Welcome to this end of summer holidays 2026 edition of my Ezine.
I have to admit that this one has taken a little bit of time to formulate in my mind because I wanted to talk about AI .
Finance update Italy September 2026
By Gareth Horsfall
This article is published on: 2nd September 2026
This is a subject which is brought up in all my conversations with clients, much more so than the price of fuel or the ongoing wars in Russia / Ukraine and Iran and it seems to be creating quite a bit of anxiety. Understandable, I would say but also the mainstream media seem to have a way of blowing things out of proportion just to generate clickbait. After all, their whole business model is now based on ad revenue.
I also want to tell you an interesting fact about Italy’s minimum declared income, even more interesting news about Revolut bank and some news on Andy Burnham’s potential UK property tax plans. So bear with me. It’s all interesting and very relevant stuff, but in the meantime…….
BOOK YOUR PLACE ON THE INVESTMENT, FINANCIAL PLANNING AND RAPHAEL IN UMBRIA TALK ON THE 24TH SEPTEMBER IN THE HEART OF THE NICCONE VALLEY.
If you haven’t registered, I would like to extend the invite to the event I will be hosting in the Niccone valley, Umbria on the 24th September.
On the 24th September in the gardens of the amazing Casa Nova, https://casanovaumbria.eu/, Niccone Valley, near Umbertide, I will be hosting an investment talk presented by Christopher Saunders from New Horizon Asset Management (Watch his video here on why we could be living through World War 3…) followed by some Italian financial and tax planning talk, and Q&A, from myself and to finish a wonderful talk from Dr Tom Henry on the life of Raphael in Umbria. All this within the stunning Niccole valley backdrop.
Now, before I get onto the main subject, let’s talk about other important things. The olive harvest! For all you olive tree owners out there, I am not sure how your trees look this year (do write and let me know!) but mine are loaded with olives.
In fact, it looks like it could even be better than 2024! 2025 was a write off, as many of you know, due to the weather and the ‘mosca’ which destroyed pretty much all the crop, but this year looks like it will be a bumper crop. It’s going to be fun doing the ‘raccolta’, but the results should be worthwhile.
At the start of the summer I also had a bit of a shock because towards mid June I asked my local farmer neighbour to come and cut the grass. For those of you who know me well now, I do like to let it grow in spring and let the wildflowers grow. I was travelling to Rome for the day to see a client and I left him instructions to cut the grass everywhere. I fully expected that a cut meant that he would leave about 4cms of grass, like a lawn. But, instead, he stripped the grass back to the bare earth with a machine which I have never seen before. Needless to say I went into a bit of a melt down moment when I saw the result. My wife had to give me a wide berth for 2 days afterwards. Thankfully, after some rains the grass and plants are starting to grow again, but it has been a bit of a shock. You may wonder why I am telling you this story, but my point is that in everything we do and see, there are elements of interpretation, experience and understanding and this leads me nicely onto the main subject of this Ezine…….. AI.
The death of original content
Over the summer I have been seeing alot written about AI, most of which I take with a pinch of salt, but one headline that appeared in my inbox was the following:
Bot and AI overtake human-generated web traffic for the first time; we are in the age of the “Dead Internet”
According to data from Cloudflare, automated bot and AI agent traffic has surpassed human-generated web traffic for the first time in history, with 57.4% per cent of requests to websites it hosts being automated bot requests, while only 42.6% originate from human users. Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, expressed surprise at the speed of the transition from human-generated to computer-program-generated content. He expected this would happen towards the end of 2027.
This, for me at least, is alarming. Not because automated AI generated content will surpass human generated content, I think that was almost inevitable but because AI models are all fishing in the same pond. I don’t know enough about how well AI can generate new creative ‘original’ ideas, but I am almost certain that it will never surpass the human capability to create and innovate, therefore it does leave you wondering to what extent the information we are getting from Chatgpt or Claude, or any other open source AI model, is just recycled from the same information which AI put there in the first place. I am sure the more technologically advanced amongst you may be able to educate me on this point, but unlikey to convince me that the loss of original human generated content is not just a loss for us all, but also very dangerous when looking to make important decisions based on information which for all intents and purposes can be wrong. The level of error in AI generated search results, for example, is something that worries investors in its longer term application.
(Please remember that my Ezine’s are human generated and researched (using minimal AI input)!
We must adapt
Having said all this above, we have no choice but to adapt. Here is a good point to tell you a personal story about my own family name history. I have written about this before but it is good to remind you of it, given the context.
