Reuters has a headline this morning that I keep reading as a loop: central bankers eye higher rates as the AI boom fuels a scramble for cash. The FT says the $10tn infrastructure boom is starting to fray, and the NYT is finding weak links in AI borrowing. The WSJ calls it the riskiest corner of the trade, crashing into higher rates.

Put those side by side and the AI buildout is both a victim of tight money and one of its causes. When a few companies want trillions of dollars at once, they bid against the mortgage market, the Treasury, and everybody else. Whether that is the main reason yields are at 24-year highs, I can’t tell from headlines. But it’s a plausible contributor, and nobody running the buildout would have wanted to hear it a year ago.

Meanwhile, Berkshire has put roughly $930 million into Bending Spoons, a company that buys aging software and runs it lean. That is about as far from a story stock as you can get. It’s a bet on boring cash flows from products people keep paying for out of habit. Next to the AI borrowers, whose cash flows are mostly promises, I find that choice more telling than any strategist note.

And in the small-things department, KFC is dropping Pepsi for Coke across 3,700 US restaurants after nearly four decades. Forty years of one fountain supplier, gone in a press release. Even the most boring contracts get renegotiated eventually, usually when somebody finally asks what the old terms are costing.

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