Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk.
The IMF is under fire tonight after the Financial Times reports the fund passed over LSE professor Ricardo Reis for its top chief economist post — apparently because he had publicly stated that President Trump's tariffs would hurt American consumers. That's a remarkable signal about how political pressure is reshaping institutions that were built to deliver independent economic analysis.
That political climate connects directly to a broader story the FT is telling tonight about the collapse of the so-called win-win era. The post-Cold War consensus that open trade and globalization created mutual prosperity is now widely treated as naive. Policymakers from Washington to Beijing are operating in explicitly zero-sum terms, and markets are pricing that reality in ways we haven't seen in decades.
Meanwhile, venture capital is placing its bets accordingly. The FT reports that AI is rewriting the VC playbook entirely, with tech investors returning to the kind of long-horizon, high-risk moonshot bets that defined early Silicon Valley. Capital is concentrating fast, rounds are growing enormous, and the underlying assumption is that artificial intelligence represents a generational infrastructure shift — not a cycle.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
