Ethan Le

Vietnam’s inflation picked up more than expected in April, as a surge in global energy prices driven by the Iran war began feeding through to transport and input costs bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

It would be the largest infrastructure project in Vietnam’s history and among the costliest rail schemes in the world. Register for free to learn why business leaders are sceptical about the railway economist.com/asia/2026/04/3…

This was one of the books that reprogrammed my brain to recognize that an interest in investing is absolutely compatible with, and indeed a high expression of, dedication to broad learning

The Vietnamese government wants to encourage private investment, which they hope will minimise graft and inefficiency. But the sheer size of the project is daunting economist.com/asia/2026/04/3…

The Yen is tumbling. That's happening because the BoJ caps Japanese long-term yields at artificially low levels via JGB purchases. These yield caps prevent the fiscal risk premium from showing up in the bond market, so instead it shows up in the currency. robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/fiscal-distr…

“The best hedge against inflation has historically been US equities:” GS’s Mossavar-Rahmani. Gold isn’t a good hedge for inflation or deflation “so the idea that gold is something you need to have in your portfolio is something we totally disagree with.” youtu.be/GF3Xs9XWkDo?si…

What I find more interesting is why it's taken the NYTimes this long to highlight this. nytimes.com/2026/05/01/bus…

Communist Vietnam is a state-run command economy in name only, the Editorial Board writes. The U.S. acknowledging that will lower prices for Americans and coax Hanoi away from China. wapo.st/42579Vf

A junior banker kept asking ‘Why do I have to use Excel?’ A tool he and colleagues created instead is used across Wall Street bloomberg.com/news/features/…

2/ Source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Via DC

The great commodities disruption ft.trib.al/kSeDG3u

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon again cautioned that a credit market downturn could be worse than expected. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, once stood out as an inflation hawk wary of lowering interest rates. But lately, his tone on rate cuts has shifted. Here’s what to know ⤵️ bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

PetroVietnam plans to import more liquefied petroleum gas from the US than its traditional Middle East suppliers next month, in the latest sign that the Iran war is reordering global energy flows bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

1/5 "Instead of seeing financial crises as arising from an unavoidable vulnerability to external shocks they are better seen as a mirror of the societies in which they occur, reflecting their political structures, vying constituencies, and blind spots." nber.org/papers/w35101

Great report on Gold future from DB: The return of history: gold, the dollar, and the monetary future. dbresearch.com/PROD/IE-PROD/P…

Very good essay by Brad Delong: "It loses the essential Keynesian insight that the problem is not that wages are sticky or that the economy has moved to a bad equilibrium but that in a world of genuine uncertainty, coordinating expectations is genuinely hard and may be impossible without external intervention." @delong open.substack.com/pub/braddelong…

Almost all other fund managers avoided communist or socialist regimes, disorder, debt-riddenness, corruption, and faraway countries of which they knew nothing. Mark Mobius took the opposite tack economist.com/obituary/2026/…

Does education expansion reduce corruption? Check out our new working paper answering this important question in Vietnam:

Why global imbalances matter again – and what to do about them cepr.org/voxeu/columns/… via @cepr_org