China is being quietly credited with keeping energy prices down in the wake of Donald Trump’s war with Iran, in turn helping prop up the global economy while cementing its own power on the world stage.

By tapping into its huge reserves of oil, “China kind of saved the day,” and helped the world avoid the “doomsday scenario” when the Strait of Hormuz closure choked off 20% of global energy supply, said Paul Gruenwald, global chief economist at S&P Global Ratings.

What did the commentators say?

For decades, China heavily depended on imported crude to meet its ever-growing energy needs. But over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to address what has long been viewed in Beijing as a major security weakness by spending billions of dollars amassing the world’s biggest stockpile of oil.

Last year China’s reserves were estimated at nearly 600 million barrels bigger than the US. This enabled it to dramatically cut its oil imports when the war in the Middle East broke out, keeping a lid on global oil prices and safeguarding its own economy.

Not only has this enabled China to weather the global commodities storm resulting from the closure of the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, it has seen China emerge as a “clear winner” from Donald Trump’s foray into the Middle East, said The Guardian, citing the findings of a report from geopolitical consulting firm Asia Group.

Long thought to be vulnerable to oil supply shocks, the conflict has made clear how China has “managed to transform that weakness into a surprising source of geopolitical power”, said The New York Times.

This has “big implications for the global energy industry, where oil producers like Saudi Arabia and the United States — not importers like China — have traditionally held most of the cards”.

“If they come to feel that in this domain, they are less vulnerable than they and many others may have assessed previously, that is a profound and important shift in one of the key inputs to how China makes decisions about its global strategy,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former White House and State Department official who worked on China issues in the Biden administration.

What next?

While the Iran crisis has vindicated Xi’s investment strategy, the “buffer” of China’s stockpile of oil, which has helped the world avoid a far deeper energy crisis up to now, “may face a test as Beijing shows signs of resuming purchases”, said CNBC.

Should this happen, the drag on global growth from elevated oil prices would deepen well beyond current estimates, said Krishna Srinivasan, director for the Asia and Pacific Department at the International Monetary Fund.

But the Iran crisis has also shown how “China’s muscular energy policy has afforded Beijing a major tool it could use, for instance, in a war over Taiwan”, said The Wall Street Journal.

“In the future, such power could be wielded in a clash with the US In the event of a war over Taiwan”. For example, “Beijing’s ability to slash oil imports for months on end could help China resist efforts by the US and its allies to block energy shipments”.

For China, “oil is not the Achilles’ heel we thought it was,” said Michal Meidan, head of China energy research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “I think a lot of people thought China was very, very vulnerable to oil supply disruptions. It’s not.”

A K-shaped economy, in which the rich get richer while everybody else falls behind, is showing up at the airport. Airlines in desperate search of profits are expanding roomy first- and business-class seating on flights while economy class continues to get more cramped.

‘Literal experience of class division’

American Airlines is “ripping up existing airplane configurations” to add more business-class seating, said CNBC. Half the airline’s revenues come from the 30% of seats in the high-end category, which is why the more expensive (and more luxurious) seating options are “only going to grow in our fleet,” said American Airlines CEO Robert Isom this week at an industry conference, per the outlet.

American’s newest Boeing 777 aircraft will feature a “monster 70-suite business-class cabin,” said CNBC. “Higher-spending customers” are a “resilient and bright spot” for airlines struggling with rising fuel costs. So the K-shaped economy is “taking flight.”

Budget airlines are joining the rush. JetBlue is revamping its first-class cabins with “redesigned seats, premium amenities and upgraded seatback technology,” said Fox Business. Flyers are “increasingly looking for more premium experiences,” said JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty in a statement, per the outlet. Southwest Airlines does not offer a first-class cabin on its flights, but it is building deluxe lounges at four airports — Austin, Baltimore, Honolulu and Nashville — as it transitions from a no-frills carrier “known for free bags and open seating” to an outfit “fighting competitors for bigger spenders,” said The Washington Post.

You should “go fly on an airplane” if you want to understand the K-shaped economy, said Allison Morrow at CNN. Delta Airlines started 2026 with projections of a 20% profit increase “largely on the backs of its ‘premium’ customers.” The industry’s shift to a greater reliance on high-dollar offerings suggests the shift to “more expensive travel isn’t just a fad.”

Economy-class passengers, meanwhile, are getting squeezed. Legroom for standard economy seats has shrunk “from roughly 35 inches in the 1970s to about 31 inches today,” said Simple Flying. Some airlines leave passengers a mere 28 inches of space. The disparity between experiences in the front and back of airliners is the “literal experience of class division" in the U.S., said Morrow.

Economy: ‘Essential for filling aircraft’

Airlines not so long ago “routinely gave first- and business-class seats away in free upgrades” to loyal customers, said ABC News. But those days are done for, given the money that can now be made from selling those tickets.

Revenue from pricier seating has “more than doubled” in the last decade, said Delta CEO Ed Bastian at a March conference, per ABC News. That can help airlines be “resilient through these tougher times.”

Economy passengers are still needed, even if they do not get the same legroom as business-class peers. The back-of-the-plane crowd is “essential for filling aircraft and covering fixed costs” for airlines, said Quartz. These days, though, it is the top-end passengers who “increasingly determine whether a route, and a carrier, makes money.”

What happened

Paramount Skydance on Monday settled an antitrust lawsuit with 12 states challenging its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, clearing the merger’s last major obstacle. The states, led by California, had argued that combining the two major Hollywood studios plus streaming giant HBO Max and a host of cable channels would harm competition, cut film production and raise consumer prices. There were also concerns about combining Warner Bros. owned CNN with Paramount’s CBS News division under Paramount CEO David Ellison, an ally of President Donald Trump.

Who said what

The settlement is “not a vote of support for this merger,” but it “resolves our antitrust concerns” by “guaranteeing massive investment” of $1.5 billion in “domestic film production and providing enforceable guardrails to help keep cable prices competitive,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said in a statement. The five-year deal also includes $47.5 million for workers affected by the merger and a “News Editorial Independence Board” to “insulate” CBS News and CNN from “corporate intervention in newsroom decisions, a demand from several of the attorneys general,” said NPR. But many panned the plan for a Paramount-led oversight board, which “sounds like utter garbage,” one CBS News staffer told The Guardian.

What next?

A federal judge must approve the agreement, The Wall Street Journal said, but Paramount “expects to close the deal in about two weeks.”

