The Dollar Is Losing Ground to the Tenge, Anthropic Is Spooking Humanity, and Where Soccer Players Are Investing

Kazakhstani banks have been given the opportunity to raise interest rates on dollar-denominated deposits; the “bond king” Bill Gross advises staying away from bonds, while in Anthropic’s leaked IPO prospectus, the company is targeting a valuation of over $2 trillion and warns of a threat to humanity.

For the first time in six years, Kazakhstan has raised the cap on interest rates for foreign currency deposits (with terms of one year or longer). The National Bank attributed the increase from 1% to 2.5% per annum to a decline in the share of dollar-denominated deposits in the economy: since 2020, that share has fallen by a factor of two and a half. Danyar Orazbaev, an analyst at Freedom Broker, does not consider this rate a convincing argument: tenge deposits currently pay 15%, while U.S. Treasury bonds yield about 5%.

Deutsche Bank, too, currently has more confidence in the tenge: in late September, it added a position to its portfolio with a strategy to sell the dollar against the tenge (a short position in USD/KZT). Analysts see support for the tenge in energy prices, the expected increase in currency sales by the National Fund, and the inflow of foreign capital into government bonds. But this is a trade for several months. By the end of 2026, the bank still expects the tenge to trade at 490 per dollar. Investbank is also maintaining its position in the Uzbek sum; analysts attribute its strength to gold exports, remittances, and reforms.

Pimco co-founder Bill Gross advised investors not to hold any bonds other than one-year U.S. Treasury bills yielding 4.55%. He is concerned about debt: total U.S. debt stands at about $84 trillion, and he estimates that $1 trillion in AI investments by 2027 will most likely have to be financed entirely through debt. This threatens to slow growth and keep inflation high. “Preserve and protect—that is my current investment motto,” Gross writes.

The IPO prospectus for AI developer Anthropic made headlines even before its official release. The company is targeting a valuation of over $2 trillion—more than double its May valuation of $965 billion. At the same time, Anthropic itself is warning investors about “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”: AI models may resist being shut down, withhold information, and behave in ways that “resemble blackmail.”

AI agents that make purchases and trades on their own are creating a new market where investors can profit, according to Capital Lab partner Evgeny Shatov. Iconic short seller Michael Burry—the real-life inspiration for the character in the movie *The Big Short*, played by Christian Bale— has, on the contrary, placed bets against the AI sector by purchasing put options expiring in 2027: he believes that “the AI bubble could burst sooner rather than later.”

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor