# Follow the Money — retained record

> Retained news record from news:net-interest.

Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/e639ce57b6afa7f3

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source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:net-interest)  published 2026-10-30 17:48 ingested 2026-10-31 02:56

[original source ↗](https://www.netinterest.co/p/follow-the-money-ece)

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Something a bit different this week. I’ve been doing a lot of presenting recently, so I thought I’d share my materials with paid subscribers. Net Interest has been running for over six years now, and with 300+ issues, the archive has become a trove of analysis and commentary on the financial sector. My AI agents had a field day with it. They sorted every post by theme, tracked how the focus has shifted over time and pulled the key data and quotes into one place. Then they went back to the original sources to bring the numbers up to date. The result is the deck attached below. It elaborates on seven themes: AI is a financing story. Long-time readers know I like to find the bank inside every company. AI has a whole ecosystem of them: labs like Anthropic that commit long to earn short, lessors like CoreWeave that rely on the capital markets for their business model, and guarantors like Nvidia, the Fannie/Freddie of compute. Private markets are the new public markets. Built for patient institutional capital, private markets are increasingly underpinned by retail savers, life insurers and banks. New pockets of demand grow the pie, but they also introduce new risks. Banks and the credit cycle. Consumer sentiment hit its lowest level on record this year, yet banks keep lending and credit remains benign. AI and the work of finance. Financial services companies thrive on customer inattention. Could AI agents, with their infinite attention spans, be their downfall? Markets for everyone. Retail investors used to be dismissed as the dumb money. Now they’re a structural force, from index options in India to prediction markets in the US. Exchanges are racing to keep up. The battleground in payments. Payments has emerged as one of the most competitive segments of finance. Upstarts are coming for the incumbents that once tried to buy them, tech giants are deciding how far into finance they want to go, and stablecoins promise to rebuild the rails from scratch. People, risk and succession. For an industry that runs on numbers, finance still depends heavily on individuals. Who takes over from Jamie Dimon, how Ken Griffin manufactures talent, and why the biggest asset managers prefer to stay private all come down to people. Each section draws on posts from the archive, and there’s a reading list at the end if you want to go deeper. Feel free to use it – and let me know what you think. Reminder: I’ll be attending the TomorrowX Summit in Austin in November, followed by Fintech Nerdcon in San Diego. If you’re at either, please do get in touch. Read more
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document fetched 2026-10-31 02:56 · canonical https://netinterest.co/p/follow-the-money-ece