Martijn Konings

The total number of billionaires across the globe reached new heights in 2025.

Some 2,900 billionaires now control $15.8 trillion, up from about 2,700 billionaires with a cumulative wealth of nearly $14 trillion a year earlier.

🔗 Read more: on.wsj.com/4owvufj

Your Comeback Guide to all the Anti-Cycling Arguments You’ll Hear This Year Anti-bike arguments aren’t just frustrating—they’re outdated, inaccurate, and often repeated without a shred of evidence.

“We can’t all be expected to bike.”

Fair. But that’s not the point.

“Not everyone can or wants to bike. But some people can & do—and they deserve a safe, efficient, affordable way to move through the city. It’s about freedom of choice.”

This & other useful comebacks, in @momentummag.bsky.social.

Don’t Eat The Rich! Abolish Them For Good

“As long as we allow an extreme minority of wealthy parasites to set the course for what happens to this species and this planet, we only have ourselves to blame for not even trying to overthrow and abolish them for good”
open.substack.com/pub/georgets...

How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don’t Liberalism has a serious pipeline problem.

This is a really smart piece by @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social, which echoes something I've long thought. The American right is simply better at creating an ecosystem of social mobility for intellectuals than the left broadly is...

www.vox.com/on-the-right...

Zu sehen ist ein Screenshot der Webseite mit dem Titel der Rezension sowie dem Buchcover und weiteren bibliografischen Angaben.

In „Die Asset-Ökonomie“ argumentieren Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper und @mkonings.bsky.social, dass nicht mehr durch Arbeit erwirtschaftete Einkünfte, sondern Vermögenswerte wie Immobilienbesitz & Co. den sozialen Status bestimmen. Die Rezension von Lukas Lachenicht:

www.soziopolis.de/minsky-und-d...

Opinion | The cost of Trump's bank deregulation could be catastrophic "The Trump Administration is running into that historical trap, scrapping critical bank rules and the people who enforce them at record speed," Julie Siegel writes.

www.ms.now/opinion/trum...

The Birth of Sensory Power The Birth of Sensory Power

Engin Isin, The Birth of Sensory Power: Doing Things with Words, Numbers and Neurons - @edinburghup.bsky.social, November 2025
edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-bir...

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

Such a good piece by @garethwatkins.bsky.social that really captures the MAGA ethos: "The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask: ‘what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things that I want to do?’"

newsocialist.org.uk/transmission...

How executive pay went galactic Elon Musk’s $1tn incentive plan supercharges a long history of rewards driving up executive pay

Perhaps don't go along with calling it an "incentive plan"

www.ft.com/content/01bd...

If you're still thinking about what to read over the holiday season – worry not, we've just made your choice even harder!

🎄 Our December issue is out 🎄

Our festive intellectual treats, from the meta-theory of performativity, decarbonization, green finance to the theory of money – check it out!

DISPATCH: Resistance on the Attawapiskat In northern Ontario, a region rich in mineral deposits has become a frontline in the fight for Indigenous sovereignty.

As Mark Carney continues his oil pipeline / tanker / LNG / Bill c-5 spree—

It's worth reading this dispatch from @forensicarchi.bsky.social 's Omar Ferwati & Nessie Nankivell, documenting Indigenous resistance to the "Ring of Fire" in Northern Ontario.

www.break-down.org/resistance-o...

Abundance thinking isn't just neoliberalism warmed over but a way to clear the ground for a compromise of centrism with MAGA authoritarianism. Dunkelman's NYT piece expresses that ambition very clearly.

jacobin.com/2025/07/klei...

Opinion | What the Left Could Learn From Trump’s Brutal Efficiency

"The only path forward is to lean back into centralized public authority. And that’s why the second Trump administration has the potential to slingshot progressivism into a new, brighter future."

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/o...

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

newsocialist.org.uk/transmission...

The co-founder of Kalshi says: " The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion."

Excited to see my article "The affective politics of reactionary futurism in Silicon Valley" has now been officially assigned a volume and issue in Critical Studies on Security (Vol. 13, Issue 3)! I have 50 free copies; let me know if you need one. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/4H3KM...

You just can’t fully rule out that Summers feels he’s done his time and is now stepping back into the public limelight and is the “leading economist” mentioned below. Gonna find out now…

The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism Locked out of home ownership, young adults are turning to risky financial behaviour

This is a must-read: Gen Z’s so-called "lazy" or "risk-taking" behavior is a rational response to structural economic barriers. With housing out of reach, many turn to crypto, risky bets & "financial nihilism". www.ft.com/content/c17a...

Will any of these talks be recorded?

How banks fuel the private credit boom Lenders emphasise their safety and private credit’s riskiness. In reality, the two are intertwined

"Banks provide the plumbing for the trillion-dollar private credit market, offering leverage and liquidity throughout a fund’s life."

www.ft.com/content/535b...

I had literally not come across this by @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social until today, and it made me think about how extremely difficult it has become to find items (e.g. "book that emphasizes continuity of far-right radicalism with midcentury mainstream conservatism") you're actively looking for.

Fed-Up UK Millennials Are Mobilizing to Push for Economic Growth An emerging political movement aims to make infrastructure, housing and growth cool for a generation of frustrated Britons.

British millennials are embracing an unlikely new cause: infrastructure, housing and the politics of economic growth.

Execs are embracing AI more than their employees are, new research suggests Research from HR software company Dayforce suggests that executives are leaning into AI far more than their employees.

AI usage: 87% of executives use AI for work; 57% managers; 27% of employees.

This is both easy to believe and easy to misinterpret. AI is *genuinely* useful if what matters is FORM. Terrible at SUBSTANCE.

If useful for your job = your job just form.

A 🧵

www.businessinsider.com/executives-a...

Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism Extreme libertarians built blockchain to decentralize government and corporate power. It could consolidate their control instead.

Oh hi, I wrote this in 2017.

“Instead of defanging governments and big corporations, the distributed ledger offers those domains enormous incentive to consolidate their power and influence.”

YouTube video by Thomas Flight Why AI "Art" Feels So Wrong

This is a terrific meditation on art and slop www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFit...

That the $75 million is going to the Treasury and not one of Trump’s businesses underscores that the administration has maintained a core of integrity in a highly polarized political environment.

Tech Titans Amass Multimillion-Dollar War Chests to Fight AI Regulation Some are battling state AI laws and threatening to punish candidates who oppose rapid deployment of the technology.

Billionaires Amass War Chests to Fight AI Regulation

* Goal is influence ahead of 2026 midterm elections

* More than 1,000 AI-related bills were introduced by state lawmakers in 2025

* Leading the Future super PAC has $100 million+

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/tech...

by @laurajnelson.bsky.social

VC and defence tech — a recipe for disaster? War should not be normalised as a financial opportunity, writes Elke Schwarz, a professor at the Queen Mary University of London.

Published today: my op-Ed for Sifted on why the dynamics of VC are too risky for defence. I’m grateful to the editors for letting me make this point in the ‘lion’s den’ sifted.eu/articles/def...

We welcome APRA taking action in response to the Greens’ & community concerns for the massive spike in investor lending. However, this alone won’t cool investors’ stampede of the housing market. Jim Chalmers must direct APRA to use their levers to curb runaway investor lending.