TheChek News Flow

Dec 5 (Reuters) - Meta (META.O), opens new tab is delaying the release of its Phoenix mixed-reality glasses until 2027, aiming to get the details right, Business Insider reported on Friday, citing an internal memo.

The delay from an initially planned release in the second half of 2026 is because the company wants a fully polished device, the report said.

Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the report.

Meta executives Gabriel Aul and Ryan Cairns said moving the release date back is "going to give us a lot more breathing room to get the details right," the report added.

The goggles, previously code-named Puffin, weigh around 100 grams (3.5 ounces) and have lower-resolution displays and weaker computing performance than high-end headsets like Apple’s (AAPL.O), opens new tab Vision Pro, the Information reported in July.

Mixed reality merges augmented and virtual reality and allows real-world and digital objects to interact.

Meta is expected to make budget cuts of up to 30% for its metaverse initiative, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.

The metaverse group sits within Reality Labs, which produces the company's Quest mixed-reality headsets, smart glasses made with EssilorLuxottica's (ESLX.PA), opens new tab Ray-Ban and upcoming augmented-reality glasses.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz fulfilled his promise to fire a (relative) fiscal bazooka in a 2026 budget passed last week. Markets shrugged.

Both the iShares MSCI Germany exchange-traded fund and broader European stocks barely budged following the Nov. 28 Bundestag vote, which greenlit a 7% increase in federal spending compared with 2024.

Stimulus of this scope was already in the price, as German equities have jumped nearly 30% this year in dollar terms. “The budget delivered pretty much exactly what the market wanted and expected,” says Maximilian Uleer, head of European equity research at Deutsche Bank.

The market might want euros to start rolling out the door sooner. I-dotting within the government and between Berlin and Germany’s 16 states will delay actual expenditure to the second half of next year, predicts Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro for ING Research. That’s 18 months after Merz outlined a 500 billion euro ($580.5 billion) infrastructure fund and declared “whatever it takes” on military spending.

“We are a federal state, and we love rules,” Brzeski explains. He expects 1% gross-domestic-product growth next year, lurching progress after three years of recession and stagnation.

Buying Germany is also far from straightforward for stock investors. The 40 companies on the benchmark DAX index earn just 20% of their revenue domestically, Uleer says. Some familiar names do make it onto Deutsche’s list of stocks most likely to get a stimulus boost: Commerzbank, Volkswagen, and Siemens Energy.

Sebastian Schrott, portfolio manager for European equities at T. Rowe Price, is looking outside Germany’s borders. Two French construction/engineering firms, SPIE and Compagnie de Saint-Gobain, are poised to scoop up German infrastructure contracts, he thinks. So is the Irish-domiciled builder Kingspan Group.

Merz meeting his spending mark isn’t bad news, of course. A quieter subsidy that will halve electricity prices for commercial customers should give a faster boost to beleaguered German industry, Brzeski points out.

The 70-year-old chancellor also seems to have quelled a revolt by younger deputies from his own Christian Democratic Union demanding cost-cutting pension reform. That has put the CDU’s governing coalition with the Social Democratic Party on solid political footing, says Mathieu Savary, chief strategist for developed markets at BCA Research. “The coalition is unlikely to fail,” he says. “Merz has four years.”

External events are also shifting Germany’s way, barring a fresh trade offensive from U.S. President Donald Trump, Savary argues. The European Central Bank has cut its key interest rate in half, to 2%, over the past 18 months. That’s reviving corporate and consumer borrowing after a long contraction following the 2008-09 global financial crisis. “Merz is lucky,” he says. “Germany can do better because the deleveraging of Europe is over.”

Better doesn’t mean “Germany is back,” Brzeski cautions. Slack global energy prices plus Berlin’s subsidies may alleviate one shock to its industrial base since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago. Merz has no quick fix for the other: loss of competitiveness to China. “China has become better than Germany when it comes to manufacturing,” Brzeski says.

At best, investors’ views on Germany and the rest of Europe is sobering up after the euphoria of last spring. “When Merz announced his €500 billion infrastructure fund, nobody read the fine print that this was over 10 years,” comments Michael Field, European equity strategist at Morningstar. “Germany is a slower burn than we thought.”

Scan the latest market commentary and you will hear a familiar refrain: Artificial intelligence is propping up the U.S. economy. Analysts see soaring share prices for Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, along with a wave of data center construction, and conclude that America’s economic resilience rests on AI’s shoulders.

Confusing the stock market with the real economy is the oldest analytical mistake in finance. AI is propping up the stock market. But healthcare is propping up the economy.

The difference is unmistakable when you look at how these two industries behave in the labor market. Healthcare is the only major sector whose share of total U.S. employment rose in every recession and under nearly every macroeconomic condition of the past 25 years. It has never posted a sustained decline—not during the 2001 economic downturn, not during the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and not during the Covid-19 pandemic-related recession of 2020.

