OCTOBER 2026 INSIGHTS

OCTOBER 2026 MONTHLY INSIGHTS

September came and went without a post — too much was happening to write about it. October more than compensates. 

The past two months have delivered a density of signals that is harder than usual to ignore: a munitions constraint that is already shaping the geometry of US foreign policy, a structural shift in global trade that has been building for years and is very visible in the data, and an economy — China's — that is deflating in slow motion while the world's attention is elsewhere. Beneath all of it, the same question I keep returning to: what does stability look like when the systems we are building it on are being renegotiated simultaneously?

What I've learned about the context

• Nearly 40% of Indian graduates aged 15–25 are unemployed, according to a 2026 study by Azim Premji University. 

• Private sector engagement in World Bank projects has expanded from $32 billion to $112 billion in three years — even as the bank's direct project funding has remained flat at $123 billion. (via Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group)

• The Pentagon has used more than 1,500 Patriot interceptor missiles in the Iran war and has fewer than 1,700 left. The US produced roughly 600 in all of 2025. (NYTimes)

• Most of the French and Dutch central banks have moved significant portions of their gold bullion out of New York over the past year. (BBC, GIS)

• The rules governing global shipping are breaking down. The battle for the Strait of Hormuz, the pandemic, and Western sanctions have created not "episodic shocks" but "signals of a structural shift in the operating environment of global trade." (Consultative Shipping Group, whose members represent more than a fifth of global trade by tonnage)

• Sanctions on Russia and Iran have driven the growth of a shadow fleet now exceeding 1,500 vessels — nearly a fifth of the global tanker fleet, almost all uninsured. (TankerTrackers.com)

• By end of 2026, the Eurasia Group estimates there will have been 300 attacks on shipping. That is as many attacks in one year as the total number since 1990.

• More money is now spent servicing the national debt than on defence in the UK, France, and the US — and in more than a dozen other OECD member states.

• China's economy is in a deflationary spiral. Youth unemployment (excluding students) reached 18.9% in August. Domestic car sales fell 20% from a year previously; housing sales fell a further 14%. (NYTimes)

• Business investment in the US is on track to rise more than three times faster than in Europe in the six years since the pandemic, highlighting an AI-driven gap. (Oxford Economics)

• Natural catastrophes are expected to cost the world $450bn in a typical year, with as much as 62% of global losses uninsured. North America accounts for half the total. (Verisk, FT)

• The top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 (of which eight are tech companies) are worth more than $1 trillion together. Combined, they account for over 40% of the index, up from less than 20% a decade ago. (FT)

• CIA Director John Ratcliffe has likened AI to "digital nuclear weapons." (NYTimes)

What I've learned about people

• "In life and leadership, we are always building two things at once: the result and the conditions. The result is this quarter, this match, this point. The conditions — the belief, the shared purpose, the permission to be honest — are what remain long after we have left the court, and what the next generation of leaders will inherit without ever knowing our names." (Scott Osman)

• When I was in Afghanistan, and somebody gave me an intelligence brief, I trusted the person, not the information they were telling me.” (Katie Muldoon, former RAF officer, in the FT’s AI and Leadership report)

• "If you don't push the envelope, you get left behind." Said by an EU defence official about Canada's bid for associate membership. True of organisations and individuals in equal measure.

What I've learned about myself

• I found myself stung recently by not being invited to a high-level event I would previously have attended. What stayed with me was the recognition that I wanted the invitation for ego reasons — not because of the quality of the conversation. I am still more dependent on external validation than I would like to be.

• The expression "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" has always felt slightly off to me. I've been testing it personally. The work I do that has no measure — journaling, sitting quietly, simply being — I systematically undervalue. It doesn't sit on a to-do list; it doesn't get ticked off. And yet it is probably among the most valuable work I do. The quandary: how to give it weight when the system I operate in rewards what can be counted.

The signals keep coming. The question is always which ones to act on.

Best regards,

Xenia

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