Energy security and resilience require investment at scale. Financial leaders examine the policy incentives, partnerships and financing structures needed to mobilize private capital for critical infrastructure and the global energy transition. #IIFinBKK

Luis is right! Companies need to make themselves heard. Please spread the word so that the 28th regime becomes a success and truly helps European firms to scale.

🚨J’AI RAISON DEPUIS LE DÉBUT 👉Cette demi-finale contre l’Espagne n’est pas seulement une défaite. C’est l’échec d’une philosophie de jeu. Depuis deux ans, je répète que le football moderne est entré dans une nouvelle ère : celle du pressing, du contre-pressing et de la récupération haute. Beaucoup m’ont insulté en expliquant que seul le talent individuel comptait encore. Ce soir, l’Espagne a apporté la démonstration inverse. 👉Pendant tout le match, les Espagnols ont étouffé la France. Nos quatre attaquants ont été privés de ballons, non parce qu’ils auraient soudain perdu leur talent, mais parce que le système espagnol empêchait tout simplement la France de jouer. Le football moderne ne commence plus avec les attaquants ; il commence par la récupération du ballon. Celui qui récupère haut impose son jeu. Celui qui subit ne fait que courir après le ballon. 👉C’est exactement ce que Luis Enrique a construit au PSG. Beaucoup y voyaient un choix esthétique. En réalité, c’est une révolution tactique. L’Espagne applique les mêmes principes : onze joueurs qui attaquent, onze joueurs qui défendent, pressing coordonné, contre-pressing immédiat et récupération à trente mètres du but adverse. 👉À l’inverse, Didier Deschamps est resté fidèle à un football d’une autre époque : bloc plus bas, transitions, attente de l’exploit individuel. Tant que l’opposition est moyenne, cela peut suffire. Mais face à une équipe d’élite qui maîtrise parfaitement le pressing, ce modèle explose. 👉Le parcours de la France a entretenu une illusion. L’Irak, la Suède, la Norvège et le Maroc ne représentent pas le niveau de l’Espagne. Dès que le niveau tactique s’est élevé, toutes les limites du système français sont apparues. 👉Pour moi, au plus haut niveau, seul le palmarès collectif compte. Les statistiques individuelles, les records ou les titres de meilleur buteur n’ont de valeur que s’ils conduisent à remporter les plus grandes compétitions. Le football moderne ne sacre plus le meilleur joueur ; il sacre le meilleur collectif. Cette demi-finale en est une illustration éclatante.

𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝗚𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝘆 🇩🇪

IS THE ECONOMIST ALWAYS WRONG? Scandalously, in some circles @TheEconomist has a reputation as a contrarian indicator. This week we fessed up to getting a big call on oil prices from April wrong. Obviously our goal is not perfectly-hedged (and perfectly boring) predictive accuracy: often it is to stimulate, provoke, and challenge. But I did want to test that wider allegation, so I ran a series of LLM scorers across our full leader database since 2000 (7,000 leaders in all.) You can see the results in the chart below: each dot is one of the 1,400 leaders where we identified concrete and falsifiable predictions that were central to the argument. Higher = more accurate, further to the right = more contrarian. We do well, unsurprisingly, when aligned with conventional wisdom. We often do worse when truly out on a limb. But actually, on average, we are a bit likelier to be right than wrong on our somewhat-out-of-consensus calls. All round, a respectable performance. And as @ecurrnomics points out an accompanying leader, there is no shame at all in being beaten by the market: as good free-marketers we believe deeply in the aggregated wisdom of prices. Take a look at my piece here, which includes a canter through our best and worst calls of the last quarter-century: economist.com/interactive/fi…

