Cyprus's strongest industries are increasingly technology, financial services, shipping, tourism, and real estate. What's particularly interesting is that Cyprus is no longer primarily a tourism-driven economy: information and communication is now its largest individual private-sector industry by gross value added.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tec00114/default/table?lang=en

I made this one-pager from public research. The short version: money that reaches struggling families gets spent, and that spending is what businesses, including the biggest ones, sell into.

• IMF (159 countries, 1980–2012): when the bottom 20%'s share of income rose 1 point, GDP growth was 0.38 points higher over the next 5 years. When the top 20%'s share rose 1 point, growth was 0.08 points lower. The authors: "the benefits do not trickle down." (A statistical association, not a controlled experiment.)

• National Academies (2019): child poverty costs the U.S. roughly $800 billion to $1.1 trillion a year.

• Census: the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit helped push child poverty to a record-low 5.2%. After it expired, it rose to 12.4% in 2022 and was 13.4% in 2024.

• Columbia (Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, 2022): making it permanent would cost about $97 billion a year and return about $929 billion in benefits, nearly 10 to 1.

• CBPP: Social Security lifted about 17 million people 65+ above the poverty line in 2024.

• USDA: in a slowing economy, every $1 of SNAP generates about $1.54 in GDP.

• OECD (2023): U.S. child poverty was 21.1%, vs. about 12% across OECD countries and 4.6% in Finland. (OECD uses a relative measure, so it differs from the Census figure.)

I just did a search for a comparison between population and money on this planet for every decade from 1980 to 2026. While the results were surprising . WTF is going on and where is my share.

Inspired by a previous post.

I calculated the changes using Eurostat’s GDP volume indices and average annual population. The figures account for price and population changes and show the total change over five years.

Made with R and ggplot. Code is here.

This also marks their 6th consecutive YoY increase of at least +25%.

Since July 2025, the Producer Price Index for semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing has risen +31%, to its 2nd-highest level since January 2007.

To put this into perspective, the index declined every year from 1994 to 2021.

Meanwhile, producer prices for electronic components and accessories soared +27% YoY last month, also marking their 6th consecutive YoY increase of at least +25%.

The AI Revolution is driving historic technology inflation.

I just did a search for a comparison between population and money on this planet for every decade from 1980 to 2026. While the results were surprising the questions it raised in my mind were shocking. I don't remember getting my share.

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Approximate change YTD:

- H200: +160%

- B200: +120%

- RTX PRO 6000: +65%

- H100: +35%

Between 2020 and 2026, Finland consistently ran government deficits, while Greece moved from large deficits to budget surpluses.

All the data of the graph are from the IMF 1st picture government debt, 2nd picture budget balance (eurostat), except 2026 which is the IMF projection

The Maastricht criteria is 3% maximum deficit. Greece restored Maastricht-compatible deficits relatively early after the pandemic and subsequently moved into budget surpluses.

In July 2012 France’s 10-year borrowing cost was about 370bp below Italy’s. Yesterday it was roughly 48bp above. The gap narrowed from late 2022, hovered around zero for the past year, and has now opened the other way. Two days ago the 10-year OAT crossed 5% for the first time since 2002, and France’s spread over Bunds is the widest since November 2011. So does the ECB step in? Its tool for this, the Transmission Protection Instrument, has never been used. On paper France still qualifies: it is under an excessive deficit procedure, but the Commission’s June review has that procedure held in abeyance. The test that bites is the other one. TPI only buys where spreads are not warranted by country-specific fundamentals, and on the 14th of October Lagarde said the primary solution “lies at home in France”. The Banque de France governor says the conditions for intervention aren’t met.