There’s a hidden cost to working from home, said Megan Cerullo in CBSNews.com. “Americans routinely say they relish the ability” to do their job remotely, a perk that’s expanded dramatically since the pandemic. But the often lonely nature of working from home can take a toll on mental health, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The study found that from 2011 to 2024, remote workers saw “a 58% rise in hours spent alone compared with in-office workers.” They also became “significantly more likely to go a full day without any human contact”—no chats with colleagues, no after-hours socializing with friends. Perhaps because of that isolation, remote workers “visited mental-health-care providers more frequently than non-remote workers and were more likely to rely on prescription psychiatric medication.” Remote work is often credited with “increased job satisfaction and better work-life balance,” but this darker flip side is “worth considering.”

Working remotely “isn’t for everyone,” said Kate B. Odell in The Wall Street Journal. But for working moms, it has been “the biggest innovation since the dishwasher.” Blunting the traditional trade-off between paid labor and family has allowed millions of women “to contribute their skills, earn money,” and still “be a primary influence on their children.” The demands on working moms will always be high. And the women working from home now “have to work harder to develop relationships with colleagues,” and often the “laptop is on at night and before dawn.” But “not being in traffic at 5 p.m. on weekdays” may be a worthwhile compromise.

For recent grads, the boom in remote work could be worsening an already bleak job market, said Emma Ockerman in Yahoo. Another recent New York Fed study found that companies are “more reluctant to hire less-experienced workers” for remote openings, because of how difficult it can be “to train new workers from afar.” As evidence, the researchers note that unemployment rates have increased “particularly fast among young workers in occupations that can easily be performed remotely,” but have dropped slightly for older workers who perform the same roles.

There’s still no replacing the office as “a petri dish of human interaction,” said Renée Loth in The Boston Globe. Sharing a workspace means you have to live with “people with different communication styles or work ethics,” as well as learn “how to interpret subtle cues from body language or vocal tone.” You can’t get these life lessons over Zoom or Slack. We can already see the “shriveling of workplace etiquette” that has transpired in the few years since the pandemic. Just as kids struggled with social development during Covid’s isolation, we’ve learned that “adults also need to play well with others, share the cookies, and not throw a tantrum over a bad report card.”

Alan Greenspan was perhaps the most influential economic policymaker of his or any era. The former Federal Reserve chairman died this week at 100, leaving behind a debate about whether he supercharged the American economy or inadvertently caused its near-destruction.

Greenspan “helped define modern American capitalism” during his two-decade Fed tenure, said NBC News. His policy judgments “created an enormous amount of wealth and prosperity for our country” during the decade-long economic expansion of the 1990s, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said to CNBC.

On the flip side, critics say the Ayn Rand acolyte’s embrace of laissez-faire capitalism set the stage for the financial collapse that caused the late aughts’ Great Recession. Greenspan’s push to deregulate financial institutions “stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe,” the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission said in a 2011 report.

Good? Or lucky?

Greenspan was a “maestro of monetary policy,” said The Economist. His Federal Reserve “kept the American economy humming” through one of the longest economic booms on record. But it was not long after he left the Fed that the global financial crisis arrived. Greenspan defended the institution’s “light regulatory touch” that critics blamed for the crash, and he argued that the Obama administration’s interventions were “preventing the massive correction” that markets needed to recover. Such excuse-making raised a question about Greenspan’s formerly shiny reputation: “Had he been good, or merely lucky, and then unlucky?”

No one promoted the free-market system “with more ardor” than Alan Greenspan, Roger Lowenstein said at The New York Times. Those principles “work well most of the time,” but the 2008 financial collapse “was not one of those times.” Greenspan’s Federal Reserve “failed to crack down on hyperpermissive lending terms” that let Americans too easily borrow too much money for houses they could not afford. The damage to Greenspan’s reputation “should be imprinted” in the memory of every economic policymaker.

Greenspan’s “worst moment” came when he pronounced himself “shocked” that banks had failed to protect themselves or their shareholders in the rush to make bigger profits, said The Wall Street Journal. In truth, Greenspan had a “keen” understanding that “government can’t fine-tune the economy or create wealth.”

Lessons for Kevin Warsh

Greenspan’s supporters remember his Fed delivering “mostly stable prices, booming asset markets and steady economic growth,” Jonathan Levin said at Bloomberg. Those fans include Kevin Warsh, the new Fed chairman appointed by President Donald Trump. Warsh should understand that Greenspan’s hot economy was partly produced “from a good deal of economic and demographic luck” — the kind of positive development “Warsh can’t bet on today.”

The newly appointed Fed chairman should learn from Greenspan’s legacy as a “bipartisan operator,” Harry Kraemer said at Forbes. Greenspan served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, after all. The Fed’s commitment to “balancing low unemployment and rising inflation does not have to be politicized.”

Gone are the days of working a grueling nine-to-five. Employees have started microshifting, a practice that involves completing duties in short, productive bursts. This allows workers to make their own schedules and save time for other obligations and hobbies.

Flexibility in the workplace has become increasingly common and sometimes even expected of hybrid and remote jobs. There may also be some benefits for business in allowing workers a freer schedule.

‘A little bit of autonomy’

Approximately 65% of workers are interested in microshifting, according to an analysis by Owl Labs. The practice, though not labeled at the time, took off during the pandemic at the height of remote work. Covid-19’s “work-from-home requirement demonstrated that employees can work successfully from anywhere, without a boss watching over them all of the time,” said The Wall Street Journal. Now, “flexibility increasingly means giving employees more control over when they work, not just where.”

Microshifting is most common in “industries where flexible work arrangements are already common, such as IT, financial services and professional and technical services,” said the Journal. People with “caregiving responsibilities at home — for children or other relatives — are more likely to try microshifting than noncaregivers.”

Over time, management and leadership have become more “adept at giving a little bit of autonomy,” Kevin Rockmann, a professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business, said to The Associated Press. Employees have also gained the “motivation and almost the license to ask for this.”

‘It’s good to take breaks’

Microshifting can have benefits for both employers and employees. Breaking the workday into shorter chunks allows employees to “squeeze in some personal business as well,” giving them “more time to relax and enjoy” days off “rather than spend them running errands,” said Moneywise. As a result, they work when they are “most focused and productive,” and “companies get the most” out of time with them. More than half of employees (59%) “schedule personal appointments during typical work hours, and 38% take up to an hour each day for personal time,” said the analysis by Owl Labs.

“From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks,” Rockmann said to the AP. “When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.” Microshifting can also improve relationships, allowing more time with friends and family, all while reducing burnout. “Taking walks or attending a child’s school function can be reinvigorating for people who get drained from sitting at a desk or looking at a computer screen,” said the AP.

‘Tremendous amount of discipline’

Microshifting also has its risks. A lack of a clear schedule “can gradually weaken our ability to commit to longer stretches of uninterrupted work,” Aytekin Tank, the founder and CEO of Jotform, said at Forbes. It could also lead to a less collaborative work environment. Employees “have to be more aware of the preferred work hours of colleagues,” and if their microshifts don’t coincide, it “can lead to periods of inactivity that might ultimately slow things down,” said Moneywise.

Without structure, employees may also “fall behind on deadlines and actually wind up working round-the-clock,” said the Journal. Microshifting “requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline,” said Moneywise. If someone is “not a motivated worker (or are someone who is easily distracted), getting things done in those work blocks could be challenging.”

Think Elon Musk “the billionaire was bad?” asked Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. “Brace yourself.” After SpaceX made the biggest-ever initial public offering earlier this month, the 54-year-old tycoon saw his wealth rocket to $1.1 trillion, more than the GDP of all but 21 nations. How much is a trillion dollars? Enough to spend $1 million a day for 2,700 years without going broke. “You don’t have to be a socialist or even a liberal” to find it “obscene” that the U.S. minted the world’s first trillionaire when so many Americans are struggling to afford gas, food, and housing. But the worse news is who we minted. In 2024, when he was welcoming Nazis to X and returning an autocrat to the White House, I likened Musk to a “Bond movie villain,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. That was “far too generous.” Since then, this chainsaw-wielding sociopath has shredded the U.S. Agency for International Development—causing 600,000 preventable deaths, most of them children, in a single year—and is now busy on X, rallying Britain’s white population to “firebomb and assault their Black and brown neighbors.” That this racist “monster” is the first trillionaire is a perfect symbol of “our modern empire’s decline and fall.”

“I am not a huge fan of Musk as a political activist,” said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. But the South African–born tech savant’s colossal fortune is “testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success, and American greatness.” Just look at everything he’s built, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. With Tesla, he launched the electric vehicle revolution. His Starlink satellite network “helped Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion.” His Neuralink brain-chip startup may let the paralyzed walk again. And SpaceX could help humanity populate other planets. Musk is our first trillionaire because “American capitalism,” by its nature, most lavishly rewards the visionaries who “make all Americans better off.”

How quaint, said Robert Reich in The Guardian. Until recently, yes, the value of American firms, like the price of their products, was set by “supply and demand” in a relatively free marketplace. But Musk and his ilk have dismantled the “old rules of capitalism.” In our “second Gilded Age,” the value of companies like SpaceX is built through hype, government connections that provide lucrative contracts and favorable regulations, “and total, arbitrary control” of pricesetting forces. Musk’s companies do have real value. But he’s a trillionaire because the system now effectively lets founders decree what their shares will be worth, then forces average Americans— through rigged markets and index-fund-driven retirement accounts “automatically” tied to SpaceX’s fortune—to buy those shares “whether we want to or not.”

We’ve been here before, said T.J. Stiles in The Wall Street Journal. A century ago, the same widening chasms—between the superrich and everyone else, between the paper value of companies and their tangible assets—provoked Americans to demand a progressive tax code and antitrust reform. Musk becoming a trillionaire on fantasies of asteroid mining could be a similar “inflection point.” Why would Musk care what Americans demand? asked TC Sottek in The Verge. He now has more “wealth, media power, and government influence” than anyone in history, and will use it to do what he wants. It’s long been clear that Musk is “the wrong man to save the world,” as some liberals once hoped he might. It’s now the world that “needs saving from him.

Back in 2001, his plan to start a rocket company seemed so misguided, his friends urged him to abandon it.

Last Friday, Elon Musk listed SpaceX on the Nasdaq at an initial valuation of $1.77 trillion. The largest flotation in history, it blasted Musk into the stratosphere as the world’s first trillionaire.

Eye-popping valuation

What makes the flotation doubly extraordinary, said Boris Johnson in The Mail on Sunday, is that it amounted to a punt, a gamble on one man’s vision for the future. In a nutshell, Musk plans to use the $86 billion capital injection to build thousands of huge, fully reusable Starship rockets, which will slash the cost of sending mass into space. These will be used to launch data centres into orbit, so that they can tap into the energy of the Sun to power our ever-growing use of AI, along with thousands more Starlink satellites, to bring reliable internet access to the three billion people who still do not have it.

With the revenue this generates, Musk will build a city on Mars. How exactly this will “butter our parsnips” on Earth, we still do not know; but what a thrilling prospect this is for humankind.

On paper, the flotation makes little sense, said John Rapley on UnHerd. SpaceX has never generated a profit; its eye-popping valuation is based on a price-to-sales ratio of 92 to one – way above the 3.6 to one average in the S&P 500. That the IPO succeeded was due in large part to excitable forecasts by investment banks who stood to make vast sums from it; but it is also the case that many investors have faith in Musk’s ability to make science fiction a reality.

A move to Mars?

His plans are hugely ambitious, said The Economist. They depend on Starship, which is already late; and tech that doesn’t even exist yet. But Musk has defied sceptics before: people said he’d never be able to land rockets for reuse; now his firm does it twice a week. And 10,000 of his Starlink satellites are already beaming internet access to 12 million people – as well as to various arms of the US government.

Of course, some people will hate the idea of doing anything that adds to Musk’s wealth and power, said Will Dunn in The New Statesman. Others, who do not object to his hard-right political interventions, may worry that his commercial vision is crackpot: cities on distant planets sounds exciting, but you have to wonder how many people will want to move from Earth – which has “terrific amenities including a magnetic field and an atmosphere” – to the toxic deserts of Mars.

But most of us will be giving Musk money, like it or not. SpaceX and Tesla are now such a huge presence in the market, there will hardly be a retirement or savings fund that is not invested in them.

The war against Iran upended the global economy and sent prices soaring. What happens now that a fragile peace has arrived?

Higher prices will “likely outlast the Iran war,” said The Associated Press. Fuel and food costs will come down slowly, airline tickets will stay pricey, and shipping costs will remain elevated as supply chain kinks are repaired after the Strait of Hormuz is reopened. There is a “good deal of uncertainty about how the reopening will unfold,” said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, to the AP.

Rebuilding ‘could take years’

The war “permanently altered” the global economy, said Patricia Cohen at The New York Times. Many countries discovered their “profound vulnerability” to shocks from relying on imported oil for energy supply, sparking a long-term “transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.” And China is “poised to benefit most” from that shift.

More broadly, the world economy has been “kicked onto a path of slower growth and higher prices,” said Cohen. Countries and businesses will not “simply pick up where they left off before the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran.”

President Donald Trump long promised that oil prices would “drop like a rock” after the war ended. But that will be a “difficult promise for Trump to keep,” as the oil industry is experiencing “extraordinary practical challenges” to restoring supply chains disrupted by the war, said David Goldman at CNN. Tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz face a “bottleneck” after Iran mined the passageway, leaving only “two narrow passageways” for safe travel. Gulf States will also need time to restart wells shut off during the war because there was no way to export the oil. Plus, rebuilding oil facilities damaged by attacks “could take years.”

The end of the war may mark a “new era of U.S. inequality,” said Matt Peterson at CNBC. The conflict heightened an “already historic disconnect” between Americans who “share in the affluence” generated by AI-driven stock market gains and “those who can’t.” The second group was forced to dip into its savings to pay for the “energy crunch” caused by the war, exacerbating already simmering economic tensions. The war “didn’t create American inequality, but it hasn’t helped.”

Volatility ‘already baked in’

It “may be too late” for Republicans to benefit from lower gas prices they hope will result from the new peace, said Politico. GOP officials fear that “voter perceptions of a sour economy are already baked in” to the midterm elections outlook.