Meanwhile, the much-celebrated AI boom is barely visible in labor-market data. Information sector employment—the broadest proxy for tech—shrank from 2.7% to 1.8% as a share of total jobs during the past 25 years. At the same time, tech firms’ equity valuations have skyrocketed.

Employment data should force investors to rethink what is actually sustaining the economy. Healthcare and social assistance employ more than 20 million Americans. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects it to account for about 38% of all new U.S. jobs over the next decade, far outpacing tech, manufacturing, and construction combined.

The data tell a clear story of steady growth. In 2000, healthcare accounted for just over 8.2% of all nonfarm jobs. By 2025, it had climbed to 11.4%. Crucially, this rise has rarely reversed. No other major sector is close to its level of stability.

Professional and business services, manufacturing, construction, information, retail, accommodation and food services all contracted during downturns. Healthcare didn’t just avoid decline. It expanded, month after month, at the exact moment the rest of the economy was breaking. Some of this reflects disproportionate job losses in lower-wage sectors during economic downturns, but it also reflects the essential nature of healthcare. Demand for medical care doesn’t disappear in a recession; it intensifies. Economic stress worsens short and long-term health outcomes. It drives up chronic illness, emergency care, and behavioral health needs, forcing hospitals and clinics to staff up precisely when other employers are cutting back.

And healthcare jobs are strong multipliers at the local level. Hospitals and ambulatory care providers support employment in transportation companies, food vendors, educational programs, janitorial services, construction firms, and biomedical suppliers. When a hospital expands, the surrounding economy expands with it. When a hospital closes, the economy immediately contracts. No AI firm has that kind of footprint in Baton Rouge, Des Moines, or Fresno.

This brings us to the real danger on the horizon. The U.S. economy is leaning on a sector whose future stability isn’t guaranteed. It is policy-dependent. Unlike AI, whose trajectory is tied to capital markets, investor sentiment, and technological progress, healthcare’s stability depends directly on federal and state policy.

Three major healthcare supports are at risk. The enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, expanded under the American Rescue Plan, are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. If they lapse, premiums for millions could jump by hundreds of dollars a month. Millions could lose coverage entirely. Rising uninsured rates increase uncompensated-care burdens for hospitals, strain budgets, slow hiring, and weaken regional growth.

In addition, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollment has already fallen sharply as states unwind Covid-19-era continuous-coverage rules. From March 2023 to July 2025, more than 17 million people lost coverage. Hospitals can’t absorb that level of uncompensated care without cutting services or closing outright. More than 700 rural hospitals are currently at risk of closing. And when a hospital closes, a regional economy loses one of its few recession-proof anchors.

Finally, the healthcare workforce, already strained by shortages of nurses, medical assistants, mental health counselors, and clinical lab workers, faces an uncertain federal funding landscape. President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget includes over $400 million in cuts to workforce programs that expand the supply of nurses, physicians, behavioral health specialists, and other healthcare workers. Without stable investments in training and education, health systems can’t staff new units, expand services, or meet rising demand. A recession-proof sector becomes recession sensitive.

If policymakers allow Medicaid funding to erode, ACA subsidies to expire, and the health workforce pipeline to thin, they will weaken the very sector that has kept the economy stable through every crisis of the 21st century. No amount of AI-driven equity exuberance will be enough to keep the real economy from feeling the shock.

Private-market institutions are taking over from old-line legacy banks. The names to watch—and the dangers to watch out for.

Key Points

• The UJA-Federation Wall Street Dinner honored Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, highlighting a shift from traditional banks to private-market institutions.
• Private-equity and alternative-asset firms have surpassed traditional banks in executive compensation, with average NEOs earning $2.3 billion compared to $331 million.
• The influence of private-market firms now extends significantly into politics, sports, entertainment, and higher education, rivaling traditional banking’s impact.

Will the last old-school banker please turn out the lights?

This past Monday night in a packed Times Square ballroom, some 2,000 attendees rose out of their seats to salute the latest lion of Wall Street, Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management. It was the 50th UJA-Federation Wall Street Dinner, a signature fund-raising event in New York, which this year reaped some $57 million, and where Rowan was lauded for his “visionary leadership” in philanthropy and business.

Dozens of boldfaced-name financiers were in attendance, including Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Group, along with leading lights from JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, but the crowd leaned more heavily toward the new side of Wall Street, including Blackstone Chief Operating Officer Jon Gray, Marc Lipschultz, co-CEO of Blue Owl Capital, and Michael Arougheti, CEO of Ares Management, as well as hedge fund CEOs Dan Loeb of Third Point and Paul Singer of Elliot Investment Management.

To a degree, the dinner manifested yet another step in the changing of the guard on Wall Street, from the old-line legacy banks to the new private-market institutions. (The other executive honored that night was Julie Solomon, co-head of real estate at Ares.) It’s an ongoing shift of power and influence well understood by major charities, which have leaned into the trend, at least in part because, as Willie Sutton might have observed, that’s where the money is.

