Some of these are standard finance and geography shorthand. Some are specific to how NGE structures its own research — the gold tag marks the ones you won't find defined anywhere else.
The North Star behind everything NGE publishes: a target of one quadrillion dollars in global GDP by 2040. Explicitly a direction, not a forecast — see the $1Q Thesis for the sixteen named forces behind it.
The document naming the sixteen distinct, individually falsifiable forces (AI, energy transition, demographics, trade rewiring, and others) that would need to compound together for the $1Q Vision to be realistic.
One-hundredth of one percent (0.01%). A rate move "up 25 basis points" means up 0.25 percentage points — the standard unit for describing interest rate changes.
Total stock market capitalisation as a percentage of GDP, used as a rough gauge of whether a market is over- or under-valued relative to the real economy underneath it. Treated by NGE as a signal to weigh, not a verdict — some markets run structurally high ratios for reasons unrelated to overvaluation.
Central Bank Digital Currency — a digital form of a country's official currency, issued and backed directly by its central bank, distinct from decentralised cryptocurrencies.
Dubai Financial Market — one of the two main stock exchanges in the UAE, alongside the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX).
Debt Sustainability Analysis — the standard IMF/World Bank framework for assessing whether a country's government debt trajectory is manageable given its growth, interest rates, and fiscal balance, or heading toward crisis.
A cost created by an economic activity that isn't paid by the party causing it — pollution from a factory, for instance, where the health and environmental cost lands on the wider public rather than the factory's own balance sheet. Central to how Letter 132 and the food-systems research on the site quantify the "true cost" of production.
Federal Open Market Committee — the US Federal Reserve's rate-setting body, whose meetings and statements move global markets.
Reshoring: moving manufacturing back to the company's home country. Friend-shoring: moving it to politically-aligned allied nations instead, rather than all the way home. Both are responses to the supply-chain vulnerability covered in Letter 97 (The Great Return), which puts a number on the reshoring response: 244,000 US manufacturing jobs reshored in 2024 alone.
Gulf Cooperation Council — the political and economic bloc of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman.
Generative Engine Optimisation — structuring content to be found and cited by AI systems (like ChatGPT or Perplexity) rather than traditional search engines. The AI-era successor to SEO, covered in Letter 66.
NGE's series profiling twenty-five smaller, overlooked national economies (Georgia, Rwanda, Uruguay, Mongolia, Senegal, Laos, Albania, Zambia, and others) with a specific investable angle for each.
Initial Public Offering — the first sale of a private company's shares to the public, converting it into a publicly traded company.
Shorthand for Latin America, used throughout NGE's regional coverage.
Middle East and North Africa — a standard regional grouping used in economic and geopolitical analysis.
A fixed target used as a direction, explicitly not a forecast — "the kind of fixed point that tells you which way to walk without promising exactly where or when you will land," per Letter 127. The $1Q Vision is NGE's North Star.
Price-to-Earnings ratio — a company's or market's share price divided by its earnings per share. The standard, though imperfect, shorthand for whether a stock or market is priced cheaply or expensively relative to its profits.
Quality-Adjusted Life Year — a standard health-economics measure combining length and quality of life into a single unit, used to compare the value of different medical or public-health interventions. The underlying NHS cost-savings analysis this measure informs appears in Letter 132.
A method used in White Paper 5 that ranks several possible futures by probability instead of committing to one single confident prediction — a range, not a point estimate.
The six specifically human failure modes named in White Paper 5 that could stall the $1Q growth trajectory: distribution, governance, repricing, cognition, the human factor, and ethical/environmental cost.
A state-owned investment fund, typically built from a country's trade surpluses or resource revenue (oil, for instance), investing globally on behalf of the nation. Examples referenced across NGE's research include Norway's Government Pension Fund Global and Singapore's Temasek.
NGE's ongoing journal testing the $1Q Thesis's sixteen forces against real-world developments, published with no fixed schedule — only when something is genuinely worth recording.
The closing summary box at the end of every NGE Investment Letter — the single-paragraph bottom line after the full argument has been made.
A plot of interest rates across different bond maturities (short-term vs. long-term). An "inverted" yield curve, where short-term rates exceed long-term rates, has historically preceded recessions.