The problem is that actual relief will take time to arrive. Price volatility is “expected to last beyond the summer months” and into campaign season. Voters are unlikely to “forget about the months and months of high gas prices that added to their pain” when they go to the polls in November, said Democratic pollster John Anzalone to Politico.

Nearly half its customers paid nothing for their food and drink after a cafe in the US stopped charging customers and asked instead for voluntary donations.

But since it switched to this curious model, the Post Modern Times cafe in Minneapolis is making a profit after mostly posting losses for years.

Defying ‘fascists’

In a statement shared on Post Modern Times’ Instagram account in January, the cafe’s owner, Dylan Alverson, said he had decided to move to a donations-only model in response to a “government occupation” in Minneapolis.

The restaurant is just four blocks from where Renée Good was killed in January by Ice agents and six blocks from the site of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “Effective tomorrow we are done making money for the fascists that occupy our city,” he said. “We refuse to generate taxes under the guise of a functioning for-profit capitalist business aligned with government strategy.”

What was “surprising” is “what ensued in the weeks and months that followed”, said The New York Times. Post Modern Times “thrived”, even as the number of customers who don’t pay for food “hovers between 40 and 50%”. Running on donations means the cafe doesn’t have to pay tax on sales and the staff are volunteers working for shared tips and community donations.

Alverson’s cafe generated $1.3 million (£960,000) in sales last year but still lost $18,500 (£13,800), “in spite of cost-conscious measures” like paying himself just $23,000 (£17,000) a year as “manager, chef and fix-it man”.

After “fighting to make a profit for 15 years”, he had concluded that it’s not “possible” without “taking advantage of people”. But since making the change, he has “succeeded more than I ever did when I was running a conventional business employing 22 people”.

Some 42% of restaurant owners said their businesses weren’t profitable last year, according to the National Restaurant Association. So, “what started as a workaround to paying sales tax” might “offer a solution to a broken industry-wide business”.

Establishing trust

“Pay what you wish”, or “PWYW”, is a “well-known, if not exactly common”, pricing strategy whereby the buyer sets the price of a given commodity, said The Guardian.

Although paying nothing is “always a popular option”, the “underlying idea” is to “establish trust” between a seller keen to provide value or expand market share, and a “fair-minded buyer”.

The fashion retailer Everlane held a PWYW sale in 2015 and when Radiohead self-released their 2007 album “In Rainbows”, it was as a PWYW download. Although 62% of fans paid nothing for the download, and the average overall price per download was just $2.26, this was still more than the share the band would have got by selling at full price through iTunes (about $1.40).

Weeks after successfully squaring up to Elon Musk in court, Sam Altman is preparing to challenge his old adversary “on a different plane”, said Bloomberg. Days before SpaceX’s expected debut, his company OpenAI – which kicked off the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 – has “filed confidentially” for an IPO, setting the stage for the third mega-listing this year, after SpaceX and Anthropic.

Despite reportedly missing “certain internal revenue and user-growth targets” and losing several key executives, OpenAI recently raised $122 billion from private investors at an $852 billion valuation. But the details of its IPO plan are being kept deliberately vague. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while.”

In fact, OpenAI’s decision to go public, potentially this autumn, “rests more on the outcome of SpaceX’s IPO ... than on just about anything else”, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. It remains an open question whether there is “enough investor capacity for three giant IPOs, potentially in rapid succession” – particularly as already listed giants are also tapping the market. “Wall Street is rushing to fund the AI bonanza in every conceivable way,” said Sam Goldfarb in The Wall Street Journal. Google parent Alphabet last week raised $85 billion; Meta is also weighing a stock offer.

OpenAI might usefully streamline its sprawling product line-up before listing. Indeed, Altman and co are plotting “the biggest overhaul of ChatGPT” since its launch – aiming for a “superapp” that combines both coding tools and AI agents, said Cristina Criddle in the Financial Times. The move reflects the company’s “growing conviction” that “the future of AI lies not in chatbots that answer questions, but in agents that perform tasks”. As one senior honcho put it: “Chat is dead.”

Summer used to be time for teens to get a part-time job, earn a few bucks and pile up some work experience. Now cultural and economic shifts are making that tradition a thing of the past.

America’s teenagers “face a bleak job outlook heading into summer,” said Yahoo Finance. Rising oil prices, automation and artificial intelligence are all part of the problem. Work is simply more difficult to find for teens. But today’s young people are also increasingly turning to “club sports, extracurriculars, college prep and even content creation” as an alternative to lifeguarding at the local pool or flipping burgers at fast-food restaurants.

What did the commentators say?

If a young person “can only work one day a month” because of their extracurricular commitments “there’s no point in really hiring them,” Jesse Lauritsen of Washington D.C.’s Zeke’s Coffee said to NPR. That could be a problem as those teens get older and move into the full-time workforce. Employers tend to look for signals that new workers are “ready to go and they have what it takes,” ZipRecruiter’s Nicole Bachaud said to Yahoo. Without a summer job, they are not getting that experience.

“Youths aren’t bothering to get summer jobs,” Stephen Moore said at The Washington Times. Working a low-paying seasonal gig can teach vital lessons in how to “show up for work on time, be nice to the foreman and do a little extra to get noticed.” Federal data suggests only about a third of teens are seeking summer work, down from 50% in earlier decades. The change is “deeply troubling” because studies indicate that the “earlier one begins working, the more successful they are likely to be later in life.” One solution would be to create a lower teen minimum wage of $5 or $6 an hour to “incentivize employers to hire them for starter jobs.”

Teens have “found better opportunities” than taking summer work, Roland Fryer said at The Wall Street Journal. Summer hiring projections are the “weakest since the government began counting in 1948,” but the “classic” teen summer gig has been “disappearing for nearly half a century” for good reason. Time “spent folding shirts at the Gap” is less valuable than building a college resume, with a “lifetime payoff” that is “significantly larger.” U.S. teenagers are not being turned away from summer jobs. “They stopped wanting them.”

What next?

The issue has taken on political dimensions. Oklahoma voters will soon decide a referendum to gradually raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. Doing so could “make things even worse by pricing many teenagers out of the market,” Ray Carter said at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. But a higher minimum wage could provide stability that is the “difference between staying in school and dropping out” for lower-income young workers, Jill Mencke said at the Oklahoma Policy Institute. The referendum is Tuesday.

What happened

Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes its stock market debut on the Nasdaq on Friday after selling 555.6 million shares at $135 each. The roughly $75 billion initial public offering (IPO) is the largest ever and values SpaceX at $1.77 trillion. If the share price rises slightly after trading begins, Musk, who is “already the world’s richest man, could become its first trillionaire,” at least on paper, The Associated Press said.

Who said what

“Like all things Musk, SpaceX’s IPO bucked the norms,” starting with its fixed $135 share price rather than a range that would let the market help determine the optimal price, The Wall Street Journal said. Musk will also “hold the majority of a special class of shares, giving him control over decisions related to company strategy, finances and personnel,” the AP said. Part of SpaceX’s sky-high valuation, and “Musk’s future compensation, depends on SpaceX eventually establishing a colony of at least 1 million people” on Mars.

What next?

“Musk and his investment bankers” are selling lofty propositions “about what the rocket and artificial intelligence company will achieve,” The New York Times said. But some analysts are “concerned with SpaceX’s finances,” and Musk’s “history of overpromising” has some investors “increasingly worried” that SpaceX “may burn them.”

Homebuyers are losing faith that mortgage rates will fall, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. The average fixed rate for a 30-year home loan hasn’t dipped below 6% since the fall of 2022. For a brief moment earlier this year, it looked like the tide might be turning. But then the Iran war erupted in February, and rates, which are linked to Treasury yields, have since surged more than half a point, recently topping 6.5%. Potential buyers “who had been waiting for better” news are reconciling with the reality that rates “aren’t coming down this year in a significant way.” Some are biting the bullet, hoping they can refinance later—and trying to find ways to cover higher housing costs. They include Bob Anderson, 66, who will close on a Detroit-area home in June that will cost $350 more a month than his rent. “I will admit I’m a little stressed,” Anderson said.

Home Depot is “a barometer for America’s housing market,” said The Economist. But the company’s share price has “plunged by a quarter from its peak last year,” as fewer home sales have led to lower sales of construction equipment and for DIY projects. “We have never seen housing activity this slow for this long,” chief financial officer Richard McPhail said in April. Real estate agents are also under pressure, said Nicole Friedman in The Wall Street Journal. Most realtors are “independent contractors and get paid when a deal closes.” But deals have been hard to come by this spring. The National Association of Realtors’ membership has decreased by 200,000 since 2022, and in a 2025 NAR survey, only 71% of agents “said real estate was their only profession”—a record low.

One Texas city offers a road map out of this mess, said Shaina Mishkin in Barron’s. Since Austin simplified its permit approval process a decade ago, housing “supply has increased, prices are down, sales are up, and buying costs have shrunk.” The typical household in Austin can now “afford 74% of listings, nearly on par with 2019 levels” and bucking the downward trend in other big cities. Austin’s leaders “understood that expanding the housing stock in any way, even with luxury apartment buildings, would ease pressures,” said The New York Times in an editorial. Let that be a lesson to everyone: “We need to build more homes.”

The build-more theory faces a major obstacle, said Ryan Dezember in The Wall Street Journal: rising construction-material costs. The average American home uses “more than 400 pounds of copper,” the price of which is soaring thanks in part to high demand from data centers. Lumber, fuel, resins, and plastics, as well as the costs of delivering these products to work sites, have all gotten more expensive because of President Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war. These costs are “adding to an affordability problem that is pushing homeownership beyond reach for more Americans.”

What happeed

Consumer prices rose 4.2% last month from a year earlier, the highest inflation reading since April 2023, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Most of the increase was due to rising fuel prices. But the “higher energy costs are rippling through the food supply chain,” affecting beef, coffee and produce, The Washington Post said. Asked about the rising cost of living, President Donald Trump “took a surprisingly optimistic tack,” The Associated Press said. “I love the inflation,” he told reporters.

Who said what

Trump’s take was “unexpected” given that voters rank the economy “as a top concern — and have given Trump low marks on that issue” after he’d pledged in 2024 to “quickly vanquish inflation,” the AP said. “His argument now is that higher prices are solely a function of the Iran war” and that “relief is already on its way” because of a “secret mission” that he said had already moved 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. “As soon as this war is over,” he told reporters, prices will drop “like a rock.”

What next?

Despite Trump’s claims, efforts to reopen the strait “have so far stalled” and oil disruptions are already baked in through 2026, Reuters said.

Another element of aviation is causing trouble for the air travel industry, and this time it’s the airplanes themselves. The companies that manufacture aircraft engines are increasingly coming under fire for alleged price gouging, which airlines say is making it harder to afford new planes. Combined with increased demand from travelers, airlines have found themselves between a rock and a hard place.

Why are aircraft engines becoming more expensive?

Aircraft engines have “emerged as an acute flashpoint for the industry, both in terms of their performance and lack of availability,” said Bloomberg. Many airplane manufacturers also increasingly rely on “less than a handful of manufacturers, creating quasi-monopolies and dependencies.” These companies are then able to drive up the price of building the engines.

Manufacturers are also turning toward a trend in energy-efficient engines, but this comes with its own problems. Continuing shortages of the “industry’s most fuel-efficient aircraft engines have sent their market values soaring,” said the Financial Times. The constraints of building these types of engines have “become one of the biggest concerns for the industry as manufacturers have struggled to keep up with booming demand for Airbus and Boeing planes.”

These factors mean that engines have become one of the most expensive elements of building new airplanes. A pair of jet engines now represents up to 80% of the total market value of a new plane, according to aviation finance company Avolon. It represents a marked change from two decades ago, when the engines would have only “accounted for 20% to 30% of an aircraft’s value,” said the Financial Times.

The continuing spike in value means the price to lease new engines has increased significantly over the past few years. In January 2025, it cost $400,000 to lease two engines from manufacturer Pratt & Whitney; in comparison, leasing an A320neo plane itself cost just $306,000, according to data from aviation consultancy Cirium cited by the Financial Times. The supply chain failures “across the industry from manufacturers cost airlines at least $11 billion in 2025,” said Bloomberg, a trend that could continue through the remainder of 2026.

How are airlines reacting?

Many airline executives are angry at the inflated cost of plane engines. Most say they are “being forced to remove engines and take them for maintenance into crowded shops earlier than expected, which is driving up costs and sucking up the fuel savings they were supposed to get from the engines,” said CNBC. The increased costs represent a “paradox: Engine makers dazzled carriers with more fuel-efficient options for new planes from Boeing and Airbus,” but now “production shortfalls and disappointing reliability with those engines are becoming costly problems.”

So far, most engines “have not reached the reliability that airlines need, though there have been improvements,” said CNBC. As airplanes “push the limits, it sometimes comes at the cost of reliability, and what we all are seeing is that those engines have to go into unscheduled maintenance far more frequently than prior engine generations,” Alexis von Hoensbroech, the CEO of Canadian carrier WestJet, told CNBC. A “lot of the fuel savings are in fact eaten up by unplanned maintenance costs.”

“As pervasive as ketchup” on chips, hot pepper sauce is an “obligatory accompaniment” for Caribbean cuisine, said the BBC. But a shortage of the fiery-flavoured condiment is “stifling supply” – both in the Caribbean, and in countries like the US, the UK and Australia, where consumers have developed a taste for its sweet, smoky punch.

It’s all about the main ingredient: Scotch bonnet, a scorching hot chilli pepper with an intense, fruity flavour. Susceptible both to “heavy rain and viruses”, and “walloped” by recent hurricanes, harvests have become devastatingly poor.

‘Confluence’ of issues

“From Jamaican jerk chicken to Haitian beef stew,” the Scotch bonnet pepper is a “foundational element” of Caribbean cuisine, said Chowhound. Not only does it pack a punch, it also adds “sweetness and an unmistakable scent”. It has a “smoky, recognisable spiciness” that has been successfully marketed the world over.

But now it’s “particularly hard to source”, said the BBC. Sauce and seasoning manufacturers such as Jamaica-based Walkerswood have cited a “confluence” of issues, including extreme weather and pests, just when global demand for hot sauce is skyrocketing; Walkerswood now exports “more than 95% of its products”.

It isn’t the first time a hot sauce shortage has had a global impact. Sriracha aficionados felt a “not so pleasant sting” four years ago, said The Guardian, as drought in Mexico resulted in a scarcity of the sauce’s “key ingredient”: red jalapeños.

