10 Thursday AM Reads

Welcome to October! Kick off the month right with my morning reads: • A double-edged code – How AI is reshaping the global wealth landscape: Global financial assets expanded to a record $260 trillion in 2025, expanding +8.6% from the previous year, despite a challenging geopolitical and economic backdrop. Global wealth creation ran on autopilot, driven by markets, which accounted for 80% of additional wealth, while fresh savings fell by -5.4% to EUR4.1trn. (the record looks less impressive after inflation) (Allianz) • Get ready for yet another cost when buying a home: Junk fees: These fees come with different names and explanations, such as document storage fees and administrative fees. And while they have been around for decades, they are spreading, including now often being charged to both home buyers and sellers. Both are collectively paying nearly $2 billion in these fees a year, according to new research from the think tank Consumer Policy Center, which called that estimate conservative, (NPR) see also Most Home Buyers and Sellers Are Routinely Charged “Junk” Fees That Sometimes Exceed $1,000: The Most Outspoken Critics of These Fees Are Real Estate Agents Who Think The Fees Are Unethical and Can’t Justify Them to Clients. A new Consumer Policy Center report catalogs the add-on charges hitting both sides of a home sale. (Consumer Policy Center) • US Long-Term Borrowing Costs Touch Highest Level Since 2004: Thirty-year Treasury yields hit a two-decade high as the rout deepened, fed by an oil-price jump, rising inflation expectations and another weak buyback operation. (Financial Times) • Scott Galloway: Selling After Trump’s 2016 Win Cost Me 40% of My Stock Gains: Galloway dispenses with vague regret: he handed roughly a third of his gains to New York capital-gains taxes, then bought back in six months later at higher prices. Market timing, fully itemized. (BigGo Finance) • The Gap Between the Rich and the Very, Very Rich Is Getting Wider: The stock-market boom has added trillions to the top 0.1%, who are pulling away not just from average Americans but from the merely rich. (Wall Street Journal) • Potato by air: The day the dads in my neighborhood discovered drone delivery: The wild thing — aside from the fact that you can just order a drone delivery to someone else’s yard — is that each potato delivery cost 82 cents. Total. Each order came from the Walmart Supercenter a few miles away. Wing is absolutely losing money on this. There’s no minimum order, there’s no delivery fee, and the prices are the same as in-store. Wing’s not even collecting sales tax. Welcome back, millennial lifestyle subsidy! Wing’s delivery drone weighs under 15 pounds, has 16 propellers, tops 60 mph and is FAA-approved to fly beyond line of sight. As engineering it impresses; as a way to get groceries, The Verge is less sure. (The Verge free) • Mosquitoes Are a Choice:The technology to eradicate mosquito-borne disease already exists. We just have to be brave enough to use it. Malaria and yellow fever were eliminated in the US in the 20th century. Saloni Dattani on why mosquito-borne disease is coming back, and why it doesn’t have to. (Works in Progress) • Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating? Yoshua Bengio on the recent run of incidents in which AI agents misbehaved in serious ways, and what those incidents say about where the technology is heading. (Yoshua Bengio) see also Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” Ashley Belanger on internal Microsoft and OpenAI emails revealing fear of an AI “doom loop” killing the news organizations the models feed on. Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs. (Ars Technica) • Moses Itauma Is the Future of Boxing: The Highsnobiety fall cover story on the heavyweight, his Nike handler, and his new hobby of practicing French. (Highsnobiety) • The Wizard of Rock Would Like a Word: “The biggest artists in the world are female,” Todd Rundgren observes, “and that’s because of video games.” Devon Ivie on Todd Rundgren, whose Midas touch turns everything he works on into something else. “All I have to do is keep the IRS at bay.” (Vulture) Video of the day: Seinfeld’s Most Brilliant Unscripted Moments Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Omar Aguilar, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Investment Officer of Schwab Asset Management, which runs more than $1 trillion across over 100 ETFs, mutual funds, and separately managed account strategies. He has held both the CEO and CIO titles since 2022 Has AI impacted the labor market yet? Source: Ghosts of Electricity Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.