Does money buy happiness? A Princeton Nobel laureate said no above $75,000. A Penn researcher with 1.7 million data points said yes. The day they sat down together to settle the fight, the answer they reached should change how you think about your own life. The Nobel laureate is Daniel Kahneman. The Penn researcher is Matthew Killingsworth. The fight between them lasted 13 years, and the way it ended is one of the cleanest examples in modern science of two smart people being wrong in opposite directions about the same question. In 2010 Kahneman and his Princeton colleague Angus Deaton published a paper that became one of the most quoted findings in the history of social science. They analyzed 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and concluded that emotional well-being rose steadily with income up to about $75,000 a year, and then flattened out completely. Above that line, the extra money was not buying any more daily happiness. The headline traveled around the world. Every news outlet ran the number. A CEO in Seattle famously cut his own salary to raise his employees to that exact threshold. The 75,000 dollar figure became cultural shorthand for the idea that the rich are not actually any happier than the rest of us once basic needs are met. For 11 years almost nobody seriously challenged it. Kahneman had a Nobel Prize in Economics, the sample size was massive, and the conclusion was emotionally satisfying in a way that made everyone feel a little better about not being wealthy. Then in 2021 a 33 year old researcher at the University of Pennsylvania published a paper that quietly destroyed the entire finding. His name is Matthew Killingsworth. He had spent the previous decade building a smartphone app called Track Your Happiness that pinged users at random moments during their day and asked them a simple question. How do you feel right now, on a scale from very bad to very good. The app was designed to catch happiness in the act, not to ask people to recall it later. By 2021 he had collected over 1.7 million real-time happiness reports from 33,000 adults. When he plotted income against in-the-moment well-being, there was no plateau anywhere. The line just kept rising. People earning $200,000 were happier on average than people earning $100,000. People earning $400,000 were happier than people earning $200,000. The curve flattened slightly but never stopped climbing. The famous $75,000 ceiling that the world had been quoting for 11 years simply did not exist in his data. Now there were two Nobel-quality findings sitting in direct contradiction with each other. One of them had to be wrong, and neither researcher was willing to walk away. What happened next is the part of the story almost nobody knows. Kahneman called Killingsworth and proposed something rare in academic science. He called it an adversarial collaboration. The two of them, joined by Penn psychologist Barbara Mellers as a neutral referee, would sit down together and reanalyze the raw data from both studies, line by line, until they figured out which one of them was wrong. The paper they co-authored was published in March 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the answer they reached was not what either of them had expected. Both of them had been right at the same time. They had been measuring two different populations without realizing it. When the team broke Killingsworth's 1.7 million data points apart by baseline happiness, the picture clarified completely. For the happiest 70 percent of people, more money kept buying more happiness all the way up to $500,000 a year, with no sign of slowing down. For people in the middle, the same pattern held. But for the bottom 20 percent of the sample, the ones who were already unhappy before the question of money even came up, the curve flattened almost exactly where Kahneman's original paper had said it would. Above roughly $100,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, more money did nothing for them. This is the finding that changes how the question should be asked. If you are not already unhappy, money keeps buying happiness for a much longer stretch than Kahneman's original paper suggested. The runway is wider than the world has been telling itself for a decade. If you are already unhappy, money does almost nothing past a certain point. There is a ceiling, but the ceiling is not about income. It is about the underlying state of the person collecting it. The deeper insight in Killingsworth's original research, the one almost nobody talks about, is the part that should sit with you longer than the income numbers. The Track Your Happiness app had been telling him for years that the single biggest predictor of in-the-moment well-being is not money at all. It is whether your mind is on the thing you are doing. His most cited paper, written with Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, is titled A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. The data from the app showed that people are mentally absent from what they are doing 47 percent of the time, and that mental absence is one of the strongest predictors of unhappiness in the entire dataset. More predictive than income. More predictive than the activity itself. More predictive than almost any demographic variable you could measure. Which means the unhappy 20 percent that Kahneman's plateau actually described were probably not unhappy because they did not have enough money. They were unhappy for reasons that more money could not reach. The reason the curve flattened for them at $100,000 a year is the same reason it would have flattened at $300,000 or $700,000. The thing they were missing was not buyable. The most uncomfortable line in the entire 2023 paper is the one that nobody on the internet quotes. The authors note that the relationship between income and happiness, while real, is much weaker than the relationship between attention and happiness. A person earning $40,000 who is fully present in their own life will, on average, report higher in-the-moment well-being than a person earning $400,000 whose mind is somewhere else. The fight about money was the wrong fight the entire time. The two researchers spent 13 years arguing over whether the dollar ceiling was at $75,000 or $500,000, and the data from Killingsworth's own app was sitting there the whole time saying the ceiling was not about dollars at all. The ceiling is whether you can hold your attention on the life you actually have. You can run the experiment yourself the next time you catch your mind drifting. Stop. Put your phone down. Look at the room you are in, the person across from you, the food in front of you, the work you are actually doing. That is the part the apps cannot sell you and the salary cannot buy you. The data has been clear for over a decade. The plateau is not in your bank account. It is in your attention.

