We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.
Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!
But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.
Here are the articles for the week ending 28 June 2026:
1. The State of the AI Economy – Azeem Azhar, William Gildea, Hannah Petrovic, Nathan Warren and Marija Gavrilov
$110bn trailing 12-month revenues – now at a $175bn pace…
…AI is scaling three times faster than any IT wave…
…AI demand is reigniting a moribund US power sector
1950-2008: +6 TWh/month annual growth
2008-2024: ±0 growth
2024-today: +9 TWh/month annual growth…
…Against GDP, AI revenue is still a rounding error
Still tiny: AI revenue is equivalent to 0.42% of US GDP (vs IT sector’s 9.4%)…
…Seven in ten GenAI claims focus on cost savings or efficiency
Claimed AI outcomes
S&P 500, Q4 2022 – Q1 2026
Revenue gain: 6%
Conversion improvement: 7%
Quality improvement: 18%
Throughput increase: 22%
Time savings: 23%
Cost reduction: 25%…
…Revenues cover the ongoing expense, not yet the cumulative bill
Q4 2025: Quarterly revenues first exceed CapEx depreciation…
…Still ~half-covered: cumulative revenue has nearly covered cumulative depreciation, but still has to cover the expected headroom…
…AI infra revenue now just clears today’s depreciation hurdle
GenAI revenues now cover the quarterly depreciation of AI infrastructure. Q1 26 headroom reached 19% for hyperscaler/neocloud revenues and 32% across all GenAI revenues.
Coverage remains thin. Depreciation absorbs roughly 81% of hyperscaler/neocloud GenAI revenue and 68% of total GenAI revenue before additional costs.
The next test is incremental coverage. As committed AI capex enters service, the depreciation base will rise. Revenue growth, utilization and pricing must continue to compound or headroom will compress again…
…Gross rental yields suggest useful lives extend past six years
Older GPUs earn yields long beyond their six-year depreciation life…
…This efficiency is increasing monetization per GW of capacity while revenues per token fall
Revenue per trillion tokens has fallen since its 2023 peak, mirroring price declines.
Efficiency gains drive lower token prices, which are more than offset by higher demand…
…AI demand is more revenue-validated than any prior platform shift. The investment case comes down to whether falling prices can move enough token volume to earn a return on CapEx.
2. Morgan Stanley Pitches Clients on a New Market for Data Center Loans – Dakin Campbell
Over the last few months, Morgan Stanley has suggested to clients that the next time they need to raise money for data center projects, they consider the leveraged loan market rather than the bond market, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Leveraged loans are those made to companies that don’t have investment-grade credit ratings, typically because they don’t have businesses that throw off lots of cash or they already have lots of debt. Such borrowers could include AI firms like OpenAI or new cloud providers such as CoreWeave…
…Leveraged loans are typically underwritten by an investment bank like Morgan Stanley. Most are then sold to financiers that bundle the loans into a single pool. That pool is then sliced up and resold to other investors based on their risk tolerance. These pools are known as collateralized loan obligations…
…Last month, Morgan Stanley brought the first AI-linked offering to the leveraged loan market when it sold $3.1 billion of notes on behalf of CoreWeave, which said it would use the proceeds to buy chips for OpenAI and Cohere. Investors placed more than $19 billion of orders, Bloomberg reported…
…Until now, most data center financing has been done via the bond market, either as junk bonds or—in the case of cash-rich tech firms like Google—less expensive investment-grade bonds…
…Other questions include the identity of the company actually leasing the space in the data center, and whether loans to finance chips get paid down on a schedule parallel to the chips’ expected useful life.
CLOs are a type of structured credit product, similar to the collateralized debt obligations that bundled mortgage loans and derivatives in the run-up to the financial crisis—debts that then suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses. CLOs haven’t experienced a similar blow-up, but many industry watchers worry that they contribute to financial instability by spreading the risk into corners of the financial system that can be hard to track.
3. China’s tribute system and the new world order – Ray Dalio
China is earning huge amounts of money from its exports, so Chinese companies and banks are building up large capital surpluses and accumulating buying power. This is exerting upward pressure on the Chinese renminbi relative to the US dollar and leading to its increased use for trade and capital transactions. Chinese investors and capital markets are emerging as competitors to their American counterparts…
…The tribute system was informed by Confucian values — in particular the idea that order comes from having clearly defined hierarchical roles. Relations within it are not between equals, but between superiors and subordinates that recognise their relative positions. The more powerful ones in the hierarchy should treat the less powerful well, and the less powerful should treat the more powerful well, so that there is harmony. If a lesser power treats the greater power inappropriately, the more powerful one punishes it, typically not violently but through pressure and deception. As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill”…
…A military blockade that stops chip exports is just one of many potential pressure-points that China can exploit, but it is notable because the Chinese have a plan to be self-sufficient in chip production by late 2028, while the rest of the world will remain dependent on Taiwan.
