Weekly Dispatch on AI, Geopolitics and Markets #13

The Centaur Weekly | AI acceleration, geopolitical risks, and economic disruptions are converging at the same time. This newsletter, curated by Cenk Sidar, breaks down the major news, analyzes why it actually matters, and highlights the risks and opportunities shaping power, markets, and technology.

A growing share of Americans in their 20s and 30s are channeling money into stocks instead of saving for homes, according to data reported by The Wall Street Journal. The percentage of 25- to 39-year-olds making annual transfers into investment accounts more than tripled between 2013 and 2023. Among 26-year-olds, participation rose from single digits a decade ago to roughly 40 percent this year, excluding 401(k)s. With mortgage rates above 6 percent and home prices near record highs, many younger workers view equities accessible via low-cost trading apps as a more flexible and potentially more lucrative path to wealth than ownership. Some cite liquidity, climate risk, and lifestyle flexibility as reasons to rent and invest the difference.

This is not a choice. It is displacement. For decades, buying a home imposed discipline. You paid the mortgage. You built equity. You stayed put. You did not “time the market” because you could not. A house was illiquid by design, and that illiquidity acted as a stabiliser for households and, by extension, the broader economy.

Now the entry point is closed to millions of younger people. High prices, high interest rates, weak wage growth, and uncertainty about the future of work have made the down payment feel distant. As a result, the money that would once have gone into a home is flowing into brokerage accounts instead.

At first glance, this seems rational. Equities are portable. Mobility matters. The modern economy rewards flexibility. But the real issue is not asset allocation. It is behavioural fragility. You cannot panic-sell your house on a Tuesday afternoon because the markets fell. You cannot check its price every hour. You cannot liquidate it in five seconds because a headline unsettled you. The friction is the point. It protects people from themselves.

Stocks are the opposite: liquid, fast, and emotionally tradable. Liquidity feels like freedom until everyone heads for the exit at once. When young people’s “down payment money” sits inside instantly tradable markets, volatility no longer lives on a screen. It sits directly on household balance sheets in real time. That is not good for portfolios. It is not good for mental health. And it is not good for long-term planning.

When savings are exposed to daily swings, the capacity to think strategically weakens. Major life decisions, moving cities, changing careers, starting a family, launching a business, become harder when your financial foundation can fall 15 percent in a month. A home used to function as a slow, unexciting, but effective wealth-building machine.

Neo-brokerages are making matters worse. They are blurring the line between investing and gambling. Politics, sports, Fed meetings, earnings releases, inflation prints, everything is becoming tradable in real time. Platforms are training a generation not to invest patiently, but to speculate constantly, aided by frictionless design and continuous stimulation.

After years of framing Mars as SpaceX’s defining mission, Elon Musk said this week that the company will redirect its near-term ambition toward the moon, with plans to develop what he described as a “self-growing city.” The shift brings SpaceX into closer alignment and rivalry with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which has consistently promoted a lunar-first strategy focused on building industrial capacity off Earth. NASA’s Artemis program, designed to return astronauts to the moon this decade, has already committed tens of billions of dollars to that effort, awarding major contracts to both companies.

“Elon to the moon” started as a meme. It may end up as a strategy. Musk sells Mars because it captures imagination. But he builds where capital and power align. Right now, that is the moon. Artemis carries real budget authority and multibillion-dollar contracts. Aligning with it is not retreat. It is discipline.

For the space industry, that shift is decisive. If SpaceX concentrates on lunar infrastructure, suppliers, robotics firms, habitat builders, and launch partners follow. The moon becomes an industrial zone with recurring revenue, not a one-off spectacle. Capital rotates toward projects with NASA backing and near-term cash flow. Mars ventures look distant again.

Bezos will feel the pressure. Blue Origin has positioned itself as the steady institutional player. If Musk locks in the lunar economy at speed, Bezos either accelerates or risks irrelevance in cislunar space. Expect more aggressive bids, tighter Washington alignment, and less patience. Musk’s pattern is consistent. Secure the contract. Preserve the option. Mars is identity. The moon is cash flow.