The British glass industry could become “No. 10 North’s first major test”, said the Financial Times. A new government green levy introduced last year has put thousands of jobs at risk in the “heavily northern-based sector”, creating a headache for Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

‘Polluter pays’

The Extended Producer Responsibility scheme is based on “the ’polluter pays’ principle to help local councils with the cost of recycling”, said The Times. It makes businesses responsible for the collection and recycling costs of the goods they put on the market, including packaging. Because the fees are calculated according to weight, glass is facing disproportionate costs compared to cardboard and plastic.

The policy, drawn up by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, is expected to raise around £1.6 billion a year. But it comes at an “acute time” for the glass sector, industry body British Glass told The Times.

The policy is making the British glass industry more expensive than the cheap imports from China and Turkey which are flooding the market. Five of the six main glass packaging manufacturers are based overseas, so the UK “has to be attractive to foreign owners as an economy but also from a policy point of view”, a spokesperson said.

Call to reconsider

Breweries and the pub industry have “long urged a rethink” on the levy, which they claim offers a perverse incentive for retailers to opt for less sustainable plastic packaging, said the Financial Times. There is also support for amending the scheme within Labour: the Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is among the cabinet ministers who have “privately been pushing for changes to the policy”.

“Too many take glass for granted”, wrote Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, on Politics Home, but this is a £1.3 billion industry “supporting well over 100,000 jobs”, and it’s “hugely important for the government to reconsider pressing ahead” with these worrying regulations.

Action needs to come swiftly, said Labour List. “Stand next to a glass furnace for a few minutes, feel the heat, listen to the noise and one thing becomes obvious”: this is not an industry “that can simply switch off at the end of the day” or “wait for market conditions to improve”.

The UK collectively donates an estimated 350,000 tons of clothes each year to our 9,900 charity shops, but the future of the sector seems in doubt as “more and more” of the outlets are closing.

Oxfam is considering shutting 100 of its 500 UK retail stores just months after the British Heart Foundation announced plans to close 150 of its 640 shops.

How do charity shops work?

When one of Britain’s earliest recorded charity shops was opened in Edinburgh in 1937, there were “queues outside” and “police on hand to manage restive shoppers”, said The Guardian.

By the 1960s, charity shops were becoming more familiar sights, and in recent years shopping for second-hand goods has lost its stigma and become recognised as a sustainable alternative to fast-fashion and throwaway culture.

The UK’s charity shops are staffed by about 223,000 volunteers and 24,900 paid employees. Together, they made more than £300 million in 2024-25. Charity shops don’t have to pay business rates, although they’re “still hit by increases in national insurance and wage bills”.

Why the decline?

Those running charity shops agree that “the glut of fast fashion” has led to a drop in the number of good-quality items being donated, said The Guardian.

“Charity shops in Britain are overwhelmed with stuff,” said Tansy Hoskins, author of “Charity Shop World: An Investigation into Community, Consumption and Waste”, in The Telegraph. The problem is they are “desperate to get rid of most of the old clothes they are given”, with most of them sold off to recycling companies in “ragbags”. The average price paid to charities for a kilo of worn clothes has “dropped from 45p to 15p” over the past decade.

Charity shops are also competing with second-hand online retailers like Vinted and eBay, which are increasingly also a resource for the charities themselves. “We need to put the higher value items that we do get on eBay to make the most money for the charity that we can,” said one charity shop manager on Reddit.

The picture is not entirely bleak. The rise of resellers who visit charity shops to buy stock to sell on themselves for profit creates a “virtuous circle”, providing the shops with “significant income”, said The Guardian, while also increasing interest in thrifting.

What’s the reaction been?

“I’m struggling to shed a single tear,” said Simon Heptinstall in The Spectator. Charity shops’ exemption from business rates has given them a “ridiculous near monopoly” on high streets, helping to push out “butchers, bakers and normal clothes shops”. Thanks to “an army” of “unpaid volunteers” and prices worthy of a “Bond Street boutique”, they rake in vast profits to support their own “sprawling corporate infrastructure”; they are no longer a community asset but an “optimised extraction racket”.

Robin Osterley, outgoing chief executive of the Charity Retail Association, has rejected suggestions that the sector is in crisis. Acknowledging that charity shops are facing challenges “maintaining their profitability in the face of some really significant rising costs”, he told Civil Society in May that I don’t “have any concerns about the future of shops”. I also “think some of the trends we’ve been seeing towards higher standards and towards larger shops in particular will continue”. He also flagged the potential of AI to “identify, describe and list donations”.

Homeowners dues are reshaping the neighborhood, said Giulia Carbonaro in Newsweek. About 21.6 million people—nearly one-fourth of all homeowners in the country—paid a condo or homeowners association (HOA) fee in 2024, according to the Census Bureau. These community governance groups rely on owner dues and assessments to cover shared amenities, like pools, trash collection, and lawn maintenance. But in many places, the fees are rising quickly as HOAs contend with higher upkeep, labor, and insurance costs. Homeowners understandably put “mortgages and utilities first when their disposable income is squeezed,” but too many missed HOA payments can result in a tax lien on their property. Between 2022 and 2025, HOA liens rose 41.7% to more than 250,000 nationwide, according to property data platform Cotality, while HOA-led foreclosure filings rocketed more than 46%.

Americans living in older condos are facing the brunt of this, said Claire Boston in Yahoo Finance. They often “pay more than double the annual fees that newer condo owners do.” The collapse of a 40-year-old condo building in Surfside, Fla., in 2021 forced many HOAs to “spend heavily to catch up on deferred maintenance” and recoup rising insurance costs. The impact has reverberated well beyond Florida. HOA fees are even increasing for affordable houses, said Cormac McCrimmon in PBS.org. In Boulder, for instance, Henriette Gregorio bought a home in 2021 through the city’s Permanently Affordable Homes program. Although her mortgage has stayed manageable, her HOA fees have since doubled to more than $800 per month. “It’s a real challenge,” said Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, who also lives in a townhouse with escalating HOA fees.