For many decades, the ultimate brass ring on Wall Street was grabbing a top position at one of the nation’s largest commercial or investment banks—the management committee at JPMorgan or a partnership at Goldman Sachs. It was the sign of ultimate achievement, a passkey to the upper echelons of New York society (and beyond), and a path to great wealth.

This was the case even after two massive shifts in the business. First, the firms went public, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s; Bank of America and JPMorgan on the commercial side, and investment banks Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and finally Goldman Sachs in 1999. And second, the two businesses began to converge, beginning with the Reagan administration’s deregulation and culminating in the tumult of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and others were either bought (Bear Stearns by JPMorgan and Merrill Lynch by Bank of America) or forced to become bank holding companies (Goldman and Morgan Stanley).

At the same time, entrepreneurs were creating a financial parallel universe: in venture capital with firms such as Greylock, Sequoia Capital, and Kleiner Perkins formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s; hedge funds including Bridgewater Associates, Elliot, and Tudor Investment; and private-equity firms KKR, Blackstone, and Carlyle Group, all established in the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. Though these companies started small, many of the founders—a number of whom still hold leadership positions—had massive ambition and grew their companies into global giants that rival Wall Street’s legacy firms.

In particular, private equity and its later incarnation, alternative-asset firms—which are much less encumbered by regulatory oversight than banks—have become fixtures of what we now call the shadow banking system, as predicted in a prescient and influential paper, “The Remaking of Wall Street” by Andrew Tuch, a law professor at Washington University. He wrote that while private-equity firms might be less financially vulnerable than the former investment banks, their credit funds and broker-dealer operations could “pose systemic risk concerns.”

“Private-equity firms have been able to expand into the broker-dealer business, into credit, into insurance, simply because they can. No one is stopping them,” says Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr., a professor emeritus of law at George Washington University and an expert in banking law and financial regulation. “They have replaced the old investment banks.”

Yes, the big four—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America—are still formidable, but in many cases they’ve been eclipsed, particularly as compensation-making machines, by their private-market brethren and their multigenerational wealth-creating fee structures.

These great fortunes are being garnered not just by private-market firms’ founders—familiar names like hedge fund CEOs Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen; Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen in venture capital; and Steve Schwarzman and Henry Kravis in private equity—but also for a whole new crop of executives, many of whom have accumulated over $500 million or even several billion in compensation.

To help quantify this changing of the guard, Barron’s asked research firm Equilar to compare the total compensation of old Wall Street to new Wall Street. Equilar measured the amount of money made by named executive officers, or NEOs (senior executives of a publicly traded company, usually the CEO, chief financial officer, and three or four others, whose compensation must be disclosed in regulatory filings) at the big four Wall Street banks, as well as at eight publicly traded private-equity/alternative-asset firms (Apollo, Ares, Blackstone, Blue Owl, Carlyle, Hamilton Lane, KKR, and TPG). Unlike almost all venture and hedge funds, most big PE firms are publicly traded, which makes for easier apples-to-apples comparisons.

The data reflect each executive’s accumulated compensation from 2006 onward (when the Securities and Exchange Commission changed reporting rules) and the value of shares sold from 2003 onward (when the SEC mandated electronic filings for this disclosure), plus the value of their current—and in many cases, vastly appreciated—stockholdings.

Here’s the tale of the tape: The average NEO of the PE/alt group has been paid some $2.3 billion, while the average legacy bank NEO made $331 million. Even when you exclude three heavily compensated private-equity founders—Steve Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone ($35 billion), and Henry Kravis and George Roberts, co-founders of KKR (both $11 billion)—the average PE NEO still made just over $1 billion.

Another take comes from looking at median total compensation of the two groups, which for execs from legacy firms is $133 million as opposed to $376 million for the PE/alt execs (or $324 million when excluding Schwarzman, Kravis, and Roberts). Still a big gap. Of the legacy bank executives on the list, only JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the most successful of that cohort, has earned more than $1 billion.

Who are some of these kings of Wall Street? Atop the list after Schwarzman, Kravis, and Roberts are two increasingly familiar names, Blackstone COO Gray (and increasingly CEO in everything but title), who has taken home $7.6 billion, and Apollo’s Rowan—noted for spearheading the ouster of the president and the board chair, an old-school investment banker, of his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania—with $5 billion.

Beyond that are some billionaires who may be less familiar—even as they helped build these companies into the forces they’ve become—like Blackstone CFO Michael Chae, who previously headed up a number of operating businesses there and has made $1.2 billion. The co-CEOs of KKR, Scott Nuttall and Joseph Bae—pals since they joined the company as junior analysts in 1996—have been paid some $3.7 billion each. There’s Jim Coulter, executive chairman and a founding partner of TPG, who now helps lead the firm’s impact and environmental investing practices.

