I did not see this coming, but my election has become an inflection point for our whole country. Today we make history.
Will you be part of this historic day by voting, calling friends who can vote, posting to social media, or making a donation?
Spread the word fellow patriots!
Per Slok, 87% of VC funding is directed at AI, 49% of investment grade bond issuance is AI, and 38% of high yield bond issuance is linked to AI.
During the internet boom, in 1999, less than 40% of VC funding was linked to internet companies.
Broadening to the wider tech-media-telecom (TMT) bubble, in 1999, VC funding for TMT hit 80% of all funding. TMT bonds were 40-50% of the high yield bond issuance in 2000 and 25-30% of total investment grade bond issuance.
Over $100B investment grade debt issued in 1999-2000 became junk by 2002.
High yield debt at 38% today vs 40%-50% back then belies the idea that today’s AI debt issuance is cleaner, backed by more profitable companies today.
As you watch Aaron Rai in the PGA Championship, you might notice he uses iron covers for his clubs and wears two gloves — two habits often viewed as golf faux pas. But both are actually inspiring.
Rai grew up in a working-class family in England, where his father sacrificed heavily to support his golf career. When Aaron got an expensive set of irons as a kid, his dad would clean every groove with a pin and baby oil after practice because the clubs meant that much to them. The iron covers became a reminder to appreciate what you have.
And the two gloves? Rai started wearing them as a kid during cold-weather golf in England and eventually became so comfortable with the feel that he never stopped.
Not gimmicks. Just gratitude… and comfort.
A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI:
“Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago.
And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.
These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society.
When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.”
This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.