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This CPI beast measures how much everything costs – sweets, shoes, silly hats, the usual. But it’s not a straightforward business, oh no. They pluck out certain things – food and petrol, because those prices wobble about like jelly on a plate – and focus on the ‘core’ of it all. It’s a bit like removing the warts from a particularly grumpy toad to get a better look at the beast itself.

The so-called experts – and believe me, I’ve met a few who couldn’t tell a bond from a bagel – are blaming everything. A slightly grumpy dollar, a little less demand – you know, the usual suspects. And now they’re worried about AI. AI! As if the robots are going to start hoarding silver to build…what? Robot dentures? It’s madness, I tell ya, madness!

However, such projections rely on the assumption that present spending is sustainable. The scale of investment is, frankly, staggering. While the hyperscalers – Alphabet, Amazon, and others – can currently afford to indulge in this expenditure, it is naive to believe that this will remain the case indefinitely. Capital, after all, is not limitless, and shareholders are not infinitely patient.

The company’s fourth-quarter reports, delivered after the market’s customary silence, revealed figures exceeding the predictions of the oracles – sales and earnings, both marginally ascendant. Yet, the investors, those restless cartographers of future prosperity, craved not mere confirmation, but a bolder projection, a more definitive path through the labyrinthine corridors of potential growth. They sought a map to a more distant horizon.

Yesterday, it was up over 5%, apparently because they’re anticipating a future where…agents? Yes, agents. Not literary ones, sadly. AI-powered digital assistants. Apparently, these agents will be the new users of the internet, and Cloudflare is…the platform they run on. It’s a tidy analogy, I suppose, if you ignore the nagging feeling that we’re building a digital bureaucracy even more frustrating than the DMV.

Both funds, you see, aspire to offer a core U.S. fixed income experience. But while VGIT is a study in monastic simplicity – a portfolio exclusively devoted to intermediate-term Treasury bonds – FIGB is a more flamboyant affair, encompassing a wider spectrum of high-grade bonds. It is a question of preference: do you desire the serene predictability of the state, or the slightly more adventurous, though not entirely reckless, path of corporate credit?

They make… things. Precision power equipment. That’s the polite way of saying they keep the lights on, but for really, really important lights. Like, the ones in data centers, and the ones that allow semiconductor factories to, you know, semiconduct. I’m not an engineer. I collect vintage thimbles. But even I understand that if those things go down, everything else kind of wobbles. Apparently, nearly 80% of their income comes from those two sectors. Which feels… concentrated. Like all my eggs in a very high-tech, climate-controlled basket.

But the answer, as it often does, has revealed itself with a delicious, if understated, clarity. The ascent of artificial intelligence is not merely continuing; it’s gathering a momentum that rather resembles a runaway carousel. Amazon, with a profligacy that would make Croesus blush, intends to disburse two hundred billion dollars this year. Meta Platforms, not to be outdone in this game of digital largesse, contemplates up to one hundred and thirty-five billion. Alphabet, ever the alphabetizer of ambition, joins the fray with one hundred and eighty-five billion, while Microsoft, with a fiscal year ending in June, plans a further one hundred and five billion. A collective expenditure of roughly six hundred and twenty-five billion dollars – a sum that, when one considers its ethereal nature, feels almost…weightless.