The word 'buoyant' is a delightful little piece of linguistic misdirection, isn't it? In financial reporting, it’s used to describe a market that is holding its head above water. In every other context, buoyancy is what happens to a carcass once the internal gases of decomposition have sufficiently inflated the torso. This is the current state of the European and British stock markets: a collection of ossified industrial relics, bank-managed stagnation, and luxury brands that exist solely to sell status symbols to the very people currently strip-mining the global economy. The indices are hitting records, yet every company with a pulse and a functioning exit strategy is scanning the Atlantic for a lifeboat.

London, in particular, has successfully transitioned from being the financial lungs of the world to being a damp, expensive waiting room for the inevitable. The City, once a place where fortunes were made through a combination of colonial exploitation and clever accounting, is now just a square mile of empty office space and 'For Lease' signs. The recent exodus—the so-called 'stars' preparing their flight from the London Stock Exchange to New York—is not a surprise to anyone who hasn't been huffing the fumes of post-Brexit nostalgia. It turns out that 'taking back control' was actually an elaborate suicide pact where the prize for winning was the right to watch your relevance evaporate in real-time.

The absurdity of the situation is peak humanity. On one hand, you have the European indices performing well, a fact that regulators point to with the smug satisfaction of a captain admiring the paint job on the Titanic. On the other, you have the companies themselves—the actual engines of value—realizing that being listed in Europe is the financial equivalent of being buried in a very nice, very stable, very permanent tomb. The 'buoyancy' is a mirage. It is a market supported by dividends from companies that haven't had an original thought since the discovery of fire, while any entity capable of 'disruption' or 'innovation' is running toward the American meat grinder as fast as their venture capital-funded legs can carry them.

And let us talk about that American meat grinder. The New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ are not 'better' in any moral or intellectual sense. They are simply louder. Moving from London to New York is the act of trading a polite, slow-motion decline for a frenzied, debt-fueled circus. The US market is a monument to the 'Greater Fool Theory,' a chaotic asylum where CEOs are treated as demigods and valuations are based more on how many times you can say 'AI' in a press release than on anything resembling profit. But for the modern corporate grifter, the choice is easy: would you rather rot in a quiet London basement or burn out in a neon-lit New York explosion? The latter at least offers a better view and higher executive bonuses.

The political class on both sides of the English Channel is, as usual, perfectly useless. In the UK, the Right-wing zealots continue to insist that deregulation will turn the Thames into a river of gold, ignoring the fact that they’ve already sold the river to a private equity firm that hasn't cleaned the filters in a decade. Meanwhile, the Left-leaning performative bureaucrats in the EU treat risk like a communicable disease. They have created a regulatory environment so safe, so padded, and so utterly devoid of friction that it has effectively friction-locked the entire economy. They want 'growth' without 'change' and 'investment' without 'uncertainty.' It is the childish desire for a heartbeat without a pulse.

The irony is that as these firms flee, the markets stay 'buoyant.' The remaining investors are simply reshuffling the same pile of stagnant cash, convinced that because the numbers are green, the system is working. It’s the ultimate victory of the spreadsheet over reality. We are witnessing the senescence of an entire continent’s financial soul. Europe is becoming a museum—a lovely place to visit, a wonderful place to have a coffee, and the absolute last place on Earth you would want to put your money if you actually expected it to do anything other than sit there and look dignified.

So, as the conga line of listings prepares to depart from Heathrow for JFK, don’t weep for the London Stock Exchange. Don’t mourn the loss of 'buoyant' European capital. It’s all just part of the grand, pathetic cycle of late-stage capitalism. One side is too bored to innovate, and the other is too manic to stop. We are watching the slow-motion collision of two different brands of failure, and the only thing we can be sure of is that the consultants will get paid regardless of which side hits the ground first. It’s a beautiful, stupid world, and I’m just here to watch the gas escape the carcass.