Too ‘temperamental’

The Scotch bonnet shortage, blamed by many on climate change, “may be lasting” said Semafor. That’s not only a blow to the hot sauce industry but it could also change the landscape of plant growth in the Caribbean altogether. Continually disappointed by the “temperamental” Scotch bonnet, many producers are now turning to “hardier crops”, including sweet potatoes, to make a living instead.

Some parts of the Caribbean do seem to have escaped unscathed, though The island of Barbados has been “marked ‘safe’” from the hot pepper shortage, said Barbados Today. Its crops remain “resilient, pest-free, and available for production”.

“The era of ever-expanding workplace perks is ending,” said Tina Reed in Axios. With jobs harder to come by and workers’ negotiating leverage shrinking, “some employers are rolling back” the glowing enticements they started dangling a few years ago. And it’s “not just free kombucha and laundry” that are off the table—policies like “paid parental leave and retirement matches are on the chopping block” as well. Consulting giant Deloitte announced recently it is “reducing paid time off, halving parental leave, and eliminating a $50,000 reimbursement for family-planning services” for most of its employees, said Lauren Goode in Wired, citing the rising costs of keeping such benefits in place. Companies should know, however, that “plenty of research shows that diminishing employees’ quality of life and lowering their total wages” harms the bottom line.

Yet companies seem to feel that “no benefit is off-limits anymore,” said Steve Russolillo in Business Insider. It’s one thing for the “free food, on-site laundry, and gym subsidies” to go, but “I really thought certain benefits like paid time off and parental leave would be untouchable.” Clearly, “I was wrong.” Of course, it’s better to have benefits cut than to lose a job entirely. But the workers who survive downsizing efforts aren’t looking at a future full of perks. The Trump administration, however, wants one specific benefit to be more widely accessible, said Lauren Kaori Gurley in The Washington Post. The Labor Department proposed a new rule to make it easier for employers to offer in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility benefits, and easier for workers to sign up for them. It wouldn’t “eliminate all costs for beneficiaries,” but it could reduce them.

Small businesses should take note of what Deloitte and other corporations are doing, said Suzanne Lucas in Inc. If “you’ve felt like you couldn’t compete with the big companies” as an entrepreneur, now is your chance. “Where you could never match Deloitte’s $50,000 IVF reimbursement or 16 weeks of paid parental leave,” you can offer other attractive perks, like remote work, four-day workweeks, and flexibility. It’s an opportunity to grab top-tier talent that was “out of your reach six months ago.”

At the same time, some perks were getting out of hand, said Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. The London law firm Slaughter and May, for instance, recently ended a policy from 2022 that allowed workers to bring their pets into the office. Seriously. Other benefits, like fertility procedures, won’t be widely missed—they are used by fewer than 1% of workers, according to benefits platform Heka. Employers are simply “waking up to the fact that what employees say they want differs from what they actually use.”

People looking to grill hamburgers this summer may not get a respite from rising beef prices anytime soon, as an ongoing cattle shortage across the United States could compound high costs at the grocery store. Farmers are now worried the beef industry could be on the fritz for a while.

How is the cattle shortage affecting the beef market?

At the beginning of 2026, American cattle producers had 86.2 million heads of cattle nationwide according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), marking the lowest number to start the year since 1951. The number of cattle that had calved (given birth to a baby) was also down 100,000 from the prior year. Several economic and geopolitical factors have “been pushing livestock numbers down, including rising costs, international competition and increased consolidation in the cattle industry,” said NPR.

“Years of severe drought in the western United States” have also “strained feed supplies and forced many ranchers to reduce their herds,” said WTHR-TV Indianapolis. With less grain comes less grass for cattle to feed on, so “farmers have cut herd sizes — a decision that can shrink the nation’s beef supply for years.” The reduced supply is becoming unsustainable for ranchers.

As cattle become more scarce, their price goes up, and these higher prices have led many ranchers to “sell their livestock and have dissuaded them from buying new animals to rebuild their herds,” said NPR. Cattle farmers say they are being forced to gamble with the industry. “We could put another 100 head out on grass, with what our grass will hopefully be this spring, but then you’re also wondering too, ‘Is that too much of a risk?’” Amanda Hall, a cattle farmer in Lexington, Kentucky, told NPR.

What does the future hold?

Even as ranchers are looking for solutions to high prices, there is “no quick fix for tight supplies, as the sticker shock in the grocery aisles didn’t happen overnight,” said Bloomberg. But Americans don’t want beef any less just because it’s more expensive, and demand has “allowed big retailers to stay on the winning side of these sales, while meatpackers lose out, as larger accounts have leverage to negotiate their pricing,” David Anderson, an agricultural economics professor at Texas A&M University, told Bloomberg.

President Donald Trump’s effort to “lower beef prices has divided top administration officials and some of his closest allies,” said Politico, potentially throwing another wrench into the problem. Trump faces a dilemma in “trying to balance consumers’ concerns about rising grocery prices with those of his supporters in the cattle industry.” The administration’s decision to import large quantities of Argentinian beef has also rubbed many ranchers the wrong way.

The government still remains optimistic that the livestock lull is temporary. While short-term lows remain, cattle inventories “are expected to rise to 91.6 million head in 2034,” said the USDA. Prices in 2026 could reach record highs “before falling back through 2031 and then starting a new climb through 2034.” Other parts of the farm are also expected to grow, as “broiler chicken production is projected to reach successive annual record highs over the next 10 years.”

China’s manufacturing might is overwhelming Europe, and Europe is gearing up to push back. A trade war could be in the offing as Brussels seeks to protect the continent’s workers and factories from a flood of inexpensive imports from state-backed Chinese manufacturers.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is aiming for a “major crackdown on subsidized Chinese imports,” said Politico. Europe cannot “be the victim of a predatory strategy that is destroying our industry,” EU industrial strategy chief Stéphane Séjourné said to the outlet.

China is warning it will retaliate against any EU action. Europe is “going further and further down a radical path,” said state-run social media account Yuyuantantian, per The Wall Street Journal. The tit for tat could further unsettle a global economy already rattled by President Donald Trump’s trade policies and fallout from the Iran war.

What did the commentators say?

The Chinese economy is “taking everyone down,” Michael Schuman said at The Atlantic. The country has become a “government-subsidized, export-driven manufacturing juggernaut” that is “alienating trading partners.” That includes Europe, where Chinese imports are “costing Germany 10,000 manufacturing jobs a month.” The success of China’s export strategy may make its businesses seem “unstoppable,” but its continuation relies on the “assumption that other countries will continue to absorb China’s exports.” Beijing may instead be pushing its rivals to embrace a “protectionism that depresses prosperity for everyone.”

“What, precisely, is the problem with Chinese surpluses?” Martin Sandbu said at the Financial Times. Chinese car imports have indeed increased in recent years, but that merely “displaced imports from elsewhere.” The overall number of vehicles shipped into the EU has “remained steady” during that time. Europe could benefit from manufacturing competition “as a spur to faster productivity improvements at home.” That would be good both for European businesses and “for consumers.”

The EU may be “finally waking up to China,” Peggy Corlin and Luca Bertuzzi said at Euronews. The reassessment “has been long in the making” after “decades of deepening economic dependence.” But Europe is not entirely united on the issue. Germany, for example, is still focused on “securing market access for German companies in China,” while Spain is welcoming a “growing share” of Chinese investments. “Political will” is the “key determining factor” in what happens next.

What next?

Europe’s search for solutions is “increasingly urgent,” said The New York Times. EU officials are worried about the “imminent collapse of industry,” Jeromin Zettelmeyer, the director of the Bruegel think tank, said to the outlet. “The tone is basically panic.”

Curbing imports could ultimately be “profoundly tricky” in a European marketplace where consumers have become “hooked on what China is selling,” said the Times. The issue may soon come to a head. “Global economic imbalances” will be on the agenda for the G7 Summit of European and North American leaders later this month.

It’s never been easier to start your own business, said Jim VandeHei in Axios. “Anyone with a strong idea” can “model and prep a new business in a weekend.” When “Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz, and I started Axios in 2017, it took months to sketch it out, mock up designs, and scrub legal obstacles.” Artificial intelligence now can do that “in hours.” Describe your ideal setup to Claude or ChatGPT and it will immediately produce “an LLC or S Corp breakdown, a filing checklist, and a draft operating agreement.” Paste in the concept and it will conduct the market research, including “the existing players, pricing, and complaints.” AI will build the spreadsheets and forecasts, generate a logo and website, and email pitches. It will even help fine-tune your product, changing “how it looks or works in minutes.” The excuse for not starting a business was always the cost of capital. There’s no excuse anymore.

Age shouldn’t be an obstacle to entrepreneurship either, said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street Journal. At 67, “I retired from a career in business journalism only to start a small publishing enterprise of my own.” Launching a startup “in retirement may sound like an oxymoron,” but the work “can be more of a feature than a bug.” You can decide for yourself “whether to keep things small or build a modest empire,” becoming only “as busy as you want to be.” Some of my retired friends “now find themselves bored or underoccupied.” That’s something you won’t experience as a startup founder. And for young people feeling increasingly unloved in this job market, “the new promise is ownership,” said Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. Gen Z founders say launching a startup gives them “a sense of control” they couldn’t otherwise get from a corporate career. Some are also turning to entrepreneurship “in the form of side hustles or backup plans.” AI makes up “for the skills they don’t yet have, offering tools and platforms they can put to use, and allowing them to do more things at once.”

It’s now conceivable that a one- or two-person team can run a $1 billion business, said Erin Griffith in The New York Times. With today’s AI, entrepreneurs can “expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed” while needing very few actual workers. Take the case of Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which was started in 2024 by Matthew Gallagher and his younger brother. Gallagher, 41, “used AIto write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads, and handle customer service.” With the help of only “some contractors,” Medvi booked $401 million in sales in 2025 and is on track to do $1.8 billion this year. But the efficiency has a downside. “I kind of want to hire people,” Gallagher said. “I’m lonely.”

Target is back on target. The big-box retailer known for affordable style has returned to its roots, sparking a turnaround after a multiyear slump.

The company’s first quarter sales were its “best results in four years,” said CNN. That’s the product of CEO Michael Fiddelke’s move to “win back shoppers with new, buzzy brands” such as Pokémon and Parke. Fiddelke took over earlier this year after a “series of strategy mistakes,” including cutting DEI programs and Pride displays, which sparked boycotts by the company’s largely liberal customer base. But now, Target’s “comeback strategy is working.”

‘Style and design’

Target is attempting to get back to what “historically made the chain distinctive,” said Axios. The company does best when it’s “truly leading with style and design at an incredible value,” said Fiddelke to reporters. Those elements help distinguish the retailer from rivals like Walmart and Amazon and are being applied not just to the products on Target’s shelves but also to “store design, remodels and even shopping carts,” said Axios. Style must be at the “center of how we think about the business,” said Fiddelke.

The company is also “executing its largest grocery transition” in more than 10 years, said Retail Touch Points. Target added 3,000 new food items to its grocery aisles during the first quarter of 2026, as well as 1,500 new health and wellness items. Customers are “actively seeking newness,” Chief Merchandising Officer Cara Sylvester said to reporters. Such changes helped, but so did consumers who seemed ready to spend during the early part of the year. Bigger-than-normal tax returns “were a source of upside to consumer spending,” said Chief Financial Officer Jim Lee.

Target’s quarterly report comes as analysts are watching to see if “surging gasoline prices due to the Iran war” are leading to consumer cutbacks, said The Associated Press. The cutbacks are also a sign of how well the company can weather becoming a “flashpoint” in culture wars. But boycotts and politics have “never been the main issue” behind the company’s slump, GlobalData Retail’s Neil Saunders said to the AP. Instead, customers felt Target was “failing on execution,” said the outlet.

‘We want to be careful’

The turnaround “may not be as smooth as the latest results imply,” said MarketWatch. Target must pivot from halting the slump to sustaining “full-scale growth,” said Brian Mulberry, of Zacks Investment Management, to the outlet. Though the company has upgraded its sales expectations for 2026, Fiddelke acknowledges the headwinds as consumers pull back from spending. “We want to be careful not to get out over our skis,” he said to reporters.

Next up are store revamps. Target and other big retailers are “pouring billions of dollars back into their stores” to lure customers even as online sales continue to occupy a bigger share of consumer spending, said The New York Times. Remodeling brick-and-mortar stores, Fiddelke told the outlet, is part of the strategy for “elevating the Target experience.”

SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are all preparing initial public offerings, competing for investor cash that could determine who ends up the winner of the artificial intelligence era.

The three companies “could make 2026 the biggest year for U.S. IPOs,” said the Financial Times. The competition has been “sharpened” by familiarity: SpaceX chief Elon Musk departed OpenAI in 2018 (and recently lost a lawsuit against the ChatGPT parent) followed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei leaving OpenAI in 2020. Now the AI rivals are positioning themselves to “command the deepest pool of capital.” All are hoping to “ride a wave of AI enthusiasm” among investors, but stock markets may be less enamored of the AI sector’s “vast cash burn” than private backers have been.

There is still enthusiasm. The artificial intelligence giants are “well-run, high-growth businesses,” said Rob Hilmer, the founder of Goanna Capital, to the Financial Times.

What did the commentators say?

The success of the IPOs depends on if the AI startups “can keep growing at the ridiculous rates they’ve achieved so far,” Parmy Olson said at Bloomberg. OpenAI says it will bring in $280 billion in revenues by 2030, up from about $25 billion now. To achieve that goal, the company’s corporate customers “must plug its technology into a broader array” of uses including “sales, finance, healthcare, human resources, logistics” and more. But many potential business clients are “keeping generative AI at bay” amid questions about whether it is “reliable enough for use in high-stakes decision-making.” Claude and ChatGPT will eventually be worked into corporate workflows. “The issue is how long that might take.”

A critical question: “How bad is the burn?” Beatrice Nolan said at Fortune. OpenAI’s need for “data centers, chips and cloud capacity” requires it to spend a lot of money, and its IPO filing will help investors determine if the company can turn a profit sooner than later. The answer “will matter to the whole AI industry.” If investors are willing to subsidize a “company spending at this scale” that will suggest the market “still has tolerance for AI’s cash bonfire.” If not, life could become “more complicated for the next wave of AI listings.”

What next?