Germany’s healthcare system isn’t collapsing. It’s being misunderstood. 66 reform proposals just dropped: €15B deficit. €42B in potential cuts. Everyone’s reacting to the cuts. They’re missing the real problem. 🧵

Lieber Herr Stelter, bitte entschuldigen Sie meine späte Antwort auf Ihre Anmerkungen. Die letzten zwei Tage waren – gelinde gesagt – sehr „dynamisch“. Deshalb komme ich erst jetzt dazu. Ich antworte schrittweise auf Ihre Punkte. /1

Last week, I had the honour to hold the #EugenBöhmVonBawerkLecture of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I argued that the narrative that Europe is in decline is misleading and that Europe should unlock the full potential of the Single Market by introducing a #28thRegime. 1/20

🇮🇹 The speech that all of Italy heard. And that the world must hear. In a country that will host the Olympic Games, Italian Senator and Vice President of the Human Rights Commission Filippo Sensi took the floor and said what should have been said out loud long ago. He called it a disgrace that the International Olympic Committee disqualified Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych. Not for doping. Not for violating fair play. But for… memory. For a helmet bearing the faces of Ukrainian athletes — his friends, colleagues, champions — killed by Russia. The IOC stated that the helmet “did not comply with regulations.” And then Sensi asked a question that brought silence to the chamber: Does aggressive war comply with regulations? Is there a separate technical protocol for it? The correct angle of a missile strike? The permissible size of a crater? An athlete prepares for the Olympics for years. A Ukrainian athlete trains between air raid sirens, in shelters, under news of the dead. He overcomes fear, exhaustion, and loss. And he steps to the start line not only for a medal — but for the right to exist. And he is suspended… for remembering. Because memory is the most dangerous substance. It is hard to add to a prohibited list. But apparently, someone would very much like to. The senator named names. Just a few among more than 650 Ukrainian athletes killed by Russia: ▪️ Yevhenii Malyshev, 19, biathlete — killed in Kharkiv. ▪️ Mariia Lebid, 15 — missile strike in Dnipro. ▪️ Dmytro Sharpar, 25, figure skater — killed in Bakhmut. ▪️ Volodymyr Androsiuk, 22, track and field athlete — also Bakhmut. ▪️ Daria Kurdel, 20 — missile strike in Kharkiv. ▪️ Alina Perehutova, 14 — standing in line for water with her mother in Mariupol. ▪️ Maksym Halinichev, 22, boxer — killed defending Luhansk region. ▪️ Viktoriia Ivashko, 9, judoka — missile strike in Kyiv. ▪️ Kateryna Diachenko, 11, gymnast — airstrike on Mariupol. ▪️ Karina Bakur, 17, world kickboxing champion — shielded her father with her body. These were the faces Heraskevych wanted to carry with him to the start line. So that they would “compete” alongside him. So that their dream would not die with them. And for that, he was punished. Because it turns out that the faces of murdered athletes violate regulations. But their absence on the track does not. In his speech, Sensi said the most important thing: The Olympic Committee did not lose an athlete. It lost its most valuable medal — its conscience. Sport without memory is just a show. Sport without humanity is just decoration. Sport that fears truth is not about peace. The Olympic movement was born from the ideals of honor, dignity, and unity. Yet today Ukrainian athletes must prove not only their strength — but their right to remember their fallen. And if memory becomes a violation of regulations — then the problem is not the helmet. The world must hear this. Because silence is also a position. And indifference is also a choice. Memory cannot be disqualified. And conscience cannot be added to a prohibited list. 🇺🇦 We remember every one of them. And we will not allow their names to be erased.