The numbers don’t lie: 33 years of Australian superannuation
I moved to Australia as both a young man and an economic refugee. Having graduated university right as the Great Recession (AKA US subprime mortgages)…
The Benchmark
A weekly letter on money, markets and history, for investors whose interest goes deeper than the share price.
Archive · page 2
The S&P 500 in 2034? (Pt. II)
In early 2024, I wrote about whether the easy money has already been made. See, writer Richard Fisher argues that humans have evolved the capacity for…
The Modern Age of Sovereign Capital
Last month, tuning in, as I do every year, for the Monaco Formula 1 Grand Prix, I noticed a man in the Mercedes hospitality area whose name I recognised.
The quiet AI war raging in small-town Germany
Last month, I wrote about how the US secretly handed control of AI to Germany in the dying days of World War II in 1945.
All you had to do was nothing
I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a friend — let’s call him B. B was one of the first people ever to try Navexa, the investment performance tracking…
Prague: Robbed By Nazis, Communists, and Bureaucrats
I'm in Prague this week for BTC Prague, Europe's biggest Bitcoin conference. Before heading to the event though, I’ve made a stop here (credit to Navexa…
What if this is only 1996 for AI, not 1999?
You see headlines like this… And you see charts like this… And perhaps you think… It's too late. The ship has sailed.
The Cubicle Belt: The front line of A.I. displacement
The men who made the steel that built America found out they were obsolete on a Monday. September 19, 1977, to be precise.
Tax to the future
This Benchmark is about the proposed Australian capital gains tax law changes. It just won’t feel that way at first.
The 2026 Hyperscaler IPO Flood
Earlier this year, I wrote an essay that relaunched The Benchmark. I argued that the financial world had split in two: The old world — debt, policy, paper —…
This Ruinous American Toll Road Doesn't Show Up On Any Map...
Shipping a barrel of oil from New Orleans to Los Angeles costs more than four times what it does from Houston to London.
How the US secretly handed control of AI to Germany in 1945
April, 1945. The war in Europe will be over in a few more brutal weeks. While everybody focuses on the battle for Berlin, the US Third Army heads south into…