Investors are enthusiastic about AI, but some experts warn the “novel technology comes with new risks,” said The Wall Street Journal. The sector has great potential, but the markets have “not factored in the cost of the vulnerabilities these systems could create,” Navrina Singh, the CEO of Credo AI, said to the outlet. That creates an unsettled market. “Everything is evolving so quickly,” said Jeffrey Bernardo, the CEO of Augustine Asset Management.

The IPOs could be derailed by “abundant and cheap” artificial intelligence available from Chinese labs like DeepSeek, said CNBC. There is also a “wave of Western challengers” such as Nvidia, Cohere, Reflection and Mistral that are “building cheaper, smaller, more efficient alternatives” than Anthropic and OpenAI. By the time their IPOs come to fruition, the “central premise of their valuations may already be gone.”

Good news for college grads, who “are finally catching a break in this job market,” said Ray A. Smith and Te-Ping Chen in The Wall Street Journal. After years of difficult hiring prospects for those leaving the comfort of campus, recent data suggests the tide may be turning. Unemployment among 20-to-24-year-olds with degrees dropped to 5.3% in March, down from a decade high—excluding the pandemic’s early months—of 8.9% last fall. “A widely watched survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers” (NACE) recently showed that employers are expected “to boost new-graduate hires by 5.6% this spring,” well above the 1.6% expected. And another survey from ZipRecruiter found that “nearly a third of employers planned to hire a greater number of entry-level workers this year,” perhaps a sign that after years of cuts to the lowest rungs of the labor market, more businesses “feel the need to replenish their pipelines.”

Notably, 90% of the NACE survey respondents said hiring college grads was now “important to their success,” said Bruce Crumley in Inc. Businesses may be starting to learn a hard lesson after turning over their entry-level jobs to artificial intelligence that isn’t yet up to the task. “Many are now more inclined to use the tools to improve the performance of new hires in those positions rather than replace them.” Small businesses are leading the way with college grad hiring, said Sherin Shibu in Entrepreneur. Owners say they are “looking for recent graduates specifically for their digital fluency,” and hands-on roles, like field manager and service technician, are growing fast “as demand shifts toward work that’s harder to automate.”

There’s no shortage of available jobs for young people, said Jason Altmire in The Washington Post. There were 6.9 million job openings in February, even as 7.6 million Americans were filing for unemployment. What gives? Most of the openings were in trades that today’s young workers aren’t equipped to fill. “Placing the four-year degree on a pedestal for decades has limited the interests of students and misaligned workers and jobs, exacerbating workforce shortages across trade professions.” This problem will only worsen as older electricians, mechanics, welders, and many others retire. These jobs “keep the economy running.” Why can’t more young people do them?

Don’t blame the kids, said Ryu Spaeth in New York. They’ve been “cursed.” Not only was their high school experience “wrecked” by the coronavirus but now they’re entering the labor market during “AI’s job-killing, human-replacing revolution.” A school of thought holds that, “whatever challenges lie in the future, people will manage to adapt and flourish.” But let’s take some pity on those trying to start a career now.

Hearing that a “sought-after” London dealer was offering an “international” and “decadent” product that customers must pay for “by weight” may ring alarm bells for some, said Elizabeth Paton in the Financial Times. Yet, for the “initiated”, procuring “delicious and extremely expensive” Alphonso mangoes is a yearly challenge.

However, this year’s crop is proving more expensive than ever for aficionados. These prized mangoes “have complex supply chains that spread all over the world, from Dubai to London, Hong Kong to San Francisco”. And these are now increasingly fragile as a result of global unrest, climate change and a host of imitators.

‘Prized’ fruit

Known as the “king of mangoes”, for their “sweetness, rich flavour and distinctive aroma”, Alphonso mangoes – originally from India – are typically only found in the UK “between April and June”, said the BBC. However, the tropical fruit may not appear as frequently on stalls this year as supply chain issues have hit traders hard. But despite “higher costs”, demand “remains strong”, with customers from across London queueing up at stalls to get their hands on an Alphonso.

All across the world, “faithful” Indian mango devotees are “leaving work meetings, stalking WhatsApp groups and paying lobster prices” in the hopes of securing “their fix of the sweet delicacy”, said The Wall Street Journal. In the US, customers can expect to pay “$50 to $60” (£37 to £48) for a box “usually holding 10-12 mangoes” – a substantial “jump” from the $40 to $45 price tag typically charged last year.

A ‘sizable drop’

The scarcity of top-quality mangoes has been primarily attributed to the disruption caused by global warming. India’s place as the “world’s largest mango producer is a source of great pride”, said Time Out Mumbai, but this year’s “erratic weather patterns, extreme heat and rainfall shocks” have totally upended the industry in the Konkan region (Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka). The result is a “sizeable drop”, one “projected to be as bad as 50-90% less yield” than expected.

More immediately, “highly unstable” conditions in the Middle East since the outbreak of the Iran war are causing contractors across Asia to “walk away from agreements”, with “uncertainty surrounding exports” rife, said Dawn. And in Pakistan, “unending orchard diseases” mean owners have been forced to “work laboriously to reap a better harvest”.

Suppliers must also grapple with the threat of “counterfeits” from other sources who seek to fill gaps in the market, said Bloomberg. Imitators are on the rise, not just within India but also from “other continents”. A failure to increase yields means consumers may soon see a “Ghana Alphonso taking New York by storm”.

Chinese-made EVs are cheap and increasingly popular around the world but not in the U.S. market where imports are mostly banned. American automakers and their allies in Congress want to keep it that way.

Congress is pushing to “lock Chinese cars out of the U.S. market,” said Autoweek. Michigan Reps. John Moolenaar and Debbie Dingell this week introduced a bill to entrench and expand a Biden-era block on “smart” cars with Chinese-made software systems the lawmakers say is a national security threat.

American automakers are also alarmed by what they see as unfair competition from Beijing-backed companies like BYD, Nio and Geely that have made “steady market share gains in ​Europe and Mexico,” said Reuters. Geely sells its EX2 EV for $22,500 in Mexico, while the average sale price of a new car in the U.S. is $51,000. Chinese carmakers have “some level of government support, or else they couldn't transact at that price,” Toyota’s David Christ said to the outlet.

‘Common sight in border towns’

Lifting the block on Chinese EVs “could devastate the U.S. auto industry,” Sandy K. Baruah and Glenn Stevens Jr. said at The Detroit News. China has “cunningly” built its carmakers using “vast state subsidies, uncompetitive labor practices and the monopolization of raw materials” to “dominate the global market.” Those practices have created an “unfair playing field” in which Chinese companies now make 62% of all new EV sales globally. “We must not allow that here.”

It is a question of “when, not if” Chinese cars will hit U.S. roads, Katrina Hamlin said at Reuters. The vehicles are “cheaper” and “often snazzier” than what American brands offer, and U.S. drivers “seem ​keen to buy Chinese cars” as “budget models become increasingly scarce” at home. BYDs purchased in Mexico are already a “common sight in American border towns like El Paso and San Diego” though they cannot be registered in the U.S. The change “looks increasingly like it’s just a matter of time.”

Congress is not buying

“Are cars the next TikTok?” Matthew Choi and Dan Merica said at The Washington Post. Lawmakers are concerned camera, sensor and trip data collected by Chinese smart cars could be shared with Beijing, similar to the fears that forced the sale of TikTok’s American operations to U.S.-based Oracle. President Donald Trump has suggested he would welcome Chinese automakers as long as their cars are “built by Americans in the U.S.” So far, though, “that is not a caveat Congress is buying.”

Chinese carmakers should be allowed “if they agree to conditions,” Bruce Stokes said at Roll Call. They should “hire American union labor” and “buy American-made parts.” They should also share “most advanced Chinese battery and other technologies” with U.S. partner companies and store the “vast amounts data” generated by their cars on U.S.-based servers. The U.S. must strike that deal or risk “being hopelessly shut out of the world market.”

What happened

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair in a 54-45 vote, with only one Democrat joining Republicans. President Donald Trump has aggressively pressured the central bank to slash interest rates and made that a condition for his chair pick. But “hot inflation readings are clouding the path for the rate cuts Warsh advocated as he essentially campaigned for the job,” The Wall Street Journal said.

Who said what

Warsh will start his four-year chairmanship amid “resurgent inflation, public discontent with the economy and unprecedented attacks on the Fed’s independence,” Axios said. No Fed chair has “been confirmed by such a narrow margin,” said the Journal, reflecting Democratic concerns that Warsh will be Trump’s “sock puppet.”

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that producer prices jumped 1.4% last month and were up 6% from a year earlier, the highest wholesale inflation numbers in at least three years. With the jump in consumer prices, it’s clear “America’s inflation problem is getting worse, not better,” Axios said. The producer price numbers were “so far above expectations,” said Carl Weinberg at High Frequency Economics, they “will set off alarm bells at the Fed” and “in the financial markets, too.”

What next?

Warsh takes the reins from Jerome Powell on Friday. Powell’s decision to stay on as a Fed governor amid lingering criminal threats from Trump’s prosecutors “could prove awkward” for Walsh, who “has vowed to embark on ‘regime change,’” The New York Times said.

It has generally been the case that younger Americans are more optimistic than their older counterparts about finding jobs. But a recent survey shows that tune has changed in a major way. Perceptions have gotten so bad that the gap between how young Americans and older Americans view the job market is now the widest in the world. There are several reasons why people in their early 20s can’t secure jobs, and AI isn’t the only factor.

What did the commentators say?

In 2025, only “43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job,” said a Gallup survey of 1,000 adults. Compared to the 64% of Americans ages 55 and older who said the same, the 21-point difference is the “largest gap of any country in job market perceptions between younger and older adults.” It’s “rare for younger adults to be significantly less positive about local job conditions than the oldest age group,” especially in developed countries; in “only five other places — China, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Norway — does this pattern hold.”

Many of these younger Americans “have higher education and aren’t yet working full time,” Benedict Vigers, a senior news writer at Gallup, said to Axios. AI definitely plays a part in this less-than-stellar job market, as it is “gutting entry-level roles,” Sam Hiner, the co-founder and executive director of the Young People’s Alliance, said to the outlet. The “corporate landscape” is also “often heavily reliant on social capital over qualifications,” further contributing to the “pessimism.”

A higher competitive edge among young people is additionally making it harder to secure jobs. “You speak with your peers, and you realize that every single one of us are competing for the same opportunities,” Amelia Sexton, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said to Axios. Gender may weigh in as well, as the “American labor market is tilting away from men,” said The Wall Street Journal. In the past year, nearly all job growth “has come from healthcare and social assistance, a sector with a dearth of men,” and “sectors with heavily male workforces have been losing jobs.”

What next?

It is clear from the data that there is a “generational rift in Americans’ views of economic opportunity,” said The Associated Press. With the midterm elections on the horizon, the split among young and old is “likely to continue fueling generational divides in politics, where younger voters have focused on economic issues such as housing costs and have registered less faith in institutions.”

The greater optimism among older generations also comes from people who “aren’t actually job hunting — they’re retired or already employed, so they judge the market abstractly without personal stakes,” said Entrepreneur magazine. Older Americans are “far more likely to own homes and have savings, insulating them from the housing and cost-of-living shocks driving young workers’ pessimism.”

The negativity felt by young job-seekers is an “incredibly new phenomenon,” Vigers said to the AP. Gallup’s 2025 poll was the first time the organization found younger Americans to be more pessimistic than people in other countries about job prospects, and that trend looks primed to continue. “Has this happened in most other advanced economies? The answer is a resounding no.”

What happened

Consumer prices last month shot up 3.8% from a year earlier, the biggest year-over-year uptick since May 2023, the U.S. Labor Department reported Tuesday. The heated inflation was driven largely by a 28% year-over-year jump in gasoline prices tied to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran.

Who said what

The latest consumer price index underscored how “daily life in America is getting more expensive,” The New York Times said. Airfares were up 21% from a year ago and food prices rose 3.2%, with coffee prices jumping 19% and tomatoes up 40%. Trump’s tariffs are “still slowly filtering through to some goods,” The Wall Street Journal said, but the war “has presented a much quicker and more obvious shock that could be hard to reverse.”

Asked Tuesday if cost-of-living concerns were motivating his dealmaking with Iran, Trump said “not even a little bit.” His only concern is Iran’s nuclear program, he said. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

What next?

In a separate report Tuesday, the Labor Department said real average hourly wages fell 0.5% from March to April, meaning “most workers are effectively taking a pay cut even as the White House touts its economic record,” The Washington Post said.

A new skirmish looms in President Donald Trump’s trade wars. The treaty that binds the U.S., Canada and Mexico markets together is up for review, but tensions are rising and could scuttle or undermine the pact.

A “war of words” has pushed review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to the “breaking point,” said Axios. The three countries must decide by July 1 whether to continue the accord for another 16 years, but U.S.-Canada discord stands in the way. Canada has raised U.S. hackles by moving to deepen trade ties with Europe and China in the wake of Trump’s imposition of tariffs last year.

Canada has been “taking advantage of the American economy and people for decades,” an administration spokesperson said to The New York Times. Canadians do not need a “small deal that disadvantages us,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said to CBC News. The treaty’s implosion would have “far-ranging economic effects,” said Axios, affecting the supply and trade of cars, crude oil and natural gas.

What did the commentators say?

The tense negotiations “reveal how serious the fissures” have become between the U.S. and Canada, Michael Froman said at the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump’s tariffs against America’s northern neighbor have “ushered in a new wave of ‘Canada first’ patriotism” that has been hard on trade, tourism and goodwill between the two countries. But Canada is “condemned by geography” to deal with the U.S., and the U.S. is dealing with rising inflation and gas prices. The treaty should be reaffirmed quickly. The “last thing” the United States needs at the moment is a “major trade crisis.”

Canada “should call Trump’s bluff” on trade talks, Peter Jones said at The Walrus. Ottawa “has more leverage than it thinks” because the U.S. economy is weakening under the weight of the country’s increasing national debt. The United States needs “stuff” that Canada makes, and “our market is an attractive one for American businesses.” Trade has “greatly benefited America.” Canada should remember that at the negotiating table. “We have cards too.”

