades closed on Dec. 31 all the major asset classes posted gains for the year, based on a set of ETFs. As a result, outperforming passive global asset allocation strategies was unusually difficult in 2025… again. All the more so for portfolios that were heavily weighted in US assets and downplayed international diversification.