Not all HOAs are evil, said Daniel Kramer and Madeline Carr in the Los Angeles Times. These “private, quasi-governmental organizations” can be real forces for good when it comes to sustainability, managing “how entire neighborhoods use water, generate energy, provide wildlife habitat, and respond to climate change.” Some are already starting to reject “aesthetic uniformity” for healthier environmental rules like “requiring native plants, limiting turfgrass, and encouraging renewable energy.” There are some HOA red flags to look out for before buying, said Veronica Dagher in The Wall Street Journal. Ask the board about any upcoming improvements. They are costly and lead to inconveniences, but “a strong track record of upgrades is often a sign of good governance.” Prospective buyers can request a “reserve study” that summarizes the HOA’s financial health to see how prepared the organization is for major repairs such as a roof replacement. Finally, talk to residents to get a vibe. While some HOAs function like “easygoing golden retrievers,” others are “tightly wound like pit bulls.”

What happened

Iran on Wednesday said it attacked two U.S. ships and eight tankers near the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S. sinking five Iranian oil tankers. The Pentagon said the tanker strikes were retaliation for Iran’s first confirmed attacks on U.S. Navy ships during the six-month war. Those attacks “failed,” The Wall Street Journal said, but “officials described some of them as close calls.”

This was the “biggest wave of attacks on shipping by both sides” yet, Reuters said, and it “sent the price of oil surging” above $100 a barrel for the first time since July. U.S. gas prices hit $4.22 per gallon, and diesel rose to a record $5.94 per gallon. On Thursday, five gas stations in California maxed out diesel at $9.99 per gallon, the highest possible price on the pump, according to GasBuddy.

Who said what

The U.S. and Iran “appear to be stuck in a cycle that is draining U.S. air defenses and deepening Iran’s economic crisis,” The New York Times said. Iranian ballistic missiles did “minimal” damage to a U.S. military base in Jordan, officials told the Times, and it may have left some U.S. troops with “traumatic brain injuries.” They also damaged “several fighter jets” at the base, CBS News said.

What next?

“I think war ​is going to end immediately after the election,” sending oil prices “tumbling downward,” because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday. Top White House advisers have “privately” discussed with Trump “that the Iran war could drag on through the remainder of his term,” the Journal said, citing U.S. officials.

President Donald Trump had a clear goal when he appointed Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve: lower interest rates to spur economic growth. Now Warsh has signaled that the Fed could raise rates to rein in rising prices, putting him on course to clash with the president.

What did the commentators say?

Raising rates before the midterm elections “would create an immediate showdown with the Trump administration,” said The New York Times. The president “has gone to great lengths” to get the Fed to lower rates and Warsh was “handpicked” for the job after an “elaborate audition process” shaped by Trump’s rate preferences.

The financial markets have demanded signs that Warsh is “serious about bringing inflation under control,” said the Financial Times. Warsh last month bent to those demands. Rising prices are “concerning,” and the central bank has “work to do,” he said at a Wyoming Fed meeting, per FT. Observers saw that as a signal that rate increases could come as soon as this month.

The Fed chairman is in a tough spot. The war with Iran has “sent global energy prices soaring,” which has “kept inflation from slowing,” Jonathan Levin said at Bloomberg. The AI spending boom has also “kept prices elevated.” A rate hike before the midterm elections “would surely raise the ire of the White House,” but it would be the “right thing” for Warsh to do in order to bring rising prices under control. It would also “bolster his credibility in the financial markets” if he was seen “putting American households above politics.”

What next?

There is “still significant uncertainty” as to whether Warsh will move to oppose Trump’s pressure campaign and raise rates this month, Jamie McGeever said at Reuters. In addition, the president might benefit if Warsh decides to ignore the White House and set his own course. Trump “doesn’t want higher interest rates,” but rising prices and higher borrowing costs “aren’t particularly palatable” to voters heading into the midterm elections.

“Not everyone is convinced” that Warsh will move to raise rates, said CNBC. The chairman’s comments at Jackson Hole were “only marginally” more hawkish on inflation than his previous remarks, Citigroup economist Andrew Hollenhorst said in a client note, per the outlet. And Trump administration officials maintain that a rate hike is not justified by the current evidence. Core inflation “has remained very, very restrained,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview with CNBC.

Trump’s preferences remain clear. The Fed should lower interest rates “OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT,” the president said in a Truth Social post. The next Federal Reserve policy meeting is Sept. 15.

John Healey has said Britain’s economy is finally “turning a corner” as he set out his mission to “make Great Britain growth Britain” again.

In his first major speech as chancellor, Healey sought to reassure the markets by pledging to stick to Labour’s tax and spend fiscal rules, while trying to present a more optimistic view of Britain’s economic prospects. But only days ago a global bond sell-off saw UK yields hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crash, further increasing the cost of borrowing for the UK government.

But Healey “begins with a credibility problem that is not entirely of his own making”, said Simon French in The Sunday Times. He is the eighth chancellor in 10 years, so many businesses, households and investors are “fatigued and sceptical” about yet another new vision for growth.

What did the commentators say?

“A glance at the news could easily reinforce the gloomy impression” that the UK economy is in dire straits, but some key indicators are “telling a more cheerful story – one of growth”, said James Moore in The i Paper.

There is a “surprising level of optimism” among businesses in the services and manufacturing sectors, with overall GDP growth expected to beat Bank of England forecasts for the third quarter, boosted by warm weather and the men’s football World Cup. The data shows “that UK plc is more resilient than anyone really expected in the face of the strong headwinds that it is battling against”.

There are tentative signs that “consumer confidence has also improved”, said Delphine Strauss in the Financial Times. Private new car registrations are up by almost a fifth compared to last summer, while earlier figures from the Bank of England show growth in consumer credit.

UK recruiters also saw hiring pick up in August for the first time in four years. It adds to “evidence that the UK’s weak jobs market was stabilising and business and consumer confidence were improving – albeit from a low base – before a renewed rise in gas prices and sovereign bond yields that again threatens to hold back the economy”.

Most members of the public who describe the economy as broken “put its condition down to poor political priorities rather than to other reasons, such as global shocks, immigration or failings on the part of individual citizens (such as not working hard enough)”, said Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman.

Andy Burnham and his chancellor are constrained by costly rising debt – interest on debt costs more than the defence, Home Office and justice departments combined – rigid fiscal rules, and Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise the three main taxes. But they need to find a way to pay for their ambitious policy platform “that commands the confidence of markets – and a public more and more convinced that the economy is broken by design”.

What next?

While the underlying numbers look positive, were the Bank of England to raise interest rates later this month, or Healey to announce tax rises in the Budget at the end of October, things could turn sour very quickly.

For now, the chancellor is trying to strike a more upbeat tone than his predecessor. After the equivalent speech in the last two years since Labour returned to power, the public has been “left with a clear message of tough times, and significant tax rises ahead”, said the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam. Today was different.