TPG’s CEO, Jon Winkelried, who toiled at Goldman for over three decades before joining TPG a decade ago, is also on the list. Michael Rees and Doug Ostrover from Blue Owl have each made a billion-plus, and so too has a duo from Ares, CEO Michael Arougheti and Bennett Rosenthal, as well Scott Kleinman, co-president of Apollo Asset Management, who once worked at Smith Barney (remember them?).

Equilar’s data aren’t measuring these individuals’ net worth. They don’t account, for instance, for Arougheti’s investment in Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles, or Winkelried’s Colorado ranches. The Equilar list also doesn’t include a number of high-profile PE billionaires like David Rubenstein, co-chairman of Carlyle, and Tony Ressler, executive chairman of Ares, who are no longer NEOs.

The pay disparity between the old and new Wall Street is apparent as you move down the pay food chain, as well. Wealth-intelligence firm Alrata looked at some 2,000 Americans with a net worth of more than $30 million who identify as being in banking and finance. The average net worth of those from a group of old-line companies (JPMorgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of New York Mellon) is $118 million, while those who identify as working in hedge funds is $142 million; venture capital, $151 million; and private equity, $161 million.

There are myriad ways to measure the impact of these private-market firms on the financial markets, starting with U.S. private-equity firms employing 13.3 million workers, who earned $1.1 trillion in wages and benefits. Firms like private-credit giant Apollo own hundreds of hospitals in the U.S. Blackstone and KKR have significant investments in data centers and own hundreds of thousands of residential units. Speaking of real estate, did you see the recent Wall Street Journal article “The Hamptons Market Is Making an Epic Comeback”? Well, guess who’s buying? “There was a time when Goldman Sachs partners were buying everything; now it’s the private-equity people,” says Paul Brennan, a top real estate agent at Douglas Elliman in the Hamptons who has sold a couple of eight-figure properties this year.

Also consider these numbers: The combined market capitalization of the eight private-equity/alt firms in the Equilar study is some $492 billion. The total assets under management of those companies is $4.67 trillion. And the private-credit market, dominated by the alt firms, is now $1.5 trillion-plus. All of those dollars represent an opportunity cost, to a degree, to the legacy banks.

“The big banks still win in mergers and acquisitions, advisory, and underwriting. They really have no competition there,” says John Arnholz, a securities lawyer now retired from Morgan Lewis. “But just look at the news—all the stories are about things Blackstone, Apollo, and Ares are doing.”

The implications of this reordering extend far beyond the workings of Wall Street and now stretch to our society writ large, be it politics, sports, or entertainment. In fact, the influence of the shadow bankers arguably matches or even exceeds that of traditional bankers.

Consider three implications of the power of private-market firms on higher education. First, university endowments, in particular those of the Ivy League, have loaded up on PE investments, which served them well until now, when it hasn’t. Second, Marc Rowan, VCs like Peter Thiel, and hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman and Leon Cooperman have been sharply critical of these schools as they work to foist changes in leadership and curriculum. And third, the big money being made in private equity is increasingly allowing these firms to hire the best and brightest on university campuses.

Then there’s politics. It used to be that so many executives from Goldman Sachs went to work in Washington that it was called “Government Sachs.” No longer. Jerome Powell worked at the Carlyle Group and other private-equity firms before becoming Federal Reserve chair. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was a hedge fund manager, and Stephen Feinberg, co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, is now Deputy Secretary of War. As for VCs, David Sachs serves as Trump’s artificial-intelligence and crypto czar—and oh, lest we forget, the vice president of the U.S., JD Vance, was a VC.

Vance, you may remember, worked for Sachs’ good friend, Thiel, who has become a key GOP funder, following in the footsteps of hedge fund honchos like George Soros on the left and Robert Mercer of Renaissance Capital on the right.

Meanwhile, at the state level, Glenn Youngkin was co-CEO of Carlyle before becoming Virginia governor, and David McCormick, former CEO of hedge fund Bridgewater, is a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.

Forays by private equity into the world of sport, once a trickle, have become a flood, with PitchBook identifying 74 major North American sports teams, valued at $258.4 billion, with PE connections. The PitchBook numbers don’t even include sports like lacrosse, bull riding, Formula One, Minor League Baseball, flag football, rugby, volleyball, water polo, or even youth sports where PE has bought in. PE investors including RedBird Capital Partners and Ares have also invested in or own marquee soccer teams in Spain, England, France, and Italy.

Wall Street bankers once made for perfect foils in popular culture. Now private-equity executives fill the roles of villains or antiheroes in shows like Billions and Succession, the latter providing this bit: “You know how, like, everyone hates you?” Kendall Roy asks. “Well, no, that’s not something I’m aware of,” Stewy Hosseini responds impishly. “Private equity,” Kendall continues, “getting your meat hooks in, chiseling your profit like a vampire locust fnck.”

