👋Good morning! Happy Friday! Halloween is eight days away, the US midterms are eleven, and earnings season is in full swing, which means the scariest masks this month are being worn by finance chiefs on investor calls. Business spent yesterday in a suitably jittery mood. Money moved in enormous, eyebrow-raising lumps between the very richest people on the planet, while the machines kept clocking in for shifts that used to belong to humans. Workers clung to the jobs they already had (nobody's leaving the party, but nobody new is getting through the door, either), and somewhere in the background, the world's most important shipping lane did its best impression of a lit fuse. It was a day of big bets and nervous hedges, of billionaires shoring up empires while everyone else quietly checked the exits. So pour something warm, settle in, and let's take stock of who's building and who's bracing.