My name is Horsfall!
For those of you who are familiar with industrial revolution history in the UK, you may be award of the Luddites. In Huddersfield, where I am from, they were a group of people who worked in the textile industry and who were involved in the finishing of cloth by hand. The introduction of machinery, which both streamlined the operation and made it much quicker, put their jobs and livelihoods at risk and as a result they organised themselves into groups who went around the mills destroying machinery. In 1812, a man named William Horsfall (a direct line ancestor), a mill owner himself, and a vocal opponent of the Luddites, was also an advocate of installing machinery in his factories, to modernise, streamline and introduce efficiencies and greater productivity. On his horse, coming back from the market one Tuesday morning, he was shot and killed by the Luddites. This culminated in the death of the Luddites movement because the police immediately swooped in to avoid similar occurences happening. However, the term ‘a Luddite’ became synonymous with people who are opposed to technology, automation and modern working methods. (If you want to see the full family story you can click HERE
Personally, I don’t like AI in it’s present form (although I recognise it’s application in business to make things easier), but I know it’s here to stay and as Jensen Huang CEO of Nvidia recently said:
You are not going to lose your job to AI, but you are going to lose your job to someone using AI
Here are a couple of interesting slides about AI, courtesy of our friends at Evelyn Partners Investment Management
Jobs will change, but not be lost.
This slide particularly interests me because it goes to show the power of human ingenuity. As we can see, apart from the great depression, unemployment levels have largely hovered around the 5% mark since the 1700’s, over which time we have seen the introduction of so many new technologies – in no particular order: the train, car, aeroplane, the telephone, machines in factories, the radio, TV, the washing machine, going into space, the cell phone, computers, the internet, and now AI.
Influencing
I think one of the best examples of this human adaption is the job of the influencer. 10 years ago, internet influencers never existed. Yet now, people are making millions from online ad revenue, quite often it is completely useless content, but which creates the clickbait required to generate income. It is also becoming a life saver for certain sectors, such as farmers, to sell direct to the public instead of through distributors or to supermarkets. The internet and now AI has, in a way, democratised the world of work in professions which, previously, had been reserved for a select few. Now, more opportunites are available to the masses.
I have noticed this myself because in my efforts to understand the world of the land a little bit more, I have done a lot of research online and come across many people who have created Youtube or TickTok channels, producing short videos on the things they do on their land and the methods they use. One development I have noticed is that when these influencers seem to reach a critical mass of followers, subscribers and likes, then they suddenly start appearing with tools sponsored by certain companies and they start writing books for sale. It is well known that generating revenue through subscribers, followers etc is not going to a create a big and reliable long term income stream, but ancilliary product and services, sponsors and driving traffic through your website, seems to be the way to go.
Influencers – a job also at risk of AI
However, the influencer space may also be a ‘job’ under threat, with the rise in automated traffic, as explained above, this presents challenges to their economic model. Bots do not click on ads, which raises questions about how content creators can generate revenue in an increasingly bot-dominated landscape. As a potential solution they could charge bots for access to digital users’ content. Like every other employment, it will have to adapt to a rapidly changing future.
What the jobless numbers can tell us about the growth in AI
I will finish my section on AI with this, because it really puts into context why AI, robotics and automation are going to play an increasingly large part in our lives.
At the beginning of August new jobless claims were announced in the USA. New filings for unemployment benefits dropped to 187,000 for the week ending July 18 — a nearly 57-year low, and a much bigger drop than economists expected. This is probably not a cyclical blip. It’s demographics finally showing up in the data. Birth rates across the developed world — the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, South Korea — have been falling for decades, and it’s finally catching up. Fewer young workers are entering the work force every year than are retiring from it. This is basically a structural worker shortage, and jobless claims sitting near six-decade lows is exactly what you’d expect that shortage to look like on paper: a “low-hire, low-fire” economy where employers are desperate to hold onto the workers they already have. (I think about our friends in N.Italy who run a number of bars and they can never find trained staff and spend most of their time interviewing, hiring and firing. It has become their biggest headache). However, a labor shortage this bad can’t be solved through immigration, fast-enough, to mitgate your way out of a birth-rate collapse, and you definitely can’t train workers who don’t exist.
The only option left is productivity — which means robotics, automation, and AI aren’t optional anymore. They’re the only way to keep the economy growing when the number of available humans is shrinking. That’s why capital is pouring into automation and AI — this is not an passing fad, this is the innovation cycle!