That little tidbit is cited in Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture by Andrew deWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at the University of California, San Diego, who, as you might surmise (perhaps along with the writer of that dialogue) is none too pleased that the PE boys have come to Tinseltown. DeWaard’s book has a table showing some two dozen examples of the likes of KKR (David Ellison’s Skydance), Apollo (Legendary Entertainment), and Blackstone (Hello Sunshine) buying into the movie business. Meanwhile, all of the big talent agencies, critical to the workings of Hollywood—William Morris Endeavor, Creative Artists Agency (which now owns ICM Partners), and United Talent Agency—are either owned or have or have had large stakes in their businesses owned by PE.

What has drawn PE to Hollywood? “Maybe because there aren’t a lot of places left to invest,” deWaard says. “Film, TV, and popular music resisted financialization for a long time, in part because it’s a complicated business. And there are people who make a lot of money in some other business and go to Hollywood because, what a great way to spend your money and go to parties.” (Shhhh. Don’t tell the limited partners.)

Private-equity executives looking for a Hollywood ending to their investments in the entertainment business and indeed across their portfolios would have to acknowledge that all of this wealth creation comes at a time when the PE/alt model is being called into question. Critics like George Washington’s Wilmarth say the current pace of dealmaking can’t sustain the number of exits required to return capital to limited partners.

“PE funds have a huge slog of debt that they’re trying to extend and pretend, with continuation funds, payment-in-kind interest deals, and net asset value loans to try to get some money back to the investors,” Wilmarth says. “Now, they’re trying to go to retail investors because institutional investors are saying, ‘Wait a minute, where are all these returns we were promised? We would have been better off with an S&P 500 fund.’ ”

Charley Ellis, longtime observer of the markets and author of The Partnership: The Story of Goldman Sachs, has seen this movie before.

“Either shadow banks will be obliged to accept greater regulation, or sooner or later, one or more of them will get caught in a mess that roils the markets,” Ellis told Barron’s in an email. “Sooner or later, one way or another, the odds increase and increase until serious problems develop that impact the markets roughly the way Lehman and Bear Stearns did. The timing, magnitude, and all the specifics won’t be known in advance, but the odds are rising,” he says.

Sounds like it might be time for Ellis to write a new book. Or at least some new chapters.

Frank Gehry, architect, 1929-2025

The globetrotting ‘starchitect’ created some of the world’s best-known buildings, from the Bilbao Guggenheim to LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall

There’s always a temptation to delve into early formative experiences when trying to explain a creative genius. In the case of Frank Gehry, you might be tempted to reflect on a childhood spent around his grandfather’s Toronto hardware store, building dens and miniature cities from timber offcuts and scraps of construction materials. Looking at the home he remodelled for himself in Santa Monica, extending an unlikely Dutch colonial-style house using corrugated steel, chain-link fencing, raw plywood and standard windows squeezed into wonky, ad hoc planes, it might seem obvious.

But then again, you might suggest that the same architecture came from Gehry’s involvement with the 1960s art scene, where his friends, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Richard Serra, were all experimenting with junk, collage or huge pieces of scrap metal. Wherever it started, that impulse ended up refined into the billowing metal sheets of the Bilbao Guggenheim, perhaps the last building to have changed everything in architecture.

Gehry, who has died at the age of 96, was an American original, the first architect since Frank Lloyd Wright to have made such an individual impact on the international scene. His fame even propelled him to an appearance in The Simpsons.

He was also a paradox. Gehry was arguably the man most responsible for remaking modern architecture as a spectacle, yet he hated the idea of the spectacular. He blazed a trail bringing advanced digital technology into architecture (adapting Dassault’s aeronautical engineering software for use in construction and founding the pioneering Gehry Technologies in 2002), yet he could barely use a keyboard or a mouse, always hand sketching squiggly scribbles or making scrappy cardboard models. He adopted an ordinary-Joe schtick, refusing to theorise or provide an intellectual underpinning for his architecture, yet he was one of the smartest, most cultured and most historically aware of modern architects.

With the Guggenheim he was responsible for what has become known as “The Bilbao Effect”, in which blockbuster architecture is credited with catalysing radical urban regeneration, yet he always denied such a thing existed; and, finally, he was arguably the first “starchitect” of the modern age — yet if anyone used that word to refer to him he might express his disdain in the language of his beloved ice hockey players.

Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, his New York-born father hailed from a Russian Jewish family and his mother had been a Polish Jewish immigrant from Łódź. In 1947, the family moved to Los Angeles and Gehry worked in a series of dead-end jobs, including truck driver and carpenter (he once made a breakfast nook for Western star Roy Rogers) while halfheartedly attending community college. Eventually, thinking back to his childhood (and being inspired as a teenager by a lecture by visiting Finnish architect Alvar Aalto), he alighted on architecture, going to study at the University of Southern California and then the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

He married Anita Snyder in 1952 and changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry, apparently because it would keep his signature similar, with a peak in the middle and a downward flourish at the end. The couple had two daughters.