Given these circumstances, China could put the US into the awkward position of needing to choose between fighting or not fighting, with each choice not to engage leading to the perception of diminished American power, so that China can gain ground by simply making threats.
4. Is Ray Dalio correct that China is reviving the tribute system? – Arnaud Bertrand
China’s ancient tribute system – called 朝贡 (cháogòng) in Chinese – is typically very misunderstood in the West: we typically think it involved tributary states paying some form of “tribute” to China in exchange for protection – the way medieval vassals would pay fealty to a lord in Europe…
…The system was basically a quid-pro-quo where China would get “得名” (dé míng, literally “getting name/prestige”) while tributary states would get “得实” (dé shí, literally “getting substance/material benefit”) in exchange. It was about China paying huge amounts of money and other material benefits for the recognition of its centrality…
…Very concretely the way it worked is that tributary states would pay largely symbolic tribute to China (like local specialties and curiosities, the system codified that tribute should be “easy to obtain and not costly”, 必易得而不贵) and they would in exchange receive 3 layers of economic benefits:
Immediate payback in the form of money and expensive goods (silk, brocade, porcelain, tea, silver, etc.), which value was typically dozens of times the value of the tribute received by the emperor The right to trade during their tribute visit: the envoys’ entourage could trade with specially licensed Chinese merchants at the Huìtóngguǎn (会同馆, the official guesthouse in the capital) Most importantly, and that’s where the real money was, they would be granted the right to trade at Chinese ports. Under the Ming maritime prohibition, tributary status was the only legal entry point into the Chinese economy…
…He is however wrong to describe the tribute system as one fundamentally based on pressure and intimidation. As we’ve just seen, it was pretty much the opposite: the basic idea was to be so generous that everyone wants in (to the extent that countries would literally fight to be tributaries), not so threatening that nobody dares leave…
…That being said, he is ironically correct – I think – that there is some form of revival of a tribute-like system but not in the way he understands it: China will (and does) use trade – its “generosity” – as a gravitational force to pull countries into its orbit. Not by threatening to cut them off, but by making the relationship too valuable to walk away from. THAT is much closer to how the actual Chaogong system worked…
…Which, incidentally, is why you can be extremely confident that China will go to enormous lengths to develop its internal market, and why the current situation where China runs huge trade surpluses is facing mounting pressure to change from within China itself. If countries don’t feel they’re benefiting enough from trade with China, the entire logic collapses. That’s why developing domestic demand isn’t some target China sets itself to assuage Western demands, as some claim: it’s genuinely a strategic imperative.
It’s also why it’s ironic that the West is so keen on pushing China to boost domestic consumption: in effect, it means we’re already in a de-facto Chaogong-like system and they’re asking that the carrot be bigger.
5. Oil Prices Make a Stunning Retreat to Prewar Levels. Where Do We Go From Here? – Collin Eaton and Benoît Morenne
The U.S. war with Iran—and the economic war the latter waged in return—was supposed to be an apocalyptic moment for the oil market. Instead, oil prices are on the cusp of falling back to their prewar levels.
Their stunning round trip, just 11 days after President Trump reached a 60-day deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, has disrupted widespread expectations that the global oil market’s recovery would take months, at minimum…
…Tankers loaded with crude are leaving the waterway in droves; gulf countries are racing to resume crude exports; and some of the largest buyers of crude on the planet are proceeding without using as much oil. Analysts at JPMorgan Chase said this week that global energy flows had shifted in ways they hadn’t expected.
“The market has rebalanced through a meaningfully different mix of demand losses and inventory withdrawals than we initially assumed,” they said.
The reprieve could be short-lived. Some oil analysts are warning that the sinking prices don’t fully reflect how tight the market remains after months of draws on global oil inventories, which are now flirting with operational limits…
…Tanker traffic through the strait has climbed swiftly since the U.S. and Iran struck an accord on June 14. A postwar record of 78 tankers sailed through the waterway on Wednesday, up from a previous high of 49, according to S&P Global. That represents 57% of prewar traffic levels…
…Oil demand in China, the world’s largest importer of crude, appears to have fallen faster than JPMorgan analysts anticipated, implying that its economy might be adapting to higher energy prices more efficiently than experience would indicate, they said…
…Whether China picks up new purchases in the coming weeks will have a huge influence on the markets. Analysts said the country might not want to reduce its strategic reserves further…
…Over the past three weeks, roughly 2 million barrels of oil a day has come back on to the market, with Iran pumping out barrels faster than Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., according to the research firm Rystad Energy. But it will likely take until October for Iraq, Kuwait and other gulf countries that had to slash production to pump oil at full speed, analysts said.
These barrels of oil aren’t immediately available to stocks around the world, which are still being depleted.
Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. We currently have no vested interest in any company mentioned. Holdings are subject to change at any time.