Patrick Boyle On Finance

Last week, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner — former FTX staffer, ex-OpenAI researcher, and author of the viral 165-page essay "Situational Awareness" — managed to lose roughly two-thirds of his $45 billion hedge fund in a matter of weeks. The margin calls arrived during his wedding weekend.In this video I break down how a trader with no professional experience raised billio...

Nikkei Asia recently reported that the five biggest US tech companies are carrying an estimated $1.65 trillion in "hidden," off-balance-sheet debt — and a lot of commentators have reached for the word "Enron" to describe the issue. In this video I look at whether that comparison holds up. It doesn't: unlike Enron, this debt isn't concealed through fraud — it's disclosed in th...

When the United States took control of Venezuela's oil exports in early 2026, it collected an estimated $13 billion in crude sales — but the official ledger in Caracas records almost none of it, and six months on there is still no public accounting of where the money went. In this video we look at what happened to Venezuela's sovereign wealth: the missing oil revenues now sit...

South Korea has the best performing stock market in the world for the second year running — and it's also in the middle of one of the worst bear markets on earth. The KOSPI is down around 27% from its June peak, more than 1.2 million retail accounts have been hit with margin calls, and hundreds of thousands of Korean investors have been wiped out entirely. But this isn't a st...

Russia's war economy is running out of road. Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out roughly a third of Russia's oil refining capacity, forcing an energy superpower to ration petrol at home and import gasoline from India — while Crimea sits under a state of emergency with the air-raid sirens switched off so the tourists aren't disturbed. In this video we look at what the num...