After serving in the US Army, he found a job back in Los Angeles working for Victor Gruen, the Austrian émigré architect who had effectively invented the shopping mall. In 1961, he moved briefly to Paris, establishing his own practice on his return the following year. In 1975, he married Berta Isabel Aguilera, with whom he had two sons, a partnership that remained solid until the end of his life.

Gehry’s early work was characterised by an industrial, ad hoc roughness that concealed extremely smart design and a genuine love of joinery and construction. He built in a kind of Los Angeles vernacular, the language of back alleys, lock-ups and industrial strips, the kinds of buildings his artist friends were living and working in.

It was his own Santa Monica house (1978) that propelled him to wider renown. It seemed to leapfrog the postmodern era straight into what would become known as deconstructivism, a movement that upturned received wisdom using expressionist angles, jagged and fragmented forms and disorienting spatial experiences. The modest home has become perhaps the most emblematic architect’s house of the modern era, colliding forms and materials, wonky walls and tortured junctions. Gehry continued to develop his junk aesthetic with a series of brilliantly inventive chairs made from corrugated brown card that were lightweight, comfortable, cheap and striking — they proved so popular that Gehry withdrew them, fearing they would distract from his work as an architect.

He made some waves with quirky buildings, such as the Los Angeles Venice HQ for advertising firm Chiat/Day, a collaboration with his friend Claes Oldenburg, which combined a building that looked like a blown-up, discarded cardboard model with a giant pair of binoculars, and a theatrical corner building in Prague that became known as “Fred and Ginger” for its seemingly dancing, interlocking volumes. But it was with the sensuous curves of the Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997 that he became arguably the world’s most famous architect.

The titanium-sheathed building picked up on the Basque city’s history of iron and steel to make a metallic symphony, a swaying, baroque spectacular that gave the fading post-industrial city a logo and revived its confidence. Soon every city wanted a cultural blockbuster and Gehry professed to being worn down by being constantly asked to “do a Bilbao for us”.

A great lover of classical music and jazz, he completed the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003, a building designed before Bilbao and with a similar spirit but which took much longer to realise.

Despite his avuncular, “aw shucks” public persona, Gehry could be thin-skinned. He was particularly upset when he was accused of cost overruns, claiming that his buildings were not extravagant. He was fiercely proud of being a practical architect and not a fey dreamer. His later designs included New York’s shimmering stainless-steel-clad 8 Spruce Street (2011), the wobbly walled Dr Chau Chak Wing at the University of Technology Sydney (2015) and the wavy glass Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014). In London, Gehry designed a wall of residential blocks at Battersea Power Station (2022), and in the Gulf, the colossal, forever imminent Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. His sinuous curves were much influenced by the folds of robes in medieval and baroque sculptures; he was always looking outside architecture for inspiration. 

Gehry came to regret his 2005 cameo in The Simpsons, in which his cartoon alter ego crumples up a sheet of paper and throws it away only to realise that it is exactly the design he was looking for. It made the creative process, over which he struggled with endless iterations of form, seem too easy. But walking around his studio and seeing the ranks of rough cardboard models with their scrappy immediacy, the animators might have hit on something essential. Gehry embodied the paradox of an architect who sees himself as an artist but is offended by the implication that art comes with impracticality. He wanted it both ways and most of the time, he got it.

Some fund managers see potential fallout affecting the currency’s global status from controversial plan

Brussels’ contentious plan to use frozen Russian sovereign assets to backstop up to €210bn in loans to Ukraine is testing the EU’s political and legal framework to the limit.

But it could also have big consequences for the bloc’s financial markets.

Some fund managers warn that a move to use the frozen assets would drive up the political risks of owning euro assets, and even cast doubt over their status as a global haven.

What is the commission proposing? 

The European Commission has proposed a “reparations loan” for Kyiv, made against the Russian central bank assets, the bulk of which are held at Belgian securities depository Euroclear.

The EU would borrow the money from Euroclear and lend it on to Ukraine at zero interest. Ukraine would be obliged to repay the money after Russia pays postwar reparations, with the frozen assets acting as collateral.

The commission and its legal advisers say this does not amount to confiscation of the assets, as Russia would still retain a claim on the cash and other assets. 

A legal move proposed by the commission would indefinitely lock in the sanctions that have frozen the assets since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, to ensure Moscow cannot repatriate the cash before it pays reparations. However, some states — most particularly Belgium — remain concerned about the plan.

Why is this relevant to the euro? 

The euro is the world’s second-largest reserve currency, with central banks holding low-risk Eurozone debt such as German Bunds in their rainy day funds. In 2024, the euro accounted for 20 per cent of global central banks’ foreign currency reserves, compared with 58 per cent for the US dollar, according to ECB data.

