Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

Fuel Lines and Falling Approval Ratings Signal That Russia's War Is Finally Coming Home

csis

• For the first time since the invasion, a majority of Russians say their standard of living is deteriorating, Putin's approval has dropped sharply, and a record 81% say they'd support ending the war tomorrow — shifts driven more by economic pain than military events.
• Ukraine's drone strikes on oil refineries are proving especially potent because they produce tangible, everyday disruptions — fuel shortages and gas station queues — that are harder for the Kremlin to hide or spin than battlefield casualties.
• Public opinion alone is unlikely to force Putin's hand, but mounting economic costs are eroding the state's capacity to sustain the war, and the authors argue Western sanctions should be intensified now to compound the pressure.

Prediction Markets Are Worse Than Gambling for Ordinary People — and the Data Proves It

roosevelt

• A first-of-its-kind analysis of Kalshi, the largest U.S. prediction market, found that ordinary retail traders have lost more than $580 million since the platform launched in 2021, with sports betting alone accounting for over two-thirds of those losses.
• Despite prediction markets' pitch that users bet against each other rather than a "house," everyday participants are largely on the losing side of trades against professional traders who use proprietary data, AI-driven algorithms, and sophisticated modeling to systematically extract money from retail users.
• Evidence suggests ordinary users fare worse on prediction markets than in traditional gambling — losing around 8% of what they bet compared to 5–6.5% at sportsbooks or slot machines — and shortly after this data became public, the platform's data partner moved it behind a $40,000 paywall.

A decades-old tax rule is quietly forcing funds to underweight the biggest stocks — and it's costing investors

harvard_corpgov

• A tax diversification rule that was once a formality now meaningfully constrains major mutual funds and ETFs: as the 'Magnificent 7' came to dominate indexes, funds managing nearly $1.4 trillion found themselves near or past legal limits on large positions, forcing them to trim mega-cap holdings.
• When funds hit these limits, they underperform — large-cap growth funds near the constraint earned about 57 basis points less in risk-adjusted returns over the following three months.
• The authors argue this creates a systematic underpricing of the largest stocks, since optimistic investors can't scale into them; a long-short strategy exploiting this pattern earned annualized alphas as high as 11.8% in recent years.

In the News

China Just Fired a Nuclear-Capable Missile Into the Open Pacific — and Gave Neighbors Only Hours of Warning

csis

• China test-launched a submarine-based intercontinental ballistic missile from the South China Sea into the Pacific on July 6, 2026 — the first time it has ever publicly demonstrated this capability in open international waters, with the missile flying roughly 7,300 kilometers and likely passing over the Philippines.
• The test was almost certainly not routine: it coincided with Australia signing a defense pact with Fiji, ongoing U.S.-led RIMPAC naval exercises, and a China-Russia joint naval exercise, suggesting Beijing used it to signal resolve on multiple fronts simultaneously.
• China gave some countries only hours of advance notice and still refuses to join the 140-nation Hague Code of Conduct on ballistic missile notifications — a troubling gap as China rapidly triples its nuclear arsenal and normalizes open-ocean missile testing.

Analysis

Researchers Used AI to Read Millions of Old Newspapers and Built the Most Complete Record of U.S. Bank Runs Ever Made

ny_fed

• New York Fed researchers used large language models to sift through 374 million digitized newspaper articles, identifying over 3,000 bank run episodes between 1863 and 1934 — far more than any official records captured.
• A key finding: most bank runs didn't end in failure, suggesting banks had meaningful tools to survive panics, a nuance invisible in regulatory data that only tracked closures.
• The resulting public database lets anyone trace how financial panics spread geographically and offers historians and policymakers new evidence about what actually causes bank runs to turn fatal.

Also Worth a Look

• A Study of 3,000 Bank Runs Finds That Bad Banks — Not Random Panics — Drive Financial Crises (ny_fed)
• AI can predict disasters with stunning accuracy — but without roads, shelters, and local responders, those warnings don't save lives (yale_climate)
• Young Women Are Rapidly Moving Away from Exclusive Heterosexuality. Young Men Aren't. (the_conversation)
• South Korea's Export Machine Is Winning — But the Model Is Running Out of Road (csis)
• Utilities Don't Have to Black Out Your Neighborhood to Prevent Wildfires (the_conversation)
• Even If You Trust Elon Musk, SpaceX's Governance Structure Should Worry You (promarket)
• Russia Is Flooding Ukraine With Ballistic Missiles, and Ukraine Has Almost Nothing Left to Stop Them (atlantic_council)