Trump’s hardball trade tactics are “doing reputational damage” to the U.S. and “undermining the American economy,” Mary Anastasia O’Grady said at The Wall Street Journal. The survival of USMCA is “important for American investors, workers, businesses, farmers and ranchers” and scuttling it is “bound to inflict wounds on lots of American companies.” It will also raise prices on American consumers amid an affordability crisis. “That sounds like a bad political strategy.”

What next?

Expect more “drama” as the USMCA review deadline approaches, said NOTUS. There will be “threats to withdraw, threats to break it up” and “maximal demands” by the United States, said former Commerce official William Alan Reinsch to the outlet.

Experts believe ending the pact is the “least likely option,” said NOTUS. U.S. business leaders are “bracing” for a showdown. There is much at stake: Exports to Mexico and Canada “support millions of domestic jobs generating trillions of dollars.”

How big is true crime?

It’s a nationwide obsession. According to a recent study by Edison Research, some 230 million Americans, or about 67% of the population, consume true-crime content: documentaries, podcasts, YouTube videos, and books that delve into real-life murders, scams, and scandals. The genre’s popularity can be seen in last year’s top-5 most-watched documentary TV shows on Netflix. Four had a true-crime theme and the No. 1 series, American Murder: Gabby Petito, had more than 60 million views. On podcast charts, series such as Crime Junkie and the audio version of NBC’s Dateline routinely sit among the most downloaded shows. This demand for crime-related content has led media giants to heap cash on top producers: In 2022, Amazon paid more than $100 million for exclusive distribution rights to the hit podcast My Favorite Murder. For the loved ones of some of the victims covered in the shows, it’s traumatizing to see their real-life pain replayed for profit and entertainment. “I’m so tired of murder victims being used as cash cows,” said Charlie Shunick, whose 21-year-old sister Mickey was kidnapped and murdered in Lafayette, La., in 2012.

How did the genre become so popular?

True-crime stories have long been a subject of public fascination, from the penny dreadfuls of Victorian England to the murder-heavy newsmagazine shows launched in the 1980s and ’90s, such as Dateline and CBS’s 48 Hours. But it was an NPR podcast, Serial, that ushered in the modern true-crime craze. For the first season in 2014, host Sarah Koenig delved into the 1999 murder of Baltimore high schooler Hae Min Lee, finding weaknesses in the case that led to the conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. He was freed in 2022. That Serial season was downloaded more than 300 million times, and its success spawned thousands of copycats and a vast community of true-crime fans. “Everybody loves a whodunnit,” explains criminologist Scott Bonn.

Who are true crime’s biggest fans? 

They tend to be white and female. Women make up 62% of listeners to true-crime podcasts and an oversize share of true-crime TV watchers. Some social scientists say women may be drawn to the genre because, in an often violently misogynist society, they want to pick up on survival skills. “If you are more fearful, you are more interested in knowing more about how these situations can occur,” said psychologist Dean Fido. Others say it’s simple human nature to be fascinated with taboo subjects like murder and rape—just as it’s natural to rubberneck at a car crash. But critics argue that true crime gives Americans a misleading picture of real crime. Serial killers, a favorite of the genre, are exceptionally rare. And true-crime creators disproportionately focus on white female victims such as Petito, 22. Her 2021 murder in Wyoming Bridger–Teton National Forest received extensive media coverage, unlike the more than 700 Indigenous women who had disappeared in the park over the previous decade.

What happens when a crime is spotlighted?

Sometimes, coverage results in a breakthrough. The case of 19-year-old Kristin Smart, who was murdered in her California Polytechnic State University dorm room in 1996, went cold until 2019 when Christopher Lambert, then a Cal Poly student, started a podcast, Your Own Backyard. Listeners sent in tips, and in 2022 former Cal Poly student Paul Flores was convicted of Smart’s murder. True crime can also reveal miscarriages of justice: Investigative podcast In the Dark helped free Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Mississippi who faced execution after being tried six times for the same crime. But critics say those shows are outliers, and that most of the genre is pure exploitation. Family members of the 17 young men murdered by Jeffrey Dahmer were outraged by Netflix’s hit Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, saying the streamer not only failed to consult them but also glamorized the serial killer. “We’re all one traumatic event away from the worst day of your life being reduced to your neighbor’s favorite binge show,” said Eric Perry, a cousin of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey.

Are there other problems with the genre?

Independent sleuths can interfere with active investigations. After the suspected February kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie, hordes of true crime livestreamers set up camp outside Nancy’s Tucson home. Police had to deploy extra patrols to manage the vloggers, one of whom had a pizza delivered to the crime scene. Those streamers typically don’t adhere to the journalistic standards of mainstream reporters. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos had to publicly refute allegations made by some streamers that members of Guthrie’s family were involved in Nancy’s disappearance, calling the claims “wrong” and “cruel.” Meanwhile, some psychologists warn that hardcore fans can become desensitized to violence. My Favorite Murder listeners, who call themselves “Murderinos,” can buy T-shirts featuring the hosts’ catchphrases, including “Stay sexy. Don’t get murdered.”

Can such shows keep our attention? 

There are some signs the industry is stagnating. While true-crime podcasts today account for 15% of all new podcasts released, that share is down 20% from 2022, according to industry journalist Frank Racioppi. And today’s most-listened-to true-crime podcasts are largely the same ones as those four years ago. But few experts think our fascination with true crime will fade anytime soon, because it runs so deep. Dr. Michael Mantell, former chief psychologist for the San Diego Police Department, notes that prehistoric humans painted “true crime” images of people killing one another on cave walls. “This is not something that’s new,” he said. “It didn’t start with Ted Bundy. This began 30,000 years ago.”

Workers are looking for ways to maximize their income while maintaining their peace of mind: Enter fractional working. The new, trendy employment model empowers executives and independent contractors to take control of their schedules.

What is fractional working?

While freelancers are typically hired for specific projects or hourly tasks, fractional workers are “more embedded into a business — often helping to lead the overall strategy at a company,” said CNBC. Fractional employees, unlike permanent employees, “contribute on a part-time basis for multiple businesses or clients.”

In the past few years, the shift toward fractional employment has been interesting to observe. “People who used to be seniors at companies that I’ve worked for have started going the fractional route too,” Rachael De Foe, a fractional public relations entrepreneur, said to CNBC. Fractional work is logical in a services-based business because “you are the service.”

Interest in fractional work has grown, and “both sides of the labor market are fueling the increase,” said the Harvard Business Review. For companies, demand is driven by “increased pressure to do more with fewer resources amid AI uncertainty and market volatility.” For workers, the appeal of “diversifying income streams, gaining autonomy and improving work-life balance is increasing the fractional labor supply.”

The traditional C-suite career path is “giving way to a more flexible approach,” Forbes said. Fractional leadership, once a “niche arrangement for consultants,” has become a “mainstream alternative to full-time leadership roles.”

The “explosion of fractional leadership,” said Forbes, “represents more than a “temporary trend.” Companies are facing “mounting pressure to control costs while accessing specialized expertise.” At the same time, executives are “rethinking the value proposition of traditional employment” after watching “waves of layoffs sweep through even the most stable industries.”

Can this be the future of labor?

The rise of fractional leadership is being “driven by both companies and executives,” said Forbes. Organizations gain “flexibility, faster access to specialized expertise and the ability to scale leadership as needs change.” Executives gain “diversified income, greater control over their work and a more durable form of stability with a portfolio.”

What sets this employment trend apart is alignment. Companies want “what fractional leaders offer,” and experienced executives are “choosing the same model for their own reasons.” When incentives align for both parties, “adoption accelerates naturally.” The evolution in executive work is a shift toward a “model that better reflects the reality of how companies operate and how leadership careers now develop.”

Fractional employment might also be a complementary option amid an AI takeover. Working as a fractional executive is a “juggling act made far more manageable by artificial intelligence tools like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT,” said The New York Times.

Nonetheless, while AI is “vastly accelerating many of the tasks conducted by white-collar workers,” it can’t automate the “hard-coded requirements of bureaucracy,” said the Times. As AI makes the production of knowledge work more efficient, the job of “presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance.” And the need for those “sometimes messy human tasks” may limit the “number of people AI displaces.”

For the shift toward accepting fractional work to hold, the “systems around it need to catch up,” said Forbes. Benefits and protections need to become more portable, Paula Gorman, a fractional operations leader and founder of The Consultants Room, said to the outlet.

If more people are “building careers across multiple clients and income streams,” said Gorman, the systems that provide stability “cannot stay tied so tightly to one traditional employer.” Industries need to “stop talking about fractional or consulting work like it is a temporary workaround.” For many people and many companies, it is “already a legitimate and strategic part of how work gets done.”

Most people likely only think of Uber for ordering rides and food, but the company wants to change this perception by expanding into a full-service travel app. The brand has announced it is partnering with Expedia for a wide variety of vacation-related services, including hotel reservations and general concierge services. The expansion is part of Uber’s effort to become an “everything app.”

‘Become the one app for everything’

The biggest change is that users can now book hotels directly on the Uber app without having to go through a third-party reservation site. By connecting with Expedia’s hotel database, Uber will offer “access to a wide selection of hotels, which will ultimately grow to more than 700,000 properties in destinations around the globe,” the company said in a press release. There is also cross-pollination with Expedia, as Uber rides “will be integrated directly in the Expedia app” starting in June 2026.

Notably, the partnership will allow Uber to offer hotel bookings “for properties in countries where it doesn’t currently offer rideshare services, if the properties are listed through Expedia,” said The Wall Street Journal. Plans to add rental property bookings through the Expedia-owned Vrbo are also in the works. Beyond hotels themselves, the company will provide specified Uber Eats “room services” that can “deliver food and any forgotten items, such as a toothbrush or phone charger, directly to the hotel,” said NBC News. There is also voice-enabled booking powered by AI.

The goal is for Uber to “become the one app for everything,” Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, said to The New York Times. The “more convenience we can bring to our consumer on a global basis, the better.” The partnership is also helping “hotels get access to travelers, get more demand, get more exposure,” which “strengthens the value proposition we bring to our hotels,” Ariane Gorin, the CEO of Expedia, told the Times.

‘There’s a catch’

Many are wondering if Uber’s new venture will make hotel rooms cheaper than competitors’ booking sites, which does indeed seem to be the case. At a Hilton hotel near Tampa International Airport, a booking through Uber with an added refund window cost $140.19, while the “same room would have cost $144” through Hilton’s website, said The Washington Post. A “reservation with a comparable refund window would have cost $165” on booking.com and $159 on hotels.com. So “Uber was the cheapest.”

But “there’s a catch” for people looking to stock up on hotel rewards points. When people “book with a third-party online travel agency” like Uber, they are “likely forgoing the brand-specific points,” said the Post. Despite this, Uber is hoping the benefits outweigh the negatives. Adding hotels could prove to be an important experiment for the business model, as the partnership “pushes Uber into a higher-value category” and “tests whether the ‘super app’ model — which has taken off in parts of Asia — can take hold in the U.S.,” said Axios.

Making the “everything app” plunge by starting with hotels does seem to be natural, as “more than 1.5 billion Uber trips took place globally outside a rider’s home city last year,” said Axios, and 100 million users ordered rides from airports. The company is “betting it can deepen its role in travel by building on behavior that already exists.”

What happened

Pioneering no-frills budget carrier Spirit Airlines ceased operations on Saturday, citing sharply higher fuel prices and the collapse of a $500 million Trump administration bailout. “This is tremendously disappointing and not the outcome any of us wanted.” Spirit CEO Dave Davis said in a statement.

Who said what

The “proudly penny-pinching” airline had capped its “final, mad-dash scramble to save money” with tentative deals to emerge from bankruptcy, unveiled four days before the Iran war started, The Associated Press said. In the end, the “spike in jet fuel prices from the war was the last straw,” said Axios.

Spirit was “often skewered for its bare-bones service,” but its “corresponding dirt-cheap fares opened up air travel” to thousands and “helped shape how other airlines competed,” The Washington Post said. Even if “you never flew Spirit, you benefited” from its low prices, said The Wall Street Journal. “Competing airlines vigorously matched its fares,” and “one big reason major airlines” were “rooting against a government bailout” is that “one less pesky discounter gives them more pricing power.”

What next?

Spirit said customers who booked flights with credit or debit cards would automatically get refunded. Most other U.S. airlines offered discounted or “rescue fares” to Spirit passengers facing canceled flights.

“No company is more unapologetic about its controversial goals than Palantir Technologies,” said Brett Shafer on The Motley Fool.

The AI powerhouse has “rocketed to become one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalisation”, by selling its analytics software to governments and big business; yet it is rapidly becoming “a political football”.

‘Ramblings of a supervillain’

Opponents cite the rumoured use of its tech in the Iran conflict, and the confirmed use of its tracking software in President Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown – as well as the “aggressive” political stance of two of its co-founders: CEO Alex Karp and chairman Peter Thiel.

Karp’s recent release of a 22-point “manifesto”, based on a book he co-authored last year, has unsettled minds further. The book’s central claim is that the survival of US civilisation depends on the technological revitalisation of the military-industrial complex. Even Palantir insiders are becoming disturbed by the rhetoric, reported Wired, and belatedly “starting to wonder if they’re the bad guys”.

Palantir’s reputation in Britain is on an even sharper descent, said Robert Booth in The Guardian. One MP compared the manifesto, which “implied some cultures were inferior”, to the “ramblings of a supervillain”.

Indeed, more than 300,000 Britons have signed petitions calling for Palantir to be dropped from UK contracts, which include a £330 million deal to process medical data for the NHS and a £240 million Ministry of Defence deal. A contract to process criminal intelligence for the Metropolitan Police is also under discussion.

‘Blackening’ NHS values

Palantir’s pitch is that it performs essential “plumbing” – joining together scattered, often incompatible, sets of data to be analysed and searched easily. But is this really a company we should trust with “our most sensitive data”, asked Faiza Shaheen in The New Statesman. By funding Palantir, “we are blackening the very values” of the NHS. Even the way it obtained its contracts seems shady. It got its toehold in the NHS during Covid by offering assistance for a token £1. Later deals were helped along by Peter Mandelson, and his lobbying firm Global Counsel.

Palantir, which is run in the UK by Louis Mosley, has become “the Left’s favourite conspiracy target”, said Matthew Field in The Daily Telegraph. Green party leader Zack Polanski has made rooting out the company a rallying call. “The tech giant, meanwhile, has embarked on its own PR blitz, seeking to portray the fears of its critics as concocted and political.” There’s everything to play for: next year, Palantir’s NHS deal “runs into a break clause”. The US firm had “better be ready” for a fight.