Policymakers have advocated for the euro playing a more prominent role internationally amid concerns over the status of the dollar this year. But a move to access Russian funds could make central bank reserve managers and other low-risk investors more nervous about holding euro assets, if it makes them seem more vulnerable to the risk of sanctions and geopolitical tensions.

The risk, investors say, is of the kind of reappraisal that the greenback has faced in recent years, as a combination of US sanctions and the Trump administration’s economic policies has left reserve managers wanting to diversify away, for example by buying up record amounts of gold.

“There is a risk [from such a move] to the safe status of the euro,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist of the IMF, but the currency was also threatened by the risk of “future Russian encroachment on Europe’s borders”, he added.

The commission’s proposal was a “reasonable way” to supply funds to Ukraine, he said, adding that Russia could still negotiate full repayment as part of a war settlement.

How are investors reacting? 

Some investors argue there is a risk of undermining the euro’s haven status, despite the single currency gaining more than 12 per cent against the dollar this year.

“Seizing Russian assets is an extremely sensitive issue,” said Christian Kopf, head of fixed income and FX at German asset manager Union Investment. 

If Europe wanted to enjoy a safe haven status similar to Switzerland’s, “it must not interfere with property rights”, he said, adding that the rule of law historically has been one of Europe’s big comparative advantages.

Kevin Thozet, a member of the investment committee at asset manager Carmignac, said such a move would “question the reserve status of the currency”, saying the single currency could suffer as investors demand a “geopolitical premium” for holding euro assets. 

But others said Russia was a special case and the market had been aware of the risk of confiscation since the assets were frozen three years ago. 

“This has just been prepped for so long now,” said Robert Dishner, senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman.

Why is the ECB sceptical? 

The European Central Bank’s concerns are twofold. An early version of the commission’s plan was to use the central bank as a lender of last resort to Euroclear.  

Euroclear holds the bulk of the frozen Russian assets and might be liable to refund Russia if the country successfully challenged the freezing of the assets in court. The ECB dismissed a lending promise to the institution out of hand, saying it was illegal, as it was akin to direct funding of governments. Such monetary financing is banned under EU law. 

While Brussels’ latest proposal does not involve an active role by the ECB as lender of last resort, its president, Christine Lagarde, still warned MEPs the plan was at least pushing the boundaries of international law. The proposal is something that is “stretched [and] that hopefully is in compliance with international law” she said this week, adding that Europe’s global reputation could be at stake. 

Karsten Junius, chief economist at Swiss private bank J Safra Sarasin, said the perception of Europe as a region with strong adherence to the rule of law had been one of its critical assets among global investors. Should this be undermined, investors in Asia and the Gulf may look elsewhere, potentially resulting in a weakening of the euro over the medium to long term. 

The ECB’s scepticism is being viewed positively by some economists. 

“The ECB declining to provide backstop is positive for safeguarding the safe-haven status of the euro,” said Mahmood Pradhan, head of macro at the Amundi Investment Institute.

Its opposition to a backstop “draws a firm line” between the ECB’s monetary policy and the EU’s support for Ukraine, he added.

How have EU politicians responded to concerns?

Opposition in large Eurozone capitals to any move to tap the assets on the grounds of market destabilisation has steadily eased as the almost four-year-long war has ground on.

Berlin’s stance exemplifies that shift: Germany was previously in lockstep with the ECB in firmly warning against any schemes to use the assets, but Chancellor Friedrich Merz is now the driving force behind the reparations loan proposal.

That is down to three factors, according to officials and diplomats. Firstly, EU states have actively reached out to big non-European investors to assure them that such a move would not signal a new weaponisation of the euro and that their money was safe in the single-currency area. 

Secondly, the loan proposal is legally sound in terms of it not amounting to a seizure of the assets — still a red line for capitals such as Berlin and Paris — as Russia retains a claim on the full amount, its proponents say.

And thirdly, a political realisation that with EU national balance sheets already under pressure, there is no other alternative way to raise the sums of money that Kyiv requires to remain solvent and continue fighting in 2026 and 2027.

“This is . . . the consensus at the European level. There are absolutely no differences of opinion on this,” Merz said on Thursday. “This money must flow to Ukraine; it must help Ukraine.”

Top-down approach will identify investment gaps and push countries to co-ordinate projects, says bloc’s energy chief

The EU will take a new top-down approach to building its cross-border energy grid, as the bloc’s energy chief warned of billions lost from bottlenecks and a failure to match supply with demand.

Brussels will develop a central plan to identify where investment is needed and will find projects to fill those gaps, in order to push EU countries to better co-ordinate energy infrastructure across borders and sectors.

Dan Jørgensen, the EU commissioner for energy, told the Financial Times that the “biggest danger” to the bloc’s decarbonisation and energy security goals was the slow construction of its power grid.