The chancellor is “trying to nurture some fragile early signs that confidence is returning” but “the burning question is how to fill multi-billion gaps in public finance plans before the Budget, in a way that minimises the economic impact.

“While vibes are important, policy matters more.”

Artificial intelligence could cause a global economic downturn, the Bank of England’s governor has warned.

Andrew Bailey is the latest in a “throng of figures” to highlight the risks posed by the most advanced versions of AI technology, said The Guardian.

What did he say?

Bailey said “frontier” AI models were “showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities”.

In a two-page letter sent to international finance ministers and central bank governors, Bailey said the advanced models risk destabilising the “highly interconnected” global financial system through cyber-disruption that “can spread across jurisdictions”.

The central bank officially raised concerns about AI in July, listing the threats of a potential stock market bubble, worsened cybersecurity vulnerabilities and AI companies’ increasingly complex and opaque debt.

How would AI cause a bubble?

The inflated valuations of companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Nvidia have led to warnings that the companies are in a stock market “bubble”. This is a “significant run-up in stock prices without a corresponding increase in the value of the businesses they represent”, said The Motley Fool.

Usually, this is driven by “highly optimistic market behaviour”, said Investopedia. Then, when investors’ confidence starts to wane as they realise their hopes are not panning out, they all begin to sell off, sending stock prices tumbling and causing an abrupt contraction in the market.

The “core problem” in the markets is always debt, said Andrew Neill in the Daily Mail. But suddenly there’s “a big new kid on the block in the credit markets” in the form of America’s AI “hyperscalers”, which are “investing several trillion dollars to roll out their transformative technology” on “borrowed money”.

They’re borrowing from private credit markets, an “expensive, unregulated, opaque source of debt”. This means “voracious governments” are competing with the AI giants for credit, “pushing up the cost of borrowing”. But if AI share prices “came tumbling down” they’d bring the “whole stock-market caboodle with them” because the “continuing surge” in share prices is “overwhelmingly AI-driven”.

So what can be done?

Bailey said the sector should prioritise “appropriate steps to support safe and responsible model release and deployment on a global basis”.

But he warned that “recent developments” have “highlighted” that “many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond”.

What happened

Fox News on Thursday said it had parted ways with financial journalist Maria Bartiromo, effective immediately, thanking her for “her work over the last 12 1/2 years.” She last appeared on air Aug. 9. Asked about reports that Bartiromo was fired for leaking confidential news coverage plans to the White House, a Fox News spokesperson told reporters only that the move was a “business decision.”

Who said what

After joining Fox Business in 2014, following a long career at CNBC, Bartiromo became “one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies at the network,” CNN said. She was fired, Status reported, because she “effectively betrayed” Fox by telling the White House that network bosses had instructed staff to “steer clear of giving credence to Trump’s delusional claims” in an “unhinged” July primetime speech on election security. Bartiromo “wanted to pursue a story related to China and 2020 election voting conspiracies,” Puck’s Dylan Byers reported, and when executives told her no, she “took a screenshot of the guidance and sent it to senior White House officials.”

What next?

Fox Business rebranded Bartiromo’s namesake programs and took down her contributor pages. “Her fans, of which there are many, will not be happy,” Trump said in an online post. “Social media lit up with speculation that Bartiromo might be in line to become White House press secretary,” CNN said. But asked about that possibility yesterday, Vice President JD Vance said, “No, I don’t think so.”

It’s a have or have-not housing market out there, said Samantha Delouya in CNN.com. Look no further than San Francisco. Just a few years ago, the City by the Bay was a symbol of “urban decline.” Now it has the hottest housing market in the country. “Fueled by the artificial intelligence boom” that has left tech workers “flush with cash,” home prices are routinely getting bid up more than $1 million above their listing price. The median home in San Francisco now sells for $1.7 million. And the frenzy has “spilled over into the rental market as well.” Rents for one-bedrooms are up nearly 23% this year to $4,180 a month, and two-bedrooms are up nearly 26% to $6,020. And the upcoming initial public offerings from AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to only increase “the potential buying power.”

The housing market should settle the lingering debate about “whether the K-shaped economy is over,” said Anna-Louise Jackson in Fast Company. It’s “alive and well.” Entry-level homebuyers “have been priced out” and seem to have “stopped searching.” Traffic on listings of homes priced below $370,000 has fallen sharply since 2021, according to Realtor.com. But “the other end of the housing spectrum tells a very different story.” Those shopping for big, expensive houses “remain very much engaged.” Wealthy buyers are “propping up national sales figures,” said Halina Bennet in Slow Boring. Current housing data “looks decent,” but that’s because upper-end strength is masking some serious lower-end weakness. For anyone who has not “become a newly minted tech millionaire,” economic analysts say, this could be “the worst year for the housing market since 2011.”

The newly passed federal housing law could offer a potential solution, said Lily Belle Poling in The Wall Street Journal. The law makes it “easier and cheaper” to manufacture modular and prefabricated homes for assembly “on site.” Such homes “have long been stuck at the fringe of the housing market,” constituting only 3% of new construction in the U.S. But that number could soon soar. Cuts to red tape in the new law should reduce costs by $5,000 to $10,000 a home. For some homebuyers, those savings “could equal more than 10% of the original cost.” Modular homes are also moving out of the trailer parks and increasingly into the suburbs, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. Several developers are pitching them “as the way of the future,” betting that more homebuyers will be “willing to give manufactured homes” another look. Newer homes “are of a much higher quality than those of past decades,” and some of the nicest ones list for more than $600,000. But on average, a factory-built home can still be had for only $90,700.

GOP lawmakers and cattle ranchers were ringing “alarm bells” last week over President Trump’s decision to temporarily lower tariffs on ground beef, said Mallory Wilson in The Hill. To curb soaring beef prices—which have been pushed up by drought, rising input costs, and shrinking herds—Trump declared that he would let up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the U.S. with “no out-of-quota tariff.” He claimed the meat would be sold at 25% below the current market rate of $6.89 a pound, but offered no details on how the plan would work or which countries would participate. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) warned that the import of cheap foreign meat will only hurt American ranchers, “most of whom are MAGA Republicans.” Meriwether Farms, a farm-to-table operation in Wyoming, called the president’s actions a “betrayal.”

