AI can make a business more productive while weakening its claim on the profits. This week’s reading explores how competition, customer relationships, office demand, and investor expectations determine who keeps the gains from progress.

Debt is optimism with a maturity date. This week, I explored what the AI boom’s increasingly elaborate financing structures reveal about the psychology of the moment—and where the first signs of missing cash flows are likely to appear.

Markets move in cycles. Technology moves in structural breaks. This week’s exploration connected late-cycle euphoria, the rise of the “jobless boom,” and AI’s thin-client architecture. The real challenge isn’t predicting the cycle — it’s distinguishing cyclical excess from genuine paradigm change. Because when output detaches from labor and compute recentralizes, capital doesn’t disappear. It concentrates.