One thing AI has done remarkably well is divide us, if you ask people where the economy and the world are heading, and you’ll get two kinds of answers: deeply optimistic or deeply worried. The sentiment feels K-shaped, with very little in between.

I have attended several VC panel discussions recently, and I’m surprised by how openly they spoke about being afraid of what AI might bring. And I couldn’t help but wonder: if anyone could slow this down, wouldn’t it be the people providing the capital?

Then again, maybe they’re caught in the same dilemma the AI labs themselves have spoken about. OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI have all, in different ways, acknowledged that no one can really stop running while everyone else keeps running. It’s a race no one can step out of alone. Some food for thought.

The Fed kept rates unchanged this week, after raising them in September. I’ve talked about this before, but let’s go again, shall weeee.

Bond yields, I know it’s boring, but stay with me, because this one shapes the money. The 10-year yield is simply what the US government pays when it borrows money for ten years, and it’s actually set by the market, now it’s sitting around 5%.

Think of it as the price of money. When it rises, almost everything else adjusts around it. Loans get more expensive, for companies and for us. Safe options suddenly pay more too, and if you can earn around 5% with very little risk, then why reach for something riskier like stocks?

So even without a hike, money is still expensive. And when money is expensive, investors become less patient. We saw that clearly this week: Alphabet fell around 11% and Amazon dropped sharply after their earnings. Both are spending enormous sums on AI, and the returns haven’t fully shown up yet.

Brazil has chosen Lula again, and I think this matters well beyond Brazil. Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy, one of the world’s biggest food and commodity exporters, and home to most of the Amazon. Who leads it shapes trade flows, climate policy and the balance of power in the region. With this result, Brazil and Mexico, the region’s two most populous countries, both have left-of-center leaders, at a time when US influence in Latin America is a live question. For investors with exposure to emerging markets, commodities or the real, this election just set the tone for the next four years.

The AI race is coming to the public market, Anthropic plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT”. Share count and price range are still undecided. For context, it was valued at $965 billion in a funding round earlier this year, with run-rate revenue above $47 billion in May. The filing also shows how expensive this industry is: around $417 billion in future commitments to compute providers. This is a rare chance to see inside one of the companies shaping the AI era, and to judge for yourself whether the growth justifies the price.

Alphabet just had a rare stumble, and fell about 11% after Q3, even though revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion, and Google Cloud doubled. The issue is the bill for AI: Alphabet spent $9.1 billion more cash than it brought in, mainly on AI infrastructure, and expects that spending to rise sharply next year. Whether this is a discount or a warning depends on how much you believe that investment will pay off.

One event I went to this week was all about building and investing in female health. I can’t believe there isn’t more focus, half the population, decades of predictable life stages, and very few designing products around it. It is pretty crazy from an empathetic perspective, but also from an economic one, $1 TRILLION is the potential annual boost to the global economy by 2040 from closing the women’s health gap.

An insurer put up a slide I can’t stop thinking about: there are around 500 pet insurance companies worldwide. Insurers built primarily around women’s health? As far as they can find: one. My jaw was on the floor, but we as women have to take the lead here. We must invest, invent and BACK women in this space. Quite literally by caring about it, use these products and services, invest if you can and have the opportunity, and give feedback that would matter to them.