This is a purely political play by Trump, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “He knows he and Republicans are being blamed” for higher prices, and it’s no coincidence that his 90-day tariff reprieve “covers the three months through the November midterm elections.” But these welcome concessions to consumers are also an admission that his tariff strategy has “failed economically and politically.” Trump may love the political leverage tariffs provide, but “he and his party may pay a price this November for raising prices” for millions of consumers.

There are very few American industries that private equity has not leached into, and investors are now setting their sights on the multibillion-dollar youth sports industry, with numerous sports receiving an influx of funds. But not everyone is on board. Parents and politicians across the spectrum have raised concerns about the future of athletics under this business model.

How is private equity getting involved in youth sports?

It began when the Covid-19 pandemic threw a curveball to youth sports across the United States. Local leagues “stopped building rinks and fields and stopped maintaining the ones they had, and no federal agency exists to coordinate what replaced them,” said Fast Company. A pathway for private equity appeared.

Private ventures find youth sports appealing because they offer “pricing power that almost nothing else in consumer spending can match,” said Fast Company. American families “spend more than $40 billion a year on youth sports — nearly twice the NFL’s annual revenue.” There was also a 46% increase in the amount families spent on youth sports from 2019 to 2025, according to an Aspen Institute survey. The rise in spending grew at “twice the rate of price inflation in the U.S. economy during the same period.” Private equity has used this surge of youth sports dollars to invest in almost every sport played by American children.

One of the most notable ventures in private equity sports is Black Bear Sports Group, a firm that in “less than a decade grew into the single largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the U.S., with 47 facilities across 11 states,” said USA Today. Black Bear, the sports arm of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, has used this leverage to “steer families into its own costly ecosystem of leagues, tournaments and fees.” Families “must spend hundreds more each year or risk being shut out.”

Black Bear’s model has changed large swaths of youth hockey from a “network of community-based nonprofits into a vertically integrated, for-profit system with fewer checks on how money flows,” said USA Today. And other sports have been similarly impacted. Brand Velocity Group, a private equity firm led by Eli Manning, has purchased the “company that manages and controls the official youth sports licenses for most major U.S. professional leagues,” said Forbes, while investment firm KKR now owns Varsity Brands, one of the largest producers of youth uniforms.

How are the players and families being impacted?

Many say the influx of private equity is creating a pay-to-play culture that can be difficult to escape. There are also questions about whether parents are being “forced into buying bundled services they don’t want,” said USA Today. “We’re all paying so much money, and each year, they take away more and more,” Stephanie Kurzweil, a New Jersey hockey mom who paid $4,600 for her son’s spot on a Black Bear-owned team in 2023, said to USA Today. “They are in it for the money. There is no thought for the kids.”

An obsession with centering youth sports around traveling is another common element of private equity that is creating angst among parents. One soccer mom “was shocked when the coach made a surprise announcement that the team was going to compete in scrimmages in Europe that cost $3,500 per player,” said Intelligencer. “I was thinking, ‘There are plenty of teams we are losing to right here in our state,’” the mom, Elizabeth, told Intelligencer. “Why do we need to go lose to teams abroad?”

As a result of this increase in private money, skills and talent level “no longer act as a barrier to entry,” said Intelligencer. “When I competed, travel was more like you had to be really good. It was intimidating, and most people did not make it,” Amanda Pennel, a Georgia mother who played travel basketball as a teenager and whose son plays basketball now, told Intelligencer. Now it “doesn’t matter if you’re the worst basketball player anyone’s ever met; there’s a travel team for you.”

It’s not just regular parents who are complaining. Some high-profile individuals are also sounding the alarm about this private equity surge. “Investor money has warped youth sports in another way: It has individualized and professionalized the experience,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), whose son plays in a Black Bear-owned hockey league, said at The Atlantic.

It is a marked change given that for “most of the past century, youth sports were managed primarily by local park departments, parent-led leagues and nonprofit groups,” said Murphy. But the “high-pressure environment, driven by parents and profit-hungry owners alike, has produced a youth-sports culture in which profit and individual achievement matter more than teamwork or character building.”

What has the larger response been?

As private equity’s stranglehold on youth sports expands, many are looking to the government to intervene — and it appears that Washington, D.C., is taking notice. Several lawmakers have been “looking at the skyrocketing costs of youth sports and trying to figure out ways to regulate private equity’s role in the industry, where rising costs have priced out many young athletes,” said Cronkite News. Democrats in both chambers of Congress recently introduced the Let Kids Play Act, a bill that “would protect youth sports from so-called ‘vulture investors’ that Democrats accuse of exploiting youth sports.”

The bill, if passed, would “ban junk fees, loosely defined as fees that are hidden, offer little or nothing in return or are added only after an initial price is disclosed or paid” and “hold private equity firms liable for certain violations,” said Cronkite News. Beyond this bill, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce also held a bipartisan hearing that “scrutinized the role of private equity in youth sports,” said CNBC, another “potential sign that Congress could be inching closer to intervening.”

“Consolidation is driving up costs for families while limiting access to more affordable, community-based options,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), the chair of the House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education subcommittee, said during the hearing. The “simple reality is that too many children are being priced out. It’s not that they lack talent or determination; it’s that their families simply cannot afford the rising costs.”

Not everyone is happy that Congress is thinking of regulating the private equity extravaganza. “Some of the largest youth sports groups acknowledge a need for regulation but defend the role of private capital in expanding access and meeting demand,” said Cronkite News. “I agree that there is a problem with youth sports,” Matt Kanne, the CEO of youth basketball operator Open Gym Premier, said to the outlet. “The infrastructure of youth sports is underfunded and ill-equipped nationally. But why block investments?”

What happened

The NBA on Wednesday punished the Los Angeles Clippers with the largest sanctions in league history after finding that owner Steve Ballmer and other team executives violated salary cap rules to funnel millions of dollars to star forward Kawhi Leonard. The Clippers were fined $30 million and stripped of five first-round draft picks, from 2029 to 2033. Leonard was fined $700,000, and Ballmer was banned from all team and league activities for a year.

Who said what

A one-year independent investigation found that the Clippers had improperly “covered personal expenses for Leonard,” CNN said, and “funneled off-court endorsement opportunities” to him through corporate partners who were rewarded with lucrative “team business.” Paying Leonard via a team sponsor would strike at the “very heart of the NBA’s most important financial rules” to ensure a “roughly level playing field” across the league, The Wall Street Journal said. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement he was “deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations,” and “the severity of the penalties reflects” their “seriousness.”

