(The Roman Empire, by the way, is perhaps the best example of a civilisation which failed to make the next great technologically leap to the carbon age and did actually wither.)

It offers a nice chart showing net issuance of “safe” assets, from Citi’s research team:

2.) Multiple choice test to decide your condescending lede!

Question: When a fake (hacked!) Associated Press tweet about a White House attack moves the stock market down, then it recovers really fast — but maybe not making anyone much money — this is a referendum on the credibility of:

a) Twitter

b) Associated Press

c) The stock market

d) How FT Alphaville makes a living

e) All of the above

f) None of the above, shut up and get off Twitter

His latest offering comes by way of Project Syndicate and relates to the issue of robots and the rise of automation. To what degree are we really approaching a leisure society and how best to respond to the changes afoot?

As he notes (our emphasis):

And arguably it’s down to technology and crowd-sourcing.

But before you shout: “this is what Marx always said, Ricardo and the Luddites were well ahead of you on that one”, we would propose what we’re talking about is a complementary trend not one that necessarily validates or duplicates what the above have said perfectly.

But first a quick backgrounder on the debate so far (as tracked by us).

So spare a thought for David Gallers, former head of CDS index trading at UBS, who was let go last week, to be replaced by snazzy new algo.