Supply chains that were supposed to self-correct haven't. Interest rate playbooks that worked for decades are producing unfamiliar outcomes. And the geopolitical backdrop that economists once filed under "external factors" has pushed its way to the center of the conversation.

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Every piece in this issue begins where the textbook ends. This issue doesn't chase certainty. The pieces that follow are sharper than that; they are written for a moment when the variables are moving and the only responsible thing is to move with them.

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As usual, Issue 36 is divided into three thematic sections, the first of which is “The Error Term”. Also called the residual or disturbance in econometrics, the error term is a humbling reminder to economists that the many regression models we come up with are unlikely to ever explain everything. If there is anything that we should be certain of, it is that the recent spike in black swan events has increased the importance of this often-shunted variable. Siddhant starts us off by teleporting us to the trading floor of the London Metals Exchange. He takes us through how an announcement to acquire 100,000 Tesla vehicles triggered a near-complete wipeout of an institution responsible for $85bn in daily traded value. If that figure isn’t large enough, Louis takes us through France’s crippling debt problem worth precisely €3,482.2bn, where gridlock isn’t restricted to bipartisan conflicts; rather, it extends to a trifecta of high deficits; weak GDP growth; and rising debt-servicing costs. Shalin then asks what happens when even the institutions meant to stabilise such imbalances are themselves drawn into politics, examining the growing politicisation of central banking. But the story of monetary authority cannot be understood without revisiting the ideas that once defined it. Sushant takes us back to the rise of monetarism, exploring how the promise of uncompromising control over the money supply once appeared to offer a solution to inflationary pressures, and why that promise proved harder to sustain in practice.

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The second section of this issue is "Pricing the World". The oldest lie ever told is that some things are priceless. It is also the most comforting one - and this section exists to complicate it. Not to be cold, but because the truth, when you find it, tends to be far more interesting. Samuel opens the section with a question most people settle without ever really answering - is love a feeling, or a decision? It turns out that pooling your life with someone else is not just romantic. It is, under the right conditions, rationally optimal. Dhwani takes that idea of belonging somewhere and stretches it to its most uncomfortable extreme. Citizenship by investment schemes allow the wealthy to effectively purchase nationality - bypassing the messy, slow, human process of actually becoming part of a place. It is legal, it is growing, and it raises a question that is harder to answer than it sounds: what is a passport really for? Dimitrios then puts the congestion charge on trial. The premise is simple - price the roads, clear the traffic. The evidence, as he shows, is anything but. Shreyas then shifts the lens from the street to the labour market, and asks a question that has been hovering over every graduate cohort for the past few years: is artificial intelligence already showing up in the pay packets of the people who were supposed to benefit most from their education? Deniz closes the section by asking who steps in when the banks step back. Across sixteen years of UK data, the answer is less dramatic than you might expect - but far more structurally interesting.

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As ironic as it may sound, Issue 36 concludes with “After the Fact”. Hindsight is not a weakness; rather, it is where the most honest analysis lives. The pieces in this section sit with what has already happened, and find that the aftermath tends to reveal more than the event itself ever did. Amba opens the section by challenging one of international economics' most comfortable assumptions - that trade deficits correct themselves. In a world where capital moves faster than cargo, the old mechanisms are breaking down in ways we are only beginning to understand. Matteo then asks a question that would have seemed radical a decade ago: is the petrodollar finished? As commodities inch away from dollar denomination, he traces what that shift means for the global order built around it. Saksham takes the EU-India trade deal and finds something uncomfortable beneath the headlines. What looks like economic partnership, he argues, is increasingly being driven by political necessity - and the difference matters more than either side is letting on. Janice continues with further introspection into EU trade policy. She turns to the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism - a policy dressed in green but received, by much of the world, as a tariff in disguise. The risk of retaliation, she argues, is not hypothetical. Alisa finally closes the section by putting Japan's Nikkei 225 surge under the microscope. Using regression analysis, she asks the question markets rarely stop to answer: is this grounded in fundamentals, or are expectations doing all the heavy lifting?

 

Assumptions are the invisible architecture of every model, every forecast, every plan. This issue has been, in many ways, an exercise in pulling at them - and finding that the architecture is less stable than we thought. We hope the ideas within have made that instability feel less like a threat and more like an invitation. When ceteris isn't paribus, the interesting work begins. 

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Through uncertainty, with rigour,​

Jai Vasandani
Director, 2025/26