Key indicators suggest the U.S. economy is closer than at any point since the pandemic to achieving a soft landing. Inflation is easing, growth remains steady, and the labor market is holding. Core inflation rose 2.5 percent in January from a year earlier, the lowest since 2021, bringing the Federal Reserve’s %2 target back into view without an accompanying recession. Beneath the surface, however, financial strain is spreading. The National Foundation for Credit Counseling reports that the average client now earns about $70,000 a year and carries roughly $35,000 in unsecured debt, half of their annual income. Before the pandemic, typical clients earned $40,000 and held $10,000 in such debt. Missed payments are rising even among borrowers on structured repayment plans, pushing the group’s financial stress index to its highest level since 2018.

The macro data may be stabilizing. Household balance sheets are not. When solid earners turn to debt counselors with liabilities approaching half their annual income, that is not financial illiteracy. It is a structural squeeze. Costs reset higher. Wages did not. The gap was bridged with credit. Asset owners benefited from the rebound in equities and real estate. Everyone else financed that rebound through revolving balances, buy now pay later plans, and extended auto loans. The divide is no longer employment versus unemployment. It is ownership versus leverage. This is the new inequality. That is why a soft landing in GDP can coincide with a hard landing in lived experience. Growth continues, profits recover, markets rally. But households feel depleted. Not laid off. Drained. In a recent article, I called this jobless growth, or more precisely, wageless growth. Output expands upward. Risk settles downward. The political consequences of that divergence rarely remain contained.

Trump’s proposed $100,000 H-1B visa fee is reshaping hiring strategy across the tech sector and reinforcing incumbency advantages. Large companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are preparing to minimize exposure by shifting hiring toward existing H-1B holders or US talent. Many have already reduced reliance on new H-1B filings in recent years and have the legal infrastructure to reroute talent pipelines.

Startups do not. Smaller firms, especially in AI, biotech, and healthcare, lack the balance sheet and immigration counsel to absorb or arbitrage a six-figure per-employee cost. For them, the fee is not a line item. It is a barrier.

The risk is talent leakage. High-skill workers are mobile. If U.S.becomes too uncertain, Canada, Europe and Asia offer faster, more predictable visa regimes for technical talent.Immigration policy aimed at tightening labor markets may end up widening the gap between incumbents and insurgents—and pushing the next generation of founders to build elsewhere.

🌍 Ray Dalio on the Changing World Order Ray Dalio revisits the structural shifts reshaping global power, debt cycles, reserve currency dynamics, internal political fragmentation, and great-power competition. It’s a concise reminder that markets don’t move in isolation; they sit downstream of history. If you think in cycles rather than headlines, this is required reading.

🎯 Neigin Sairafi — Skill, Strategy, and Luck A framework for navigating potential and possibility. A sharp analysis for separating what you control from what you don’t. Skill compounds. Strategy directs exposure. Luck selects outcomes. In an AI-accelerated world, understanding the interaction among the three is an edge, especially as variance widens and optionality matters more than linear progress.

🧠 Career Zigzaggers Are Winning in AI. This is exactly what I covered in my article From Renaissance to Centaur Man. Linear careers were optimized for stability. AI rewards range, synthesis, and cross-domain fluency. The people capturing outsized upside are those who can connect technical, strategic, and human layers. This aligns directly with the Centaur thesis: hybrid capability is no longer aesthetic — it’s economically advantaged.
https://www.the-ai-corner.com/p/career-zigzaggers-are-winning-in

🎥Jason Fried: Build for Yourself, Keep Costs Low, Stay Small. Fried argues for profitability, autonomy, and product clarity over fundraising theatrics. In an era obsessed with leverage and growth optics, staying small is a strategic choice — not a constraint.