What next?

The Clippers “vehemently reject” the NBA’s “heavily biased investigation,” the team said in a statement, and “intend to vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available to us.” There is “no appeal or arbitration process available to the team,” The Athletic said, citing a league source.

Even “the liberal intelligentsia” expressed alarm when America’s national debt recently surpassed the $40 trillion threshold, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Blame the entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which “keep growing on autopilot,” along with a pandemic-era “spending binge” by both political parties that has doubled annual deficits to nearly $2 trillion. The initial Covid relief bill in 2020 was necessary, but continued sending out checks for far too long. The Biden administration spent trillions on additional stimulus for a “mostly recovered” economy, as well as a “bipartisan infrastructure bonanza,” and “a climate extravaganza.” Because of these spending sprees, the gross national debt has ballooned by $17 trillion since 2019—about as much as the country accumulated “during the entire first 225 years of its history.”

The true culprits are 21st-century GOP tax cuts, said Bobby Kogan in MS.now. Data show that those massive reductions in revenue, passed under George W. Bush and President Trump, are “driving this fiscal imbalance.” It was not a secret that raw federal spending would increase as Baby Boomers aged and health-care and retirement costs rose, but our old tax system “was set to keep pace with it,” and “debt was projected to shrink continuously as a percentage of the economy.” Bush even inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton (who raised taxes), but he squandered that gift by reducing taxes on wealthy Americans. Trump doubled down on that irresponsible strategy, and slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Now Republicans insist we must cut “crucial aid that Americans rely on,” rather than undo the tax cuts “that are responsible for creating the fiscal gap.”

President Trump promised to cut the deficit, said Alan Rappeport in The New York Times, but he’s “only exacerbated America’s financial woes.” Elon Musk’s now-disbanded DOGE failed to achieve its goal of slashing federal spending by $1 trillion, and it’s unclear it saved any money at all. Trump’s tariffs backfired when the Supreme Court ruled most of them illegal, which led to refunds to companies of $160 billion. Trump’s expensive war against Iran has only added to the sea of red ink. Getting out of this mess means “putting everything on the table,” said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. That includes tax increases and cuts to popular benefits. Sadly, neither Democrats nor Republicans have the “gumption” to tell voters that hard choices must be made.

The trade war between the United States and Canada has turned white-hot, and it is not clear when or if the conflict will abate. America’s northern neighbor is hunkering down for extended economic pain, while President Donald Trump argues that Canada has been “ripping off” the U.S. for years. Tariffs are flying in both directions. Will anybody blink?

‘Undiplomatic’ bargaining

Last weekend’s breakdown of U.S.-Canada trade talks is a sign that Trump’s “bulldozer approach” to trade “may be reaching its limits,” said The Washington Post. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from negotiations “rather than accept a lengthening list of U.S. demands,” choosing to face new American tariffs on an “array of Canadian products” that includes “hockey sticks and Crown Royal whisky.” (U.S. consumers could also face a surge in toilet paper costs.)

Carney is digging in. Trump’s “undiplomatic style” of bargaining — including frequent references to Canada as a “51st state” — has made once-friendly Canadian public opinion “fiercely anti-American,” said the Post.

Canada is “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social. “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” That proclamation “depends on the meaning of the word ‘need,’” Paul Krugman said on Substack. Canada “dominates” the type of lumber that U.S. contractors prefer for framing houses, and America “imports millions of barrels a day” of Canadian oil. The United States economy is much larger, but an “all-out trade war would create a lot of pain” at home when American voters are “already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.”

Trump’s latest trade conflict “makes no economic or political sense,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. GOP candidates are “already getting pounded” on affordability issues on the campaign trail. The president’s abysmal approval rating is the result of voter perceptions as he wages “blunderbuss wars without a strategy.” Now Trump is providing fresh fuel for those concerns a “mere 10 weeks before midterm elections.”

‘United against Donald Trump’

Carney was “right to call Donald Trump’s bluff,” Tony Keller said at The Globe and Mail in Canada. There was widespread fear among Canadians that “Ottawa was about to sign a bad deal” with the United States that would make major concessions to Trump “in return for nothing much.” The good news for Ottawa: U.S. voters “won’t understand why Mr. Trump is so intent on severing our partnership.” Canadian leaders must now “appeal to Americans and American business” for support.

Canada is now “more united against Donald Trump than ever,” Stephen Maher said at the Toronto Star. The Canadian government is preparing aid to assist the country’s hardest-hit businesses. Trump seems equally determined. It is “time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore,” he said Wednesday to interviewer Glenn Beck, per Reuters. This may be a long fight: Carney “sees little chance” of resuming trade talks until after the U.S. midterm elections in November, said Bloomberg.

Since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants last month, terminating employment authorization for beneficiaries, South Florida has been bracing for impact. The sudden loss of TPS for so many Haitian employees who reside in the region has hit its economy hard.

What is happening in Florida?

As a result of the end of TPS for Haitian immigrants, “some home-care agencies have shut down,” said The Wall Street Journal. Nursing homes in South Florida are “scrambling to fill vacant positions,” and restaurants are “scaling back operating hours.”

Few industries have been left untouched. Hotels, retailers, airport contractors and small businesses are also struggling with staffing shortages. No other U.S. state has “more Haitian TPS holders than Florida,” said the Journal. Of the “roughly 350,000 Haitian TPS holders” in the US, almost half live in the state. Around 93,000 of them are part of the state’s workforce, according to an analysis by three immigrant-rights groups — FWD.us, Haitian Bridge Alliance and UndocuBlack Network.

The changes have affected both Haitian workers and “South Florida’s tourism industry,” said the Miami Herald. About 52,000 Haitian TPS holders were part of the workforce in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to Phillip Connor, a research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Migration and Development, per the Herald. Of those, a “significant number worked in tourism-related jobs.”

The Department of Homeland Security has for decades “granted TPS designations for foreign-born people who can’t return to their home countries because of “unsafe conditions such as armed conflict or natural disasters,” said the Journal. When Trump returned to office, his administration moved to “terminate TPS status for 13 countries, including Haiti,” arguing that prior administrations had “misused the program by repeatedly extending its protections.” In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could end TPS status for both Haitian and Syrian nationals. There are “significantly fewer Syrian TPS holders in the U.S. than Haitian ones.”