“In Europe, it’s a huge problem and we lose billions every year in lost value because of curtailment and bottlenecks,” he said.

⁠Costs from grid congestion reached €5.2bn in 2022, and could rise to €26bn by 2030, according to figures from the EU energy regulator ACER.

The European Commission would work with member states and transmission system operators to find where investment was most needed, said Jørgensen, who insisted the new method would not constitute a power grab by Brussels.

“This is not a zero-sum game where the EU gets more power, thereby the member states get less power. Actually, by giving the EU new competences here, we will also empower member states to do more and better,” he said, adding that it marked a “paradigm shift” in infrastructure planning.

The EU, which was originally founded as a steel and coal union, has consistently struggled to improve its internal market for energy. An “energy union” that was first proposed in 2015 has yet to be completed.

“It is a bit of a paradox that we have an internal market that works better for selling tomatoes or toothpaste than it does for energy, since energy clearly is so important right now for our competitiveness, for our security and, of course, everybody wants to fight climate change,” Jørgensen said.

The rapid build-out of renewables such as wind and solar, which are far more volatile and dispersed power sources than gas or coal power plants, means there is an even greater need to upgrade and improve the grid.

The commission will develop “a comprehensive central EU scenario” for energy infrastructure planning, according to a draft document due to be presented next Wednesday.

Brussels would also undertake a “gap-filling” process, it said, that would “propose projects to address unmatched needs” in energy grids.

According to a report last month by the German think-tank Agora Energiewende, the EU could save more than €560bn between 2030 and 2050 if EU countries co-ordinated their energy infrastructure planning across sectors.

“A top-down approach to scenario-building would help identify areas where investment is needed,” the report said.

A major blackout on the Iberian peninsula in April and electricity price spikes in Greece last summer have strengthened the argument for more intervention from Brussels, officials have said.

Brussels will also establish an EU-level effort to simplify and speed up permitting procedures, which can take several years at present and hamper projects with a hefty administrative burden.

But Nicolás González Casares, a Spanish socialist lawmaker who led negotiations on the EU’s electricity market last year, said he was “particularly worried” that the commission’s new approach risked overriding environmental protections and creating legal uncertainty by assuming tacit approval for projects in order to speed up construction timelines. “The energy transition will only succeed if it is fast, but also fair and sustainable,” he said.

The first test of the new approach will be on eight proposed “energy highways”, which include interconnectors across the Pyrenees, cables linking Cyprus to mainland Europe and pipelines for hydrogen in south and south-west Europe.

The commission will also publish guidance for member states on prioritising critical projects for grid connection in an effort to reduce queues that are in some cases years long and have led to power-rationing in some countries.

Miner’s assets and prospects strengthen its hand for M&A — a game it knows better than anyone

The way to get ahead in mining nowadays is to have a lot of copper. Two companies laid out their stall to investors this week by pointing to their prospects in this space. One of them, however, pushed the pedal to the metal harder — in a way that feels like a pitch for future mergers and acquisitions.

Rio Tinto’s capital markets day was simple and prudent. It confirmed its target of growing production by 3 per cent a year until 2030. But its copper production next year will be 5 per cent below analysts’ estimates. Compare and contrast with Glencore, which may have cut next year’s targets but also pledged to grow copper production by 9.4 per cent a year to 1.1mn tonnes in 2029, far above expectations, and hit 1.6mn tonnes by 2035 to become one of the world’s largest copper producers.

Most of Glencore’s plan relies on expanding existing mines, with one new project in the mix, which should make its task a bit more manageable. That’s important given the company’s empire was stitched together through acquisitions, trading prowess, logistics and marketing — not starting mines from scratch. What it does possess, however, is a portfolio of stakes in some blue-chip copper assets: 44 per cent of the Collahuasi mine, in which competitor Anglo American also holds a stake, and 34 per cent in the Antamina mine, which it shares with BHP and Teck Resources.

Whether Glencore can deliver on its new strategy of in-house growth may not matter as much as selling the dream. Its assets and prospects strengthen its hand for M&A — a game it knows better than anyone. Glencore is one of the sector’s most persistent suitors, even if its courtships often end in rejection. It floated a merger with BHP in 2022, launched a failed $23bn hostile bid for Teck Resources in 2023 before settling for its steelmaking coal arm, weighed a bid last year for Anglo and sounded out Rio Tinto on a combination in October 2024. 

Investors seem to have bought into its prospects: the company’s shares rose 6 per cent on Wednesday, giving it a market value of £45bn, roughly 30 per cent above where it was six months ago and more than offsetting its weakness earlier this year. Indeed, as a multiple of next year’s earnings, Glencore is now valued at a premium to both Rio and BHP.

The art of negotiation depends on having alternatives. Wednesday’s copper extravaganza looks strategic. Glencore’s message, to investors and to its peers, is clear: if you want copper, this is where you should get it.