April 15 is typically a day Americans want to forget. Not this year, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. Thanks to the “big, beautiful bill” passed by congressional Republicans last year, taxpayers were able to claim an average of $3,462 in tax refunds as of Tax Day, up nearly 11% from 2025. Over $241 billion has been refunded to Americans so far, compared with $211 billion at this time last year. That’s a result of language in the GOP law that increased the standard deduction, added a $6,000 rebate for qualifying seniors, boosted the child tax deduction, and set new rules for deducting tips, overtime, and car loan payments. The bill also overrode planned tax increases for a vast majority of filers. People have taken notice. Alia Shawa, a waitress at a New York City restaurant, said that she and her husband, a chef, got “a whopping $26,000 refund” after deducting the taxes on her tips and his car loan, compared with owing $12,000 to the IRS last year. “I finally get something back,” Shawa said.

People are using their refunds “to shore up their finances rather than splurge,” said Julia Fanzeres and Josyana Joshua in Bloomberg. Early filers increased debt payments by about 20%, according to the Bank of America Institute, using the funds to pay off bills, car loans, credit card balances, and student loans. Lower-income households put even more of their refunds—nearly 30%—toward repaying debts. At a time of stubborn inflation and rising gas prices because of the war with Iran, Americans are “focused on getting their own fiscal homes in order.” That’s why the refund boost isn’t likely to improve voters’ sour mood, said Daniel Bunn in Barron’s. The average refund is only about $350 more than last year, which is well below what President Trump originally claimed it would be. And “an extra few hundred dollars landing in Americans’ wallets from once-a-year tax refunds won’t ease” the economic strain caused by many of Trump’s other policies, including his tariffs and cuts to Obamacare. “The reality is that on Tax Day 2026, the cost of day-to-day life was higher and more financially tenuous than it was a year prior.”

Besides bigger refunds, there’s another thing that’s different this tax season, said Richard Rubin in The Wall Street Journal: a lack of enforcement. The IRS has shed more than 25,000 workers since last year, “leaving fewer federal employees to audit returns, collect unpaid tax debts, and deter Americans from skirting the law.” At the top, there’s no acting IRS commissioner, and senior officials are “doing double duty.” Audits of people with at least $10 million are set to drop 39% this year. The Trump administration “has defunded the police,”said one tax lawyer. “There’s no more succinct way to describe what’s happened.”

No-frills carrier Spirit Airlines is bankrupt. Now President Donald Trump is mulling a federal takeover of the company. Can the U.S. government make the planes run on time?

Spirit Airlines employs 14,000 people and “maybe the federal government should help that one out,” Trump said to reporters last week, per Reuters. But there is hesitation in Trump’s cabinet and among the president’s free-market fellow Republicans. There has been “a lot of money thrown at Spirit, and they haven’t found their way into profitability,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said to the outlet. The federal government “can’t make dumb investments.”

A federal takeover would make Spirit the “Amtrak of the skies,” Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven said to Axios. The possible deal would give the airline $500 million in cash in exchange for a 90% government stake in the business. That would “mark a renewal of a bailout strategy” the government pursued following the 2008 financial crisis, in which the feds owned pieces of “too big to fail” companies such as General Motors, Chrysler and several banks, said the outlet.

‘Market discipline’ versus ‘Moral hazard’

The federal government “has to save Spirit Airlines,” Kyle Stewart said at Live and Let’s Fly. The Justice Department sued to block a merger between Spirit and JetBlue in 2022, arguing that the “Spirit effect” forced other airlines to lower fares to be competitive. And it is true that Spirit “made air travel possible for people who otherwise could not afford it.” But that created a moral obligation for the government. The government kept Spirit from selling itself, which means it “cannot shrug when the same airline later circles the drain.”

The Justice Department made the “wrong decision” blocking the 2022 merger, Ben Schlappig said at One Mile at a Time. The government’s intervention “failed to take into account that Spirit no longer had a viable business model.” But the “bad merger idea” probably would have failed, given that JetBlue is also currently stumbling. Beyond that, Spirit’s current rate of spending means it would likely burn through $500 million “in a matter of months.” That would leave the government “owning an airline that loses a lot of money. Then what?”

“There’s no economic justification for the government to save Spirit Airlines,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. Letting the company fail “would be a useful lesson in market discipline,” but a bailout “would fuel moral hazard” that would invite rivals like JetBlue to seek government assistance as well.

‘Fundamentally flawed’

An infusion of government cash might not save an airline that has “been on life support for years,” said CNN. Spirit and other discount carriers “continued to lose money” after emerging from the pandemic. The company’s business “was fundamentally flawed,” United CEO Scott Kirby said to the outlet.

Spirit could become the “new face of state capitalism,” Jessica Karl said at Bloomberg. But the company’s problems have been apparent for years. “A check for $500 million from the Trump administration won’t magically change that.”

Facing decades of discrimination and exclusion, women have created networking events to help each other get a fair shake at climbing the ladder of success. But in an era that’s actively against diversity, equity and inclusion, these women-only spaces have become new targets of the Trump administration.

Why are ‘new girls’ clubs’ being targeted?

The president’s crackdown on DEI has had a “chilling effect on women’s initiatives across the business world,” said USA Today. President Donald Trump arrived in office on campaign promises to “restore fairness in the workplace” by eradicating “woke” DEI policies he believes “harm men and white Americans.” The fear of lawsuits and pressure to align with the administration has led “dozens of the nation’s largest companies, from McDonald’s to Facebook owner Meta,” to roll back diversity programs.

An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit filed against a Coca-Cola distributor for hosting a women’s retreat in 2024 could jeopardize the network as an antithesis to old boys’ clubs. These “new girls' clubs” are “widely credited with helping women splinter the glass ceiling,” USA Today said. They allowed women to “gather, to share information, to share stories, to be inspired and to see there is a path forward for them,” Reshma Saujani, the founder of nonprofit Moms First, said to the outlet. Shutting those opportunities down is “not about restoring a meritocracy.” Instead, it’s about “ensuring there isn’t a meritocracy.”

The Coca-Cola lawsuit is the first “related to workplace diversity, equity and inclusion in the second Trump administration,” said The Independent. The EEOC accused the company of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “with malice or reckless indifference to the federally protected rights of male employees,” the agency said in its complaint.

More such lawsuits “could be imminent,” said The Washington Post. In December, EEOC chair Andrea Lucas issued an unusual public appeal, asking white men who feel they have experienced discrimination at work to contact the agency “as soon as possible.” Women-only networking events create new girls’ clubs that operate like the old boys’ clubs before them, she said in February on LinkedIn, while likening them to racially segregated employee social events of the 1970s. The agency is already investigating “footwear giant Nike and financial services firm Northwestern Mutual over their corporate diversity initiatives,” said the Post.

Are women’s networks exclusionary?

Women’s networks “don’t exclude men, they help women catch up,” gender equity researcher Amy Diehl said to USA Today. Still, organizations have disbanded gender-based mentorship and coaching programs and employee resource groups since those programs were labeled exclusionary. Regardless of how these lawsuits are resolved, the “effect is already being felt.”

It is “really striking” that the EEOC has decided women’s networking is “so problematic that they have to go out against it,” said Chai Feldblum, the president of EEO Leaders, a group she cofounded last year to challenge the Trump administration’s attacks on employment civil rights. Our country is “not well served by frightening employers away from doing positive actions to ensure a fair and equal workplace.”

DEI opponents think the EEOC’s complaint is valid. Hosting a “lavish, all-expenses-paid retreat for women only,” while men are excluded, is “textbook discrimination, plain and simple,” Nick Barry, the senior counsel with the America First Legal advocacy organization, told USA TODAY. The law does not “carve out exceptions for discrimination that is fashionable or well-intentioned.”

Usually, these types of lawsuits involve “substantial workplace harm,” Jenny Yang, a former chair of the EEOC, said to the Post. That usually comes in the form of pay disparities and harassment, not a “single networking event, as in the Coca-Cola distributor case,” the outlet said. There has been a “sustained effort to locate a DEI-focused challenge for at least a year,” Yang said. It suggests “they didn’t have a stronger case to file.”

Congratulations to Kevin Warsh, President Trump's preferred pick to be the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, said Hakyung Kim in the FT. He managed to get through an eagerly awaited grilling about his nomination by the Senate Banking Committee “without causing a Treasuries market meltdown”.

Risk of escalation

Warsh carefully “sidestepped multiple gotchas on his independence from Trump” – including the suggestion that he is “a human sock puppet”. But ultimately the world's most important central bank still faces a political deadlock, said DealBook in The New York Times.

Thom Tillis, a Republican committee member, has vowed to block Warsh's appointment unless the Department of Justice drops its investigation into the current chair Jay Powell's building renovations. Powell has refused to quit next month as scheduled unless his successor is in place; Trump has threatened to fire him. For the moment, investors “are largely ignoring the drama”. But any escalation “carries huge risks”.

Even if this soap opera is swiftly resolved, Warsh faces “a high-wire act” convincing investors that he's his own man, “without angering Trump”, said Nick Timiraos in The Wall Street Journal. An erstwhile inflation “hawk”, he auditioned for the job by constructing a case for the rate cuts Trump wants – arguing that an AI boom “would soon deliver a productivity surge”. Yet the Iran war has changed everything.

Regime change

When Trump picked Warsh in January (in part because of his “central casting” looks), markets were factoring in at least one or two cuts this year, probably more, said The Economist. But the soaring oil price pushed headline inflation to 3.3% in March (up from 2.4% the month before) and next month's data could be equally painful. Few now expect cuts this year. Moreover, Warsh's AI argument has always been “shaky”. If the technology really does make US workers more productive, “the correct monetary response might well be to raise interest rates”.

Warsh's most interesting views, which also potentially bring him into conflict with politicians and the markets, concern the Fed's balance sheet, said John Authers on Bloomberg. “He is loudly on record that it should be smaller” – meaning that the Fed should sell down some of the huge portfolio of bonds it took on to deal with the 2008 financial crisis and then the pandemic. “At the margin, that would mean less liquidity in the market, and higher bond yields.”

Yet we're no clearer how he might actually go about this, said Hakyung Kim. Warsh is proposing “regime change”. But “if you're going to rip up the current playbook, you'd better have a better one, and it's not clear that Warsh does”.

What happened

Meta said Thursday it will cut about 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, as it shifts resources to artificial intelligence. In a company memo, Chief People Officer Janelle Gale said the social media behemoth would also close 6,000 open positions “as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently” and “offset the other investments we’re making.”

Who said what

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “reorganizing his company around AI products in a fierce race” against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, The New York Times said. Zuckerberg has “made no secret of his AI ambitions,” including rolling out AI-powered social media he “hopes people will incorporate into their daily lives,” and he has pushed employees to “use AI in their daily work.”

Meta’s cuts are the “latest in a string of tech industry layoffs fueled” by AI’s efficiency promises, CNN said. Amazon said it would cut 16,000 workers in January, and financial-tech firm Block’s 40% workforce cut in February “came with a stark warning that more companies would follow suit.” Microsoft on Thursday said it was offering buyouts to 7% of its workforce to invest in AI.

What next?

Meta said it will notify employees being laid off on May 20.

The S&P 500, the benchmark US stock index, hit a record high on Wednesday. This is being mirrored in other major stock markets across Asia and Europe, despite growing concerns over global fuel and energy prices as a result of the war in Iran and the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.

“There’s a lot of risk out there and yet asset prices are at all-time highs,” Sarah Breeden, deputy governor of the Bank of England, told the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack. “We expect there will be an adjustment at some point”, she said. What “really keeps me awake at night is the likelihood of a number of risks crystallising at the same time”.

As Jack said: “It is unusual for a senior figure at the Bank to be so forthright on market movements.” With confidence fluctuating around peace talks, and reverberations in energy markets continuing, what has gone up could just as easily come down.

What did the commentators say?

“Nothing, it seems, can dent the almost inexplicable optimism coursing through financial markets,” said the ABC’s chief business correspondent Ian Verrender. In the past, stock markets would “shudder” and “tumble”, then spend a decade recovering from economic “calamity”; nowadays the recovery time is cut down to weeks, “if they bother to react at all”.

Investors are not “oblivious” to what is happening in the world, said Joe Rennison, financial markets reporter for The New York Times. They are just attuned to “what exactly the markets are measuring”, looking beyond the “immediate upheaval from the war” to concentrate on its “long-term effects on corporate profits”. Americans may be struggling to afford fuel for their cars, but companies have been “very profitable indeed” for “quite a while now”. Big tech is “riding a wave of enthusiasm”, and it is these bigger companies, like Microsoft and Meta, who have been shielded from the war and tend to influence the market more profoundly.

Although the market “rapidly rebounded – and then some” after Trump’s ceasefire announcement, having been on a steady slide for most of March, investors are “not simply taking Trump at his word” that the war is “almost over”. Instead, they are responding to the White House’s “apparent eagerness” to find an end to the combat. “Investors might not believe Trump, exactly, but they do seem to believe that the worst of the war has already passed.”

After “years of headline-driven volatility” and a “dip-buying mindset”, investors have learned not to “stay bearish for too long”, said Bloomberg. The current pattern echoes the “Ukraine-war playbook from early 2022, when an initial equities sell-off and commodity price surge” soon reversed to normal.

“It is never easy to price uncertainty,” said Tej Parikh in the Financial Times. Investors have long relied on “ebitda”, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, to ascertain the “core value of a business”. But it now appears they have changed their tune, relying on “earnings before Iran, tariffs and dubious announcements”.

What next?

Since the war in Iran began, analysts have “actually raised their expectations for upcoming profits” for S&P 500 companies, said The Associated Press. Major companies such as PepsiCo and GE Vernova have either “stuck by” or “raised” their revenue forecasts for the year, which were initially published before the start of the war. S&P 500 profits could “accelerate to 20% in the second quarter, and companies aren’t giving them many reasons to reconsider”.

Of course, the US stock market “can easily return to falling”. If US-Iran peace talks break down, or if oil supplies cause greater concern, Wall Street’s mood could “swing quickly back to fear”. If oil prices, in particular, stay elevated for long enough, that could “erode” profits and raise costs, not to mention “weaken the spending power” of consumers around the world.