Critics of TPS argue that people with the status “make up a fraction of the overall labor force — a loss the economy can absorb,” and that any difficulties in replacing them could “have the benefit of raising wages.” Their departure creates “real opportunities for less-educated, American-born workers,” Steven Camarota, the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, said to the Journal.

Who is feeling the impact?

Employers and deportees aren’t the only ones feeling the impact. Businesses are “terminating employees with lots of experience,” Wendi Walsh, the secretary-treasurer of the South Florida hospitality workers’ union Unite Here Local 355, said to the Herald. That will “put pressure on the workers left behind.”

The local economy will “miss the workers’ income too,” said the Herald. Haitians on TPS in South Florida provided “$1.5 billion in annual economic contributions, $174 million in annual federal and payroll taxes, and $176 million in annual state and local taxes,” according to estimates by the Princeton research fellow.

In South Florida and elsewhere across the nation, many “de-documented” immigrants are “taking refuge in a growing underground economy,” where transactions are “in cash and remain off the books,” said the Sun Sentinel. Some are “going mobile to quietly deliver services that once yielded paychecks.” Others rely on friends and family to go grocery shopping, “fearing they’ll be arrested by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Many of them are “scared the government will deport them to Haiti” when they know they “cannot survive” there, Margarette Nerette, a vice president at the Florida branch of the Service Employees International Union, which represents healthcare workers, said to the Sun Sentinel. They have “kids who go to school” but don’t seek medical care or go shopping. They don’t know “what to do to survive the crisis the government has put them in.”

A significant drought in Panama caused by the El Niño weather pattern has forced the Central American country to slash the number of vessels it lets through its major canal. And the reduced flow of goods through one of the world’s most consequential shipping lanes could create a ripple effect that shakes the world’s economy.

What did the commentators say?

Starting on Sept. 15, the Panama Canal Authority will let 32 ships pass through the canal’s locks daily, a drop from the 36 it currently allows. While a decrease of just four ships per day may not sound significant, it represents a major change for a “critical chokepoint that moves about 5% of the world’s shipping,” said CNN. The United States is the “canal’s biggest user — about 70% of all the goods moving through it are coming to or going from the U.S.”

These reductions are necessary because the Panama Canal “relies on fresh water to operate its locks and has had less rain than normal” in recent years, said the Financial Times. The coming El Niño, when “surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean rise, potentially causing severe drought and warmer winters, could be one of the most intense ever.” And for Panama, the “result is a wet season that’s already been drier than usual and is likely to get worse,” said CNN, possibly causing a massive shortage of freshwater in the canal.”

This shift in the number of vessels could result in higher prices for consumers in the U.S. and globally, experts say. While some ships “may wait to transit to avoid the higher fees, those carrying more time-sensitive cargo are likely to take the plunge and pay the steep transit prices, driving up the price of those goods,” said CNN. One notable example: the pharmaceutical ingredients in Tylenol and certain prescription drugs, which “come, in large part, from China and are believed to transit through the Panama Canal to the U.S. East Coast,” said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to CNN.

Others are not convinced the change will have much impact on prices, especially in the United States. There is only a “small chance that cargo owners, pressed by paying more for shipping and other costs, will pass on this increase to customers,” Simon Heaney, a senior manager at the Drewry shipping research and consultancy firm, told Newsweek — especially since global shipping has already “been upended for months by the U.S.’ war with Iran,” said the outlet.

What next?

The shipping reductions are just the Panama Canal’s latest in a line of “other water conservation measures, such as lowering the maximum draft — the vessel’s depth in the water — for the largest ships,” said The Guardian. But the canal itself could also turn into a hindrance for vessels, as officials said that with the “upcoming reduction, waiting times for ships trying to get through without making a reservation beforehand will increase.”

In the meantime, shipping companies have already been “preparing for possible disruptions in the 110-year-old canal,” said the Financial Times, with many taking drastic measures to get ahead of the cuts. For ships that don’t make reservations to pass through the canal, officials typically issue several extra slots through an auction; at least one large ship “paid a staggering $4 million to fast-track its trip,” said CNN, leaving “others, either unwilling or unable to shell out that kind of sum, in maritime limbo.”

North Korea has been hailed as “the world’s most surprising economic success story” by the leading US financial daily, The Wall Street Journal.

Despite being tightly controlled, technologically backward, and subject to crippling Western trade embargoes, the country has recorded year-on-year GDP growth of more than 3%, of which many advanced economies could only dream. Their unlikely success story has been “aided by arms sales and troop deployments to Russia” to fuel the Ukraine war, support from China, and “the ability to flout international sanctions to import more energy, components and materials”.

What has changed?

Five years after making a rare admission that the nation’s economic policies were falling short, in February Kim Jong Un addressed the Workers’ Party Congress to celebrate a turnaround, declaring “everything has fundamentally changed”. But while the supreme leader may have triumphantly taken credit for the boom, in reality “he has Russia and China to thank”, said Forbes.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, North Korea has earned an estimated $14 billion providing military support to the Kremlin, and hundreds of millions in trade and foreign aid from China. North Korea’s “emergence as a modern-day pirate state on the back of its lucrative cryptocurrency theft operations” has also helped, Shreyas Reddy of Korea Risk Group, told the Financial Times.

The effect of this influx on the so-called hermit kingdom has been sudden and startling. The regime has used some of the windfall to modernise Pyongyang with new brightly lit shopping districts filled with luxury and high-tech goods, and high-rise apartments blocks. Cars, once a rarity, are increasingly common and frequently electric, and can even be hailed with ride-sharing apps.

Outside the capital, the regime’s ambitious “20x10” regional development initiative aims to build new factories, housing and public infrastructure in 20 counties each year over a 10-year period.

All of this is an “incredible accomplishment for a country that is this poor”, regional expert Stephan Haggard told the WSJ.

Can it last?

Due to a lack of reliable data and the regime’s complete control of the media, accurately assessing what is happening on the ground in North Korea is notoriously difficult, said WioNews. But “a closer look beneath the headlines reveals a more complicated picture than either Western critics” or the Pyongyang regime acknowledge.

While the growth over the last three years appears genuine, said the Financial Times, North Korea’s “economic resurgence fell short of a genuine transformation” in that it “was mostly being driven by participation in Russia’s war in Ukraine”.

Peter Ward of the Sejong Institute in Seoul said North Korea was in the throes of a “Russian sugar high” fuelling a slew of “shovel-ready, exciting-looking projects that will catch the eye of the leader, but aren’t necessarily sustainable”.

