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Conference Board confidence fell to 81.9 in September, missing the 89.2 forecast, as fuel costs, Iran war worries and job fears weighed on households.

The same dollar can buy ten different things in a year - or sit in an account doing nothing. The difference is velocity, and it's the missing variable that explains why printing money sometimes causes inflation and sometimes doesn't. A short walkthrough of the equation MV = PQ, why a dollar changes hands four-to-ten times a year in healthy economies, why velocity crashes during recessions, and what the wild swings of 2020–2021 actually showed us.

Rayon (France) – Raised a €10M Series A for browser-based CAD and interior-design software.

Section 338 bans on Canadian alcohol, dairy and motorcycles began Tuesday as Canada taxes $20B of US goods

Brent crude holds near $105 after Washington dismissed Iran's seven-day offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for sanctions relief as "cynical."

Biossil (Canada) — Toronto-based startup that uses AI to repurpose failed drug candidates raised $153M led by OpenAI's Startup Fund, hitting unicorn status.

Counterfeiting isn't just theft. It's a slow-motion attack on the unit of account itself - every fake bill that circulates makes every real one worth a little less. A short walkthrough of why authenticity is non-negotiable for money to work, the historical episodes where counterfeiting collapsed entire currencies, the layered defenses on a modern banknote, and why digital money may finally make counterfeiting mathematically impossible.

Refinyx (Sweden) — Critical battery materials recovery startup emerged from stealth after acquiring Northvolt's 134-patent recycling technology portfolio and pilot facility.

Anthropic (private) eyes a Nasdaq listing as sales pace tops $65B and the 10-year yield hits 5.27%.

Three monetary technologies are racing toward the same future at the same time: central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, and cryptocurrencies. Each one solves a different problem and creates a different set of trade-offs around control, privacy, and trust. A short walkthrough of what CBDCs actually do, why programmable money changes the rules of every economy that adopts it, and why the transition will take decades, not months.

Project-S (Germany) — Munich-based space orbital safety and traffic management startup emerged from stealth with a multi-million-euro seed round backed by Uni.Fund and ESA programs.

An economy isn't a list of transactions - it's a circuit. Money moves in one direction, goods and services move in the other, and every paycheck, purchase, tax, and investment is a node in the loop. A short walkthrough of the circular flow model, why savings and investment create leaks and injections, and why understanding the diagram is the cleanest way to see why stimulus expands an economy and austerity shrinks it.

Complaion (Italy) — Milan-based startup raised €13.5M seed to help SMBs automate regulatory certification and compliance management with AI.

When the stock market hits a record high while wages stagnate and factories sit idle, two economies are running at the same time. A short walkthrough of the difference between the real economy (wheat, haircuts, semiconductors) and the financial economy (claims on the future value of all of that), why they're linked but not identical, and why bubbles, crashes, and the entire 2008 crisis make more sense once you stop confusing the two.

erad (Saudi Arabia) — Riyadh-based SME alternative financing platform closed a $22M Series A led by MEVP to expand credit products across the GCC.