Allbirds is making a complete heel turn after the shoe brand announced its pivot to AI. And many are skeptical that the footwear company will succeed in making such a big switch to the convoluted tech space. But Allbirds is just the latest in a list of companies that got their start in one industry, then changed to something quite different.

Android

Android cellphones have become as ubiquitous as iPhones in modern years, but the company didn’t start out in the phone game. The brand was launched in 2003, originally “conceived as an operating system for digital cameras,” said software development company Velvetech. By the time Android got up and running, the “market for digital cameras significantly fell,” whereas the “mobile device market was constantly growing.”

The company was forced to pivot to stay alive and began producing an operating system with more widespread uses. It is now used “primarily for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other wearable devices,” said IT brand Spiceworks.

Nintendo

Nintendo has always made games but probably not the kind you’re thinking of. The company was started in 1889 when its founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda in Kyoto. By 1902, Yamauchi “started manufacturing the first Western-style playing cards in Japan,” said Nintendo’s website. The company began growing in size throughout the mid-20th century.

By the 1970s, Nintendo realized it had to make a change to keep up with the times, and in 1975 “began the development of its first electronic video game systems,” said BBC News. In 1978, Nintendo “produced a computer game version of the board game Othello” and has since been responsible for producing some of the most iconic video games franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong.

Nokia

Nokia has made perhaps the biggest one-eighty of the companies on this list. While known today for its industrial-strength cellphones, the company started in the 1860s as something wholly different: a wood pulp mill in Finland. This mill was the first step in the mass production of paper. The modern company was eventually formed as a “merger between the Nokia Company (paper), Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works in 1867,” said the Crypto Museum, a Dutch virtual museum.

Prior to its eventual focus on cellphones, Nokia became a bit of an everything brand. It has been “involved in the production of paper, rubber, electricity, car and bicycle tires, footwear, communication cables, television sets, consumer electronics, personal computers, robotics, capacitors, plastics, aluminium, chemicals, mobile phones and last but not least: military communications equipment,” said the Crypto Museum.

Slack

Slack is used today as a business-to-business chat tool by numerous companies and industries. Yet it originated in the 2010s as an “internal communication tool” for the “quirky online multiplayer game Glitch,” said Encyclopedia Britannica. The video game garnered positive reviews, but its “creators found the game to be expensive and unwieldy.” They soon started looking for alternative ways to implement the technology.

This arrived in the form of a rebrand: Slack, a “provider of a messaging tool for facilitating workplace communication, an ‘email killer’ and the ultimate collaboration app,” said TechCrunch. Today, Slack is “used by more than 100,000 organizations, including 77 of the Fortune 100 companies, demonstrating the network effect of a mature and innovative product,” according to the company itself.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen has always sold cars. But in this case, it’s the company’s history that represents a major redirect. The brand is well-known for its associations with the Nazis during World War II: In 1937, Adolf Hitler’s party “founded a state-owned company that was later named Volkswagen, or ‘The People's Car Company,’” said NPR. Volkswagen leadership would eventually disavow its Nazi ties.

The pivot came in modern times, as Volkswagen shifted from supporting antisemitic Nazi Germany to negotiating weapons deals with the state of Israel. In a tinge of irony, Volkswagen, which “produced parts using forced labor for V-1 cruise missiles used by the Wehrmacht during World War II, may soon be manufacturing parts for an Israeli-designed missile defense system,” said Haaretz.

YouTube

YouTube is best known as the video platform where you can watch just about any kind of video. But it was originally started in 2004 by three PayPal employees who had an “idea for a website for users to upload video dating profiles,” said Business Insider. The company was even trademarked on Valentine’s Day. As a dating site, YouTube “attracted little interest, forcing the co-founder to take out ads paying women $20 to upload dating videos.”

Then people began “uploading videos of all kinds to YouTube,” said Business Insider, and the website took off as a general platform. Today, over “20 million videos are uploaded daily” on YouTube, with an estimated 20 billion total videos on the site, the company said.

Americans in privately run Medicare plans caught a break earlier this month, said Maya Goldman in Axios. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced that the government will increase average Medicare Advantage payments by 2.48%, or more than $13 billion, in 2027. That’s a big improvement over the 0.09% raise initially proposed in January. Insurers will also benefit from a decision to pause a proposed overhaul to Medicare’s risk-adjustment model, which pays more for covering sicker patients. It means benefits should remain steady for people in Medicare Advantage, which allows seniors to choose private insurance plans that are covered by the government. Some providers “said the pay boost still doesn’t reflect economic realities,” with the rising costs of “drugs, supplies, and more patient visits stoking medical inflation.” But there is growing “bipartisan concern over how much” the popular program is costing taxpayers.

The $13 billion handout “sits oddly with the Trump administration’s performative chainsaw-wielding claims about reducing spending,” said Brett Arends in MarketWatch, because it rewards a program that is “grossly inefficient.” The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent government watchdog, says that the government spends 14% more—$76 billion—for Medicare Advantage enrollees than it would if those beneficiaries were enrolled in traditional Medicare. After saying he was going to hold those costs down, Trump is back-sliding in favor of the “big insurance companies, most of them listed on Wall Street.”

Medicare Advantage enrollment numbers keep rising because the program works, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial—by “using market competition to improve care for seniors” and, yes, restrain spending. Overall Medicare spending was $431 billion less over the past decade than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2010, “even as the share of beneficiaries in Advantage increased by half.” A Trump plan to expand Medicare Advantage further by automatically enrolling seniors in private insurance plans would “reduce Medicare waste, fraud, and abuse.” But Democrats—who prefer government-run health care—are opposed.

Trump himself has labeled health insurers “as fat cats that need to be reined in,” said Bob Herman in Stat News, yet “his policies are enriching them.” He threatened “to demand lower premiums” from health insurance companies in December but never did. Now lobbying letters reveal that the largest Medicare Advantage insurers “pressured the Trump administration not to move forward with its risk adjustment proposal,” which would have “led to more accurate, and lower, payments.” There was no justification for the pause “other than industry resistance,” analysts say. And in the end, the insurers got “exactly what they wanted.”

President Lee Jae Myung warned earlier this month that the conflict in Iran represented a “war-like situation” for South Koreans. As oil reserves continue to dwindle, even if normal service in the Strait of Hormuz were to resume, it would take a long time for supplies to catch up.

The war is “serving as a significant turning point” for South Korea to shift to renewable energy, South Korea’s Minister of Climate, Energy and Environment Kim Sung-hwan told CNBC. We must undergo a “fundamental energy transition” and “turn this challenge into a blessing in disguise”.

Rising oil prices, and the weakening of the won against the dollar, are “dealing a double blow” to the Korean economy, said The New York Times. But reliance on oil has also highlighted the domestic tussle for green energy action in a divided South Korean system.

‘Draconian’ measures

The “brightly illuminated” satellite images of South Korea at night, compared to the “sea of blackness” in the North, have long been seen as a “wider triumph of capitalism and democracy”, said Christopher Jasper, transport industry editor, in The Telegraph. However, due to the Iran war, these lights could be extinguished “in a matter of weeks”.

Compared to fellow developed countries, South Korea is “almost uniquely lacking in natural resources”, relying on imports to meet “90% of its energy needs”. Around 70% of its crude oil shipments, in addition to 20% natural gas, come from the Gulf. The country has seen fuel prices increase by a fifth, a ban on driving one weekday in five for individuals, and calls to reduce shower times and to charge electric cars and phones only in the daytime. Much more “draconian” measures could be just weeks away.

South Korea must face a “difficult home truth”, said David Fickling in Bloomberg. Behind the “sleek modern society” is an “insatiable appetite for fossil fuels that’s undermining its economy”. But this appetite presents a climate and “strategic” threat. State utility Korea Electric Power Corporation’s (Kepco) “huge” generation plants provide “tempting targets for rocket attacks”, and its proximity to North Korea and China leaves the South exposed to mine threats, should the conflict expand.

A ‘catalyst’ for energy reform?

The fossil-fuel vulnerability highlighted by the war in Iran could be the “catalyst for a faster clean energy system”, said The Guardian. South Korea’s energy targets long predate the current war, aiming to generate 20% of electricity from renewables by 2030 and phase out coal by 2040.

As with most renewable energy, there must be the infrastructure to support it. The power generated by new energy is “colliding” with the grid’s capacity, meaning it is “in effect going to waste”. There is hope in the form of Kepco building high-voltage transmission lines to Seoul, but a decade-long wait and “resistance” from locals are taking the shine off the progress.

On top of the energy opportunities, this is a “fresh opportunity” to “strengthen Seoul’s hand” against North Korea, said Jenni Marsh in Bloomberg. According to Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol, Middle Eastern countries are “lining up” to buy Korea’s missiles, with their 90% success rate and “affordable price tag” an attractive proposition for buyers. The crisis has also fuelled government investment into nuclear-reactor restarts to “maintain grid stability”. As North Korea’s Kim Jong Un “plays hard to get” with the US, and “refuses talks” with Lee, improving defence capabilities “looks like an increasingly smart option”.

President Lee’s “catnip” calls to transition to renewables due to the war in Iran have “no chance of being met”, said Fickling in the same outlet. For instance, Kepco has “effectively banned” all new generators in the “renewables-rich” east until 2032, all because its “crumbling grid is supposedly incapable of accepting new connections”. Decisions such as these will do “nothing to advance South Korea’s energy transition”. Society as a whole needs to fight against those who have kept them “hooked on polluting power”.

What happened

The satirical news outlet The Onion on Monday said it had reached an agreement to temporarily take over right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones’ Infowars platform and turn it into a parody site. Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022 after a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion in damages to the families of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Onion’s plan requires approval from Texas District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin.

Who said what

Under the proposed deal, The Onion would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars’ site and intellectual property for six months or a year, covering rent and utilities “until an appeal filed by Jones is decided and the path is cleared for a sale,” NPR said. It’s a “Hail Mary bid” by The Onion, Politico said, after a federal judge “blocked its initial plan to acquire Infowars in 2024 during a bankruptcy auction,” calling the process flawed. “We are excited to lie constantly for cold, hard cash, but this time in a cool way,” Onion CEO Ben Collins said Monday, and “we’ll make sure some of it gets back” to the Sandy Hook families.

What next?

Jones “vowed to fight the licensing proposal in court” on his show Monday, but “acknowledged he and his crew could be kicked out” of their Austin studio by the end of the month, The Associated Press said.

It was not a joke. The shoe company Allbirds announced last week that it is pivoting to artificial intelligence, a sign that the AI bubble is about to pop. Or maybe the tech optimists are right and everything is AI now.

The company was “once the maker of Silicon Valley’s favorite shoe,” said The New York Times. Allbirds was previously valued at $4 billion, but the company earlier this year closed all its stores and sold its assets for a mere $39 million. Now the brand seeks a fresh start: The business is rebranding itself “NewBird AI” and announced it had received a $50 million influx to buy up advanced computer chips that will let it enter the AI infrastructure business. That investment is a “drop in the bucket” for an industry spending billions to build data centers, but Wall Street loved the news. NewBird’s stock immediately rose nearly 600%.

The market’s reaction proves “AI excitement is alive and well — but as silly as ever,” Noah Weidner said at The Street. The move might make sense, though. Artificial intelligence requires a “massive volume” of computing power, and companies able to furnish it “will drum up excitement” — even if that company once sold shoes.

AI is creating wealth

Will AI spending hold up?

The shoe company’s “flailing AI embrace” is “not a horrible idea on the surface” given that it fills a “real business need,” Nitish Pahwa said at Slate. But the AI spending that has “propped up the economy” might not persevere, and communities are “successfully obstructing the data centers” needed for further expansion. Indeed, Allbirds’ stock started to drop after the initial surge, said Bloomberg. The market roller coaster ride gives Allbirds the feel of a “meme stock,” said 50 Park Investments’ Adam Sarhan, in which “emotions take over and logic and reason get thrown out the window.”

President Trump wants to “open up workers’ retirement plans to his pet industries,” said Sam Gustin in The New Republic. The Labor Department recently proposed a long-awaited rule that would shield 401(k) plans investing in crypto and private equity and credit markets from getting sued over excessive risk—no minor concern since crypto prices have cratered in the past six months. “The stakes are enormous.” A 1% shift of funds would flood “more than $100 billion in new capital” into troubled sectors in desperate need of a bailout. This is just another way for Trump, whose family has billions of dollars in crypto, to use the presidency as a “giant ATM for himself, his family, and his cronies.”

Actually, the Labor Department’s proposal will make “retirement better for millions of Americans,” said Charles E.F. Millard in The Wall Street Journal. The idea is to let “fiduciaries be fiduciaries” and protect them from “frivolous litigation” when they seek the best investments. If the plan goes ahead, 401(k)s will look “more like traditional defined-benefit pension plans,” in which investment management and risk management was left to the employer, who could then “use the actuarial law of large numbers to pool longevity and investment risk and provide an income that retirees could count on.” Critics on the Left say the little guy will get bamboozled” as huge swaths of people’s hard-earned savings get shoved “willy-nilly” into risky assets. But “that’s just politics.” This proposal “is all about retirement security” and freeing professionals to find “lifetime income solutions” for their clients.

Retirement plans are long overdue for an update, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Most existing rules date to 1979, long before cryptocurrencies and other digital assets existed, and they have deprived employees of the “chance to gain more of a stake in the entire U.S. economy.” The private capital market grew from “$2 trillion in 2008 to $13.7 trillion in 2023”—why shouldn’t workers get a piece of that? Sure, investing everything in such assets “would be a bad idea,” but diversifying portfolios with 5% here and there reduces portfolio risk as opposed to adding to it.

This is no time to expose retirement funds to the private credit market, said Alan Rappeport and Colby Smith in The New York Times. “Cracks have begun showing” in the $3 trillion market as funds start to cap investors’ redemption requests. Private loans are already at risk of defaulting at rates not seen since the pandemic, and the situation will only get worse as AI scrambles the prospects for software firms. Some economists now see “echoes of the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.” If Americans’ wealth gets bound up in the fate of these funds, a “broader private credit meltdown could become a political liability for Trump.”

The price of crude oil could rise to $150 a barrel under a US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Jorge Montepeque, managing director of oil traders Onyx Capital Group, said prices “should be $140, $150” if the naval blockade goes ahead, said The Telegraph.