Is this an investment opportunity?
Many of you have quoted me headlines that there is an AI bubble just waiting to burst and that a market crash will be lead by over speculated AI stocks. There is probably some truth in the fact that there are companies out there who have overly inflated valuations due to the hype around AI. However, the question is whether a revaluation of these stocks alone would be enough to generate a full market crash, or maybe a correction.
Major innovation cycles have never been cheap, and they’ve never been non-inflationary. Every prior boom — the 1970s energy and productivity shock and others — was accompanied by a commodity repricing. Building new infrastructure and new machines at scale means real demand for real materials.
Put it all together: a demographic worker shortage forcing an automation super-cycle, requiring a huge amount of hard assets (commodities) to build it all out. The smart money has already moved away from the speculative AI firms who may see a revaluation sometime soon, into the resource based companies who are going to be building the infrastructure to take us into this innovation era.
Revolut – it’s now an Italian bank – save money on charges
I have to tell you about ‘una scoperta’ recently. I have been an account holder at Revolut bank for a year or so now. Revolut being the online bank but did not have a national presence anywhere other than the UK (I think) Well, that all changed recently and it opened a full Italian online banking operation (plus a number of other European fully operational online banks). I converted to the Italian bank when notified.
This is not the interesting part. The better news is that over the summer I had another one of those bills to pay to a comune, or a multa or something and I was moaning, again, at the fact that you always have to pay about €1.50 to some entity somewhere, or worse €1.95 in the post office or in the tabaccheria, even when I am spending the time to input the payment myself online. This annoys me so much! In fact, I get quite furious about it. Banca Intesa charges me €1 every time I make a bonifico from my business account. I see red every time. I mean why, when I am entering the data myself on my phone and spending my time to enter the bonifico ONLINE should I have to pay €1 to the bank?
Well, the fantastic news is that I discovered, (through an AI search, ironically) that Revolut does not charge those pesky bank charges, neither for bonifici nor bill payments, nor comune payments, nor Agenzia delle Entrate payments. I think that this could save me in the region of about €100 a year, approximately.
And besides the cost savings the Revolut app is fantastic and much easier to use than any other Italian banking app I have. So, I am a convert. I hope they use this as disruption to the Italian banking sector and bring some positive change because, quite frankly, the time is up for charging to send payments in Italy! When disruption makes companies more competitive and treats clients better than before, this is my kind of capitalism. (I just hope they don’t fall in line with the other Italian banks, over time)
Italy’s average ‘declared’ income – a sign that maybe they need to modify the tax rates?
I had to have a chuckle to myself over the summer when I saw a social media feed about the average ‘declared’ income in 2025, according to INPS.
The simple reason I was laughing to myself was because the income of €27649 is suspiciously close to the figure of €28000, over which you move to the second band of income tax at 35%.
The crazy thing being that just a few years ago when the 23% rate finished at a maximum income of €19000pa, the average declared income in Italy was just below €19000.
If ever there was a sign that people are just looking for a better (some might say fairer) income tax system in Italy, then this has to be the most obvious signal yet.
Andy Burnham’s revision of the UK council tax and stamp duty system
I thought a note covering off Andy Burnham’s possibile revision of the UK council tax rates, might be worth a mention here because it could potentially impact Italian resident owners of UK property.
One proposal is to reform the current system of council tax and stamp duty and introduce a land tax (although no commitments have been made as to what, or when any reforms might take place….to date!). A land tax could hit Italian resident UK property owners hard because currently council tax is paid by the person in the property itself. A land tax would be imposed on the owner of the property. Given that Italian resident UK property owners have to pay IVIE (the Italian wealth tax on overseas properties), then this could constitute a double wealth tax if you are an owner of UK property. The only way to offset that might be to raise the rent, but if you are fixed into a rental pricing agreement and do not have the possibility to raise rent then it might just be another tax to add to your current ones!
Another, related property proposal in the UK is to reduce the ‘mansion tax’ threshold on which it is charged down from £2million to £1.5 million. This could drag quite a significant amount of properties into the annual mansion tax calculation, especially in urban areas and cities. The tax ranges from £2500 – £7500 pa, depending on the value of the property.
If you would like to discuss anything you have read in this Ezine, or to register for the event on the 24th September then feel free to contact me on
gareth.horsfall@spectrum-ifa.com
or call / message me on +369 333 649 2356.
As usual if you have any questions or would like to get in touch then please do so on
Always happy to help!