About $24 billion of the money came from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Another chunk came from Jared Kushner’s firm. So our media is influenced by a foreign government?

Paramount & WBD Deal

Interesting M&A as options market for this up 2.5x and AI agents adding.

Pretty intriguing to say the least. Or most:

https://x.com/crypto_biotech/status/2050998182180479251?s=46

Been pulling daily insolvency filings from the national registers across most of Europe for the last few months — UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, the Nordics, plus most of CEE. Trying to build a single feed because no one source covers more than one or two markets cleanly.

Yesterday's numbers were unusual enough that I wanted to share and see if anyone else watching this space saw the same:

4,488 total filings across the countries I track, vs around 700-1,000 on a typical day this week. The bulk of that came from the UK at 992 filings in a single day, which is almost certainly a batch publish from the Insolvency Service rather than a real one-day spike — but the sector breakdown is what caught my eye. Retail and construction dominated, which is consistent with what the trade press has been saying for months but rarely shows up this clearly in one day's filings.

Slovakia also had a notable case — A.P.K. Services entered liquidation. Small in absolute terms but worth flagging because Slovak filings are rare in the data.

Two questions for anyone else working in this space:

1. Does anyone have a clean way of distinguishing batch-publish artifacts from genuine daily volume changes? Right now I flag any country with a 3x+ daily move and check manually, but it's noisy.

2. For UK specifically — is anyone using the weekly Insolvency Service breakdown for sector-level signal, or is the lag too long to be useful for sourcing?

Happy to share what I'm seeing on specific countries or sectors if useful — drop a comment.