The US blockade was due to begin at 3pm today UK time. Writing on social media, Donald Trump said that the US was going to start “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz” and will “interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran”.

How will it work?

Under Trump’s plan, instead of having navy ships escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, US forces will board and potentially seize any vessels that pay Iran’s toll, a move that would effectively close the strait off entirely.

The US Central Command said that its forces would not impede the freedom of vessels travelling to and from non-Iranian ports. It also pledged that it would release additional information to commercial mariners.

The president warned that “any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL”, but “at some point” an agreement on free passage would be reached. He said that other countries would be involved in blockading the strait, but did not specify which. Keir Starmer said the UK would not join the blockade.

What will the effect be?

The consequences for the global economy could be serious. There’s “little clarity” about how the US navy will take control of the strait without “reigniting” the conflict with Iran and “causing another shockwave” in the money markets, said Michael Evans in The Times.

The blockade “might risk worsening a war-driven global energy crisis”, said The Washington Post. Although Iran would “potentially suffer the most economically”, it may also “come as a blow to the rest of the world”, particularly nations in Asia, which “rely heavily” on oil and gas from the Gulf.

So the president is “once again playing loose with the fortunes of financial markets and the global economy as he struggles to find a way out of the war”, said Australia’s ABC News.

As for Trump, the plan “reflects his hope” that he can repeat the “model of his intervention” in Venezuela, said the Financial Times. There, the US “seized” the then president Nicolás Maduro in a military operation after a naval blockade of the Latin American nation.

“You saw what we did with Venezuela,” Trump told Fox News. “It’ll be something very similar to that, but at a higher level.”

What did experts say?

Initially, Trump’s plan will only affect the small number of vessels that are still navigating the waterway, shipping expert Lars Jensen told the BBC. If the US does blockade the strait, it will “halt a very tiny trickle” of vessels and “in the greater scheme of things, it doesn’t really change anything”.

But three legal experts in the US said the blockade could violate maritime law. One of them suggested the blockade, which will be enforced militarily, would violate the current ceasefire agreement.

The blockade is a good “counterpoint” to Iran’s closure of the strait, Dennis Ross, the former senior US diplomat and Middle East negotiator, said on X. It puts “greater pressure on Iran” and “great pressure on China to pressure Iran”.

But Vali Nasr, a former US official and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Financial Times that the plan will be “fine by the Iranians” because it “prolongs the chokehold on the global economy”.

Tehran might respond by shutting down the Bab el-Mandeb, a chokepoint off the coast of Yemen, said Nasr, and “then the US will have to deal with that”.

Elon Musk always does things in a big way. The same is true of his plans to take SpaceX public. But how investors will make out could depend on how much they like him. As Musk works to convince buyers that his rocket company could be valued at as much as $2 trillion, SpaceX is earmarking up to 30% of shares for “nonprofessional, noninstitutional investors” and “banking on the popularity” of the tech billionaire to help it raise as much as $75 billion from the stock offering, said The Guardian. And the so-called “retail” trade by his fans will be a “critical part of this and ​a bigger part than any IPO in history,” Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen told a meeting of bankers on April 6, per Reuters.

SpaceX is more than just rockets. It now includes xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, along with Starlink, Grok and the X social media network. Money raised from the IPO would help SpaceX finance “launching artificial intelligence data centers into orbit, creating a colony on the moon and getting humans to Mars,” said The New York Times. But those are “expensive and unproven” technologies that could take “years and billions of dollars to achieve.”

What did the commentators say?

IPOs “used to fund growth,” Brad Badertscher said at The Conversation. Going public helped “young, cash-strapped companies” like Amazon and Apple get traction, and “much of their dramatic growth” happened afterward. These days, most companies “can now raise billions privately” and, like SpaceX, only go public after they have entrenched themselves in the marketplace. Investors are not getting in on the ground floor. Most “explosive growth in corporate value” comes while “companies are still private.”

The SpaceX IPO could “showcase the free market at its best,” Matthew Lynn said at The Washington Post. The company is “pioneering innovative technologies and generating jobs and wealth.” Bringing along ordinary investors might add to those accomplishments. Giving regular people ownership of stocks gives them a “stake in the free market” and makes them “far more likely to support the system.” Musk’s stock offering could convince Americans that “free-market, risk-taking entrepreneurship isn’t such a terrible thing after all.”

A “bumper crop of mega initial public offerings” is expected over the next year, Jonathan Levin said at Bloomberg. History suggests investors should “tread very, very carefully” when evaluating companies like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. Mega IPOs have “underperformed the market” on average in recent years. But some investors will inevitably decide that Musk’s company and its peers “are in a league of their own.”

What next?

SpaceX “could trade like a meme stock” after the IPO, said MarketWatch. Stocks driven by “social media trends” are often prone to “high trading volumes and price volatility.” The Musk-helmed company “clearly has some of the ingredients” to fit that profile, Roundhill Investments CEO Dave Mazza said to the outlet.

We’ve recently checked off another year of inaction on the sinking ship known as Social Security, said Brenton Smith in MarketWatch. New projections from the Congressional Budget Office reveal that the trust fund will now run out of money by 2032, “resulting in benefit cuts of 22.5% in 2033.” As they’ve done for the past 40 years, our lawmakers are likely to continue to react to this slow-moving disaster “with the rhetoric of empty politics” and no real solutions. Voters, too, have consistently “responded with systemic denial.” Seniors continue to “recycle the tired cliché of indifference, ‘We paid for our benefits,’” and resist any effort to protect future generations. A 2% increase in the payroll tax in 2005 would have extended the program for another 75 years. Now the cost to achieve the same result is 4%. “If fixing Social Security were easy, it would already be done.” But hard choices must be made.

Here’s one way to “help restore sanity to a program millions of Americans depend on,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. “There’s no reason” Social Security should be sending $100,000 checks to wealthy Americans. But the way the program is constituted, couples who have continually met the taxable maximum on their earnings can become eligible for the maximum benefit, upward of $101,000. The rising costs of living will only “keep boosting payments” as time goes on. A “Six Figure Limit,” as proposed recently by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “is the right idea.” A $100,000 cap would erase “one-quarter of the shortfalls and save $190 billion over the next decade,” said Shawn Tully in Fortune. But that would only delay insolvency by seven years. “It will take additional modest, and also more radical, fixes to bridge the yawning gaps.”

“OK, now take a breath,” said Pat Regnier in Bloomberg. Solving the shortfall may come down to a “nail-biter,” but few experts expect Congress to allow dramatic cuts to this “wildly popular” program. If the Six Figure Limit isn’t enough, other solutions “are simple in terms of math if not politics.” Lawmakers can make up for the shortfall with taxes, such as by raising the amount of income subject to a payroll tax (currently $184,500). Or they can reduce benefits “by raising the age for full retirement” again, or “changing the formulas for calculating benefits or cost-of-living adjustments.” But those nearing retirement should not panic. Even if the trust fund runs out in 2032, “major benefit reductions likely would be gradual and not kick in for at least a decade.” Social Security is going to last, but “having an aging society is expensive no matter what, and it’s going to leave a mark somewhere in the coming decades.”

The fuel crisis sparked by the war in Iran has reached the airline industry, said Will Gottsegen in The Atlantic. In addition to oil and gas, much of the world’s supply of kerosene—the base product for jet fuel—passes through the Strait of Hormuz. But with the waterway effectively closed since early March, jet fuel prices have soared by more than 58%. Airlines, “which have always had razor-thin margins,” immediately felt the strain. They have already needed to reroute many flight paths away from the war-torn Middle East, “using up more fuel and putting more pressure on airlines to compensate elsewhere.” Travelers are now seeing the turmoil show up in their ticket prices. United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby this week warned fliers to book their “summer travel as soon as possible, before prices go even higher.”

The jet fuel crisis is so dire that “airlines are drawing up plans to cancel flights” if the war drags on, said Christopher Jasper in The Telegraph (U.K.). There is particular concern about the ability for some planes to refuel after long-haul flights to southeast Asia, a major Gulf oil importer, “potentially leaving aircraft stranded” at far-flung locales. “Because no one has a crystal ball, what this all means for travelers is up in the air,” said Aarian Marshall in Wired. But if the war continues for weeks or even months, “bigger changes—and inconveniences—might be headed to an airline near you.” Carriers could raise ticket prices, eliminate less profitable routes, or experiment with new fees—as they did during 2008’s “major and sustained” fuel shock, when charging passengers for luggage became the norm.

Wondering about the war’s impact on vacations “might seem distasteful,” said Andrea Felsted in Bloomberg. But it’s a serious problem for the tourism industry, which was “already at risk from a slowdown following the post-Covid travel boom.” Certain tourist spots like Dubai, the fifth-most visited travel destination last year, are a no-go now with the war happening. Another important global tourist spot, Mexico, is simultaneously witnessing “a wave of violence” following the killing of a Jalisco cartel leader, which will undoubtedly give travelers more pause. “While the super-wealthy will continue to travel, the simply comfortable might vacation closer to home, or not at all, particularly if the cost of energy deepens the cost-of-living crisis.”

The travel industry’s problems run deeper than the cost of jet fuel, said Ganesh Sitaraman in The New York Times. In recent weeks, travelers have endured thousands of canceled flights, hours-long lines at TSA checkpoints, and multiple safety crises, including a tragic crash at LaGuardia Airport. “Flying hasn’t always been like this,” and the culprit for America’s mess in the skies is deregulation. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 eliminated route and price regulation, setting the stage for the current era of “fortress hubs dominated by just one airline” at the
expense of smaller communities, as well as the relentless cost cutting that has made flying miserable. “Politicians need to learn the lessons of hundreds of years of infrastructure policy” and embrace “a regulatory and industrial policy that will once again make our air transportation system the envy of the world.”

‘Why Latinos join ICE’

Geraldo L. Cadava at The Atlantic

People have “treated the phenomenon of Latino border agents as something of a puzzle,” says Geraldo L. Cadava. Some have “argued that these Latinos come to embrace the mission of the Border Patrol through the process of socialization during training,” but a “simpler explanation is that Latinos who join ICE believe in the enforcement of immigration laws and that they are protecting, not antagonizing, their communities.” But this “of course doesn’t mean that other Latinos accept their logic.”

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‘The mall was an American experience. Not anymore.’

Blake Fontenay at USA Today

There was a “time, not so long ago, when malls felt like the centers of the cultural and social universe in American towns across the country,” says Blake Fontenay. Malls “used to be like watering holes on the Serengeti, where all sorts of creatures would gather and learn to coexist.” Time “has moved on. Consumer habits have changed,” but as “progress marches forward, we need to take stock of what we may be leaving behind.”

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‘To save lives in nursing homes, make inspections random’

Margaret Morganroth Gullette at The Boston Globe

Nursing homes “tend to increase staffing levels and expend more effort on patient care as a government inspection looms and cut back afterward,” says Margaret Morganroth Gullette. But the “predictability of inspections influences the homes’ timing: they’ll do what they need to do to clean up and then go back to business as usual.” Sending out “inspectors randomly would be a simple fix.” Another solution “could be to focus the surprise inspections on the homes with the most complaints.”

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‘Trump’s new cyber strategy is catnip for Beijing’

Ahana Datta Fasel at Foreign Policy

Even “best-in-class cyber capabilities rarely stay contained, and once exposed, they move rapidly,” says Ahana Datta Fasel. But Donald Trump’s “new six-pillar national cyber strategy” doubles down “on this risk, elevating offensive cyber operations as Washington’s primary instrument of deterrence.” This is a “dangerous gamble — one that Beijing, which has emerged as the prime cyber adversary to the United States, will see not just as an escalation but also as a legitimization of its own destabilizing posture.”

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People who want to grab a once-trendy pair of shoes in person will have to go somewhere else: Allbirds announced it has closed all of its stores and struck a deal to sell its assets. The sell-off marks a massive fall from grace for the shoe company, which began as a direct-to-consumer fashion brand before opening brick-and-mortar locations. Allbirds is merely the latest DTC company to find itself drowning, and experts say its shuttering may point to larger problems with the business model.

From $4 billion to $39 million

Allbirds once represented the pinnacle of tech-bro fashion and became known as the “eco-friendly shoe company that won over Silicon Valley,” said the Los Angeles Times. The brand is best recognized for its high-end wool shoes that were “initially embraced by celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, who invested in the company in 2018.” Following a slew of successes with the DTC model, Allbirds “peaked at a $4 billion valuation when it went public in 2021.”

But the company’s remaining assets were sold in March for $39 million, representing only “1% of its peak market capitalization,” said Fortune. The 99% plunge in value was due to “major strategic missteps in trying to sustain its once meteoric growth.” A trend “doesn’t always translate to enduring brand value,” and in Allbirds’ case, the company “believed its growth would last forever, not quite understanding that its distinctive shoes were in fact a fad.”

However, the Allbirds C-suite is seemingly confident that things will turn around. Allbirds “has evolved into a lifestyle footwear brand known for modern design, innovative materials and unparalleled comfort,” Joe Vernachio, the company’s CEO, said in a statement. The sale “builds on the foundational work already completed and sets up the brand to thrive in the years ahead.”

Hit a ceiling

The collapse of Allbirds now has some people asking larger questions about the viability of DTC. Many of these companies “sought to build their customer bases through physical retail and banked on opening stores to boost balance sheets,” said CNBC. As “rents rise, physical retail loses its shine and being digitally native becomes more important, Allbirds and other DTC companies have begun to shift their focus” to a more online strategy.

Many of these early-2010s DTC brands are “suffering from slow sales,” said Marketplace. DTC wasn’t a completely new idea when it arrived, as the business model largely replaced mail-order catalogs. But the “internet refreshed the strategy,” as “anyone with an idea was relatively easily able to present it,” Mark Cohen, the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, told Marketplace. There is also a “dichotomy between coming up with a brilliant idea and then managing it brilliantly after it’s been noticed by consumers.”

Most brands “do need physical retail to grow their customer base,” Kevin Mullaney, the CEO of retail consultancy The Grayson Company, said to Marketplace. Yet many of these brands, including companies like mattress seller Casper and skincare brand Glossier, were caught “trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once. Meanwhile, the direct-to-consumer space was getting more competitive.” DTC is a “great concept, but it hit a ceiling,” Jessica Ramirez, a co-founder of the advisory firm The Consumer Collective, told Marketplace. Companies “can only go so far with concepts like that.”