March Market Insights: There is no Bronze Medal

“There’s only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.” The subtext of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s widely cited speech from late 2025 sounds like tech‑bro theatre until you reflect on it. In artificial intelligence, there is no bronze medal. There will be a hegemon and a runner‑up. Everyone else will be a client.

February Market Insights: Fortress America and the Colony Next Door

Historians are likely to regard Donald Trump’s presidency as a pivot—as significant as any in U.S. history comparable to the Jacksonian turn, the New Deal, or the Reagan Revolution. Yet Wall Street remains strangely somnolent, pricing in neither the durability nor the depth of what is unfolding. The Trump Doctrine should be seen as equal to—not subordinate to—the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 U.S. policy that warned European powers against further colonization or interference in the Western Hemisphere. It represents a new organizing framework for U.S. power that blends hard power, economic nationalism, and pro-growth domestic policy

January Market Insights: The 2026 Market Forecast

History does not move in straight lines. Markets ricochet between excess and restraint in violent cycles, a truth American economist Peter Bernstein hammered home and one investors are again being forced to relearn. The foundation for the 2026 investment thesis is that with interest payments on U.S. debt now exceeding annual defense spending, the fiscal constraint has become too binding to ignore, and structural adjustment is no longer optional. We have no choice but to adjust; the system is in a state of flux.

December Market Insights: 2026 and the King Dollar Revival

Rumors of the U.S. dollar’s decline are as persistent as they are exaggerated. In 2025, one fact stands out: The global U.S. dollar system—“King Dollar”[1]—is not vanishing. The financial, legal, and institutional architecture that makes the dollar the world’s indispensable currency remains at the heart of global finance.

November Market Insights: Wealth In A Capex Supercycle

Everyone’s talking about an AI bubble—but are we missing the real story? In his November Market Insights, James Thorne explains why the real AI opportunity can be found in the CapEx supercycle buildout

Wealth is the product of energy times intelligence: energy channeled into artifacts that enhance human life. American visionary Buckminster Fuller’s idea hints at a fire that powers value itself. As Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned, the tools we build can also build us. Our tools don’t merely enable prosperity; they reshape society. With artificial intelligence (AI) dominance now tied to national security and economic growth, policy moves—like U.S. President Donald Trump’s supply-side measures and 100 per cent expensing of capital expenditures (CapEx) through 2031—set the stage for a CapEx supercycle.

October Market Insights: Trump, Carney and the Western Awakening

A new era for Canada is about to begin.
“I read in a newspaper that I was to be received with all the honors customarily rendered to a foreign ruler. I am grateful for the honors; but something within me rebelled at that word ‘foreign’. I say this because when I have been in Canada, I have never heard a Canadian refer to an American as a ‘foreigner’. He is just an ‘American’. And, in the same way, in the United States, Canadians are not ‘foreigners’, they are ‘Canadians’. That simple little distinction illustrates to me better than anything else the relationship between our two countries.”

August Market Insights: The Unreasonable Rally

In a year marked by fiscal surprises and technological upheaval, America stands at a crossroads. The June 2025 budget surplus has upended the old narratives, leaving Wall Street’s perennial skeptics scrambling for new alarms. Yet beneath the noise, a deeper transformation is underway.

July Market Insights: The Six Months Where Everything Changed

The Great Depression of the 1930s was more than an economic collapse; it was an ideological crucible. As capitalism faltered, socialism surged, promising salvation through state control.

Today, that battle rages anew, with the U.S. Federal Reserve at its heart.

June Market Insights: The New Nexus of Power

For decades, the American establishment clung to the gospel of globalization, open markets, cheap goods, and the promise of shared prosperity. Yet beneath the surface, this grand experiment hollowed out the nation’s industrial heartland, eroded economic security, and fueled a populist backlash that upended politics from Ohio to Washington. The opioid crisis, the decay of small towns, and the anger of those left behind are not mysterious—they are the predictable fallout of an economic order designed by and for elites, insulated from the consequences of their own policies.