Hey crew, here’s to another week of cutting through the noise and focusing on what actually moves financial minds forward.

Just the stuff affecting wallets, business & the economy:

🔍 Gross Domestic Plot Twist: Overnight GDP Bump

💏 Investing In Relationship Status

Here’s to the 133rd weekly edition

Let’s dive in.

Ethiopia's Ministry of Planning and Development got a new name in October 2026: the Ministry of National Strategy.

And just weeks into its new identity, it asked “Will the real GDP please stand up?”, and promptly announced that Ethiopia's economy was 59.2% larger than previously thought.

Quite an impressive first month on the job.

If only renaming things had the same effect on our bank accounts.

Anyway, let's get the headline numbers out of the way, so we can get to the interesting bits not covered elsewhere.

Per the ministry’s report last week, which we must admit is unexpectedly well written and quite polished, our GDP for 2024/25 has been revised from 15.09 trillion birr to 24.03 trillion birr.

That's almost 9 trillion birr in previously unaccounted-for economic activity, bringing the dollar estimate to $201.4 billion, with a further estimate of $210.7 billion for 2025/26.

Excellent news, except for one detail: nobody actually made another 9 trillion birr.

We simply found it in the statistics.

The change is called GDP rebasing, and Ethiopia is far from the only country to discover that its economy was larger than previously estimated.

In fact, South Africa completed its own GDP rebasing just six days before Ethiopia announced its results.

Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, measures the value of goods and services produced in a country over a year.

To work out how much production is really growing, statisticians choose a benchmark reference year, called a base year, whose prices help separate increased output from inflation.

Think of a restaurant still using its 2015 menu to understand its business.

Since then, it has added delivery, catering and a second location. Meanwhile, the prices of everything from injera to cooking oil have changed rather dramatically.

Its old records no longer tell the full story.

Rebasing means updating that reference year, collecting better information and adjusting what gets counted. Ethiopia moved its base year from 2015/16 to 2024/25, supported by new censuses and better administrative records.

No factories appeared overnight. No one received a 59% salary increase. And Agriculture is still about 32% of our total economic activities.

The statisticians essentially updated their Excel to the latest version, crunched some numbers and found more of what was already there. And then some.

The surprise is where they found it.

Transport and storage, previously estimated to contribute 479 billion birr, is now valued at 1.85 trillion birr. That's almost four times the old figure, and more than manufacturing's 1.65 trillion birr.

Accommodation and food services went from 353 billion to 1.13 trillion birr. Restaurants and hotels, it turns out, were carrying considerably more economic weight than we gave them credit for.

Perhaps we underestimated the economic importance of the ቁርጥ ቤቶች in our article from a couple of weeks ago.

Meanwhile, other sectors went in the opposite direction.

Real estate and business services’ share of GDP is now only 2.9%, revised downward by 45%, while construction's share of GDP fell from roughly 20% to 15%.

So, while the economy became 59% larger, some of our most visible economic activities became relatively smaller.

You still can’t throw a stone without hitting a construction site, but it appears they now represent a smaller share of the larger economy. That’s a good thing.

And then there's the economy that didn't exist in 2015.

Telebirr, digital banking, ride-hailing and the shops selling everything from phone cases to sofas through Telegram have changed how Ethiopia does business. Yet some of these newer activities were invisible or inadequately captured by the old framework.

The ministry's report explicitly identifies mobile payments, fintech and e-commerce as parts of this changing picture.

An important detail to note: trillions of birr changing hands digitally, as we now do on Telebirr, do not mean trillions of birr of new GDP.

Sending a friend 5,000 birr over Telebirr doesn't create 5,000 birr of economic output.

Otherwise, we could fix national growth by sending the same money around a Telegram group all afternoon.

It's the value of the services provided, in other words the delightful service charges & transactions fees we complain about, that matters.

So the next time you're annoyed by a 162 Birr “Other Bank” service charge, take comfort in knowing you're contributing to Ethiopia's GDP.

How patriotic of us.

You're welcome, Ministry of Planni.…National Strategy!

It’s tough being Jensen Huang right now.

But let’s hold the phone for a moment:

✅ Billionaire.

✅ CEO of one of the most powerful companies in the world.

✅ The US president on your speed dial.

What could go wrong? Well, turns out, a lot.

Revelations recently came to light about some marital indiscretions, involving Huang, the NVIDIA CEO, and a certain lady that has been by his side for years.

Huang built one of the most influential companies in modern history, with AI accelerating his ascent to the upper echelon.

The story is still developing at the time of writing but markets tend to react when news like this breaks out.

Now for context, NVIDIA produces computer chips that are instrumental for the running of AI models.

It has been around since 1993 and Jensen has been the mastermind behind it.

The company is killing it but a CEO having an affair has turned the tables upside down.

China and the US are fierce enemies on the technology front, so much so that they each ban any export of innovative products to the other.(Those two don’t play nice)

And that’s where the story focuses, a young lady, deemed to be spy affiliated, swaying Huang.

Trust broken.

Marriage on the rocks.

And a stock market that reacted as soon as traders woke up their Lenovo ThinkPads in the morning.

National security and espionage fears spook investors and NVIDIA shed stock market weight under that pressure 📉

That’s what emotions do. Don’t be surprised if serial monogamists who married their high school sweethearts are the investor cohort bringing the stock down (Why? Values…they highly disapprove of cheating)

Or it could be some sophisticated hedge fund players using complicated financial engineering to take advantage of the situation.

Fact of the matter is, cheating complicates things.

And the financial markets typically look at this from every angle but one: the fundamentals of the business.

NVIDIA is thriving: its market is strong, it’s coming up with upgrades each quarter and it has government backing.

Investing should be objective not subjective.

Ask yourself, if NVIDIA was on the ESX and the scandal was close to home, would you pull out your Neway app to dump your shares or would you take a moment and understand how this would affect the fundamentals of the business?

The savvy ፍራንክ Digest crew would go for option 2.

Leave the emotions at the door, it’s usually not good for the chips…they need to cool down.