Articles
From the watch.
Dated readings of the economy, AI and markets, drawn from the public data Palanor tracks, and essays on the method behind them. A reading is not a forecast: each one says what the signals show today and what would change the answer.
Anthropic just did scenario planning in public. Here's how we'll know which future we're in.
Three futures for the AI economy, two worlds they leave out, the signposts that separate them, and the one number that's already at a record.
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America cut its aid by more than half. Nobody filled the gap.
In 2025 U.S. official aid fell from $65.5 billion to $29.0 billion. Every other source we can measure added about $7 billion. Here is the ledger, and what it says about depending on one funder.
One in five websites now blocks AI.
We read the robots.txt file of the top 10,000 websites. 19.3% tell at least one AI company's crawler to stay out. Big sites and French sites block most; universities and governments barely block at all.
Earnings calls now read more like ChatGPT. Filings don't.
We score every S&P 500 earnings call and annual report. The share of executives' prepared remarks that reads like AI output roughly doubled from 2021 to 2026. The risk-factor sections of the same companies' 10-Ks barely moved.
AI is getting the blame for more layoffs. The jobs data shows something smaller.
Layoffs publicly blamed on AI rose eightfold in a year, to 62,768 jobs. Six announcements make up three-quarters of that. The clearer signal is quieter: recent college graduates are falling behind everyone else.
Every article
- Market Reads·OCTOBER 18, 2026·3 min read
America cut its aid by more than half. Nobody filled the gap.
In 2025 U.S. official aid fell from $65.5 billion to $29.0 billion. Every other source we can measure added about $7 billion. Here is the ledger, and what it says about depending on one funder.
- Methodology·OCTOBER 18, 2026·3 min read
One in five websites now blocks AI.
We read the robots.txt file of the top 10,000 websites. 19.3% tell at least one AI company's crawler to stay out. Big sites and French sites block most; universities and governments barely block at all.
- Market Reads·OCTOBER 18, 2026·3 min read
Earnings calls now read more like ChatGPT. Filings don't.
We score every S&P 500 earnings call and annual report. The share of executives' prepared remarks that reads like AI output roughly doubled from 2021 to 2026. The risk-factor sections of the same companies' 10-Ks barely moved.
- Market Reads·OCTOBER 18, 2026·3 min read
AI is getting the blame for more layoffs. The jobs data shows something smaller.
Layoffs publicly blamed on AI rose eightfold in a year, to 62,768 jobs. Six announcements make up three-quarters of that. The clearer signal is quieter: recent college graduates are falling behind everyone else.
- Predictive Planning·OCTOBER 5, 2026·9 min read
Anthropic just did scenario planning in public. Here's how we'll know which future we're in.
Three futures for the AI economy, two worlds they leave out, the signposts that separate them, and the one number that's already at a record.
- Predictive Planning·MAY 23, 2026·9 min read
The Rise of the Predictionist.
Why the futurist is finished, the strategist is too generic to mean anything, and the seat that holds predictive planning needs its own name.
- Market Reads·MAY 15, 2026·6 min read
Reading the rolling recession.
The recession most forecasts called for did not arrive as a recession. It arrived as a sequence — and the sequence is not finished.
- Methodology·MAY 12, 2026·7 min read
Forecast and watch.
Two disciplines, separated by what they do with uncertainty. Only one of them ages well.
Index essays
How three of the Palanor indices read the world, and what they were saying when we wrote them.
The Index that flipped 30 points.
What happened to the AI Margin Compression Index when real hyperscaler capex data joined it.
The capital window.
How the Capital Tightness Index reads the window for an operator who has to refinance, raise or close.
When the markets price AGI.
Reading prediction markets as signals, and what they price that equity markets do not.
Elsewhere
Some pieces appear first on our Substack. Longer quarterly work lives in Research, and every article applies one argument: the instrument was missing.