Ultimately, said Asia Business Daily, the racks of luxury goods and the Pyongyang construction boom are “merely an optical illusion”, in that they are enjoyed “almost exclusively by the leadership and a privileged class in Pyongyang”.

North Korea remains incredibly poor. Out of its 27 million citizens, 17 million are still believed to live in extreme poverty, and the UN estimates that more than 40% of the population are undernourished. Analysts are sceptical that Kim can turn the short-term gains brought about by the war in Ukraine into sustainable long-term growth. “Knowing the North Koreans, they probably haven’t fixed the roof while the sun is shining,” said Ward.

Just a couple of years ago, Anthropic was an underdog in the AI race. Now the San Francisco start-up, co-founded by CEO Dario Amodei, is preparing to float in October “at a valuation of $2 trillion or more”, said George Hammond in the Financial Times – “a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering”.

Booming demand

Anthropic’s growth has been astonishing even by Silicon Valley standards. Valued at around $965 billion in May, when it eclipsed arch-rival OpenAI for the first time, investors reckon the $2 trillion price tag is justified by booming demand for the Claude maker’s advanced AI models and coding tools – especially from business. Annualised revenue is expected to rise more than ten times this year to around £100-120 billion.

The usual suspects – Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase – are working on the listing, said Bloomberg. If it proceeds as scheduled, Anthropic will debut not just before OpenAI, but also before DeepSeek – the Chinese AI firm that has been grabbing increasing market share.

‘Tough’ questions

Growing Chinese competition is just one of the “tough investor questions” Anthropic will have to field, said The Wall Street Journal. Others include “tensions with the Trump administration” – which forced it to briefly pull leading models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – and “a growing backlash” against data centres. Additionally, Anthropic faces animus in Silicon Valley, where many CEOs are “nervous about its power over the AI ecosystem”.

The recent sell-off in SpaceX’s shares after an early pop has also “reminded investors of how turbulent moving from private to public markets can be”. Still, for the moment, Anthropic is lifting “Wall Street’s animal spirits”, said Due Diligence in the FT. Come autumn, the street will be buzzing.

The nest isn’t as empty as it used to be, said Noam Scheiber in The New York Times. Sending a kid off to college usually meant an end to cohabiting with them under the same roof. Not anymore. Today, nearly half of adults under 30 are still living at home, according to the Federal Reserve, a level not seen since the pandemic. The prevalence of “boomerang kids” reflects a number of trouble spots in the economy, including the soaring cost of living, out-of-control home prices, and “persistent weakness in the job market for recent graduates.” Many young people are moving back with their parents to look for jobs “from the relative comfort” of home, where meals are guaranteed and rent is paid for. It’s becoming so common that the stigma is disappearing: People who live at home after graduating are perceived less as “rudderless” and more as “driven-but-thwarted.”

For parents, it can be a financial hit to let a grown son or daughter move in, said Jeff Green in Bloomberg. Most parents want to do all they can to help their child. But such caregiving isn’t free. Financial planners estimate it can add up to “roughly $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year,” when you add up all the extra groceries, utilities, and other expenditures, which cuts into retirement savings. They recommend establishing “clear expectations along with a timeline and exit plan.” That could include charging increasing rent until it reaches market rate—at which point young adults may prefer to move out and share an apartment with roommates. There’s a difference between “providing a safety net and enabling financial immaturity,” said Michelle Singletary in The Washington Post. There needs to be accountability. If adult children are home because “they’re carrying massive student loans,” make sure you “monitor their progress reducing the debt.” If they’re unemployed or can’t contribute financially, there are other ways to ensure they can help, “such as cooking, cleaning, or maintaining the property.”

Having a boomerang kid is “probably less dire” than it seems, said Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker. There has actually been a “steady increase in young people living at home over the past 25 years.” Some of this is cultural—black, Asian, and Latino families usually have higher rates of intergenerational living—and some of it is social: “People are getting married later in life,” and thus not leaving the nest for love. “In reality, most young people are likely doing OK.” But it’s also “likely they’re not doing as well as they had hoped.” That’s why “the narrative of the downwardly mobile young person” has become so persuasive—as a rallying cry for the Left, and a cry for help from Mom and Dad.

“Hi there. I have received your email. I have printed it off. I’m now using it to light flaming cocktails for the entire bar. Best, Lucy.”

That was an ‘amusing’ out-of-office reply from a British Airways holiday advert a couple of years ago, said Country Life, but there is more to the “philosophy” of these emails than just trying to be funny, said The Atlantic. They can be a “rote obligation or an opportunity to make a grand statement about work and life”.

For some, it is a “simple one-line email”, while others use it to “apologise profusely” for being away or “highlight their indignation at being tied to work or the internet in the first place”. Selecting the right tone requires adhering to a hidden etiquette of rules. And needless to say, ”transitioning between vacation and regular obligations can get complicated”.

‘Cry for help’

It can be frustrating to be hit with a “barrage” of out-of-office (OOO) responses to a group email you have sent, said the Financial Times. You may think your colleagues are “lazy good-for-nothings, slacking off while you toil through the long summer”, but their replies can tell you “so much more”.

Someone who says they will be “checking their emails intermittently” is almost certainly on holiday with their in-laws, and “wants to reply to your email within 17 minutes rather than the usual six”. Then there are those who are even more addicted to being permanently on call, claiming to have “no access to internet”. If they do get access, they say they will have smashed their phone, laptop and smartwatch and “thrown them into the ocean”. This is a blatant “cry for help”.

Then there are the jokey ones. “I am currently out of the office, trying to return home after a successful conquest involving a large wooden horse. It may take me some time.” This person has not checked their company policy and will “shortly be unemployed”.

I went through a phase of setting “funny” out of offices, said Sophia Money-Coutts in Country Life. But I “shudder with horror now” thinking about it. “Life’s too short; time is too precious to agonise” over what you write. “Straightforward is the way to go for everyone involved.”

That said, the “aggressive approach” is by far the worst. Some people not only declare they will be away, but that “all emails will be automatically deleted during that period”. How “irritating”. This would make more sense if they were on a sabbatical or maternity leave, but “it’s quite self-important if you’re only hopping to Mallorca for a week”. And setting an OOO saying you’re off for a “mere afternoon”? A “touch pompous”.

Keep it short, said Forbes. “Your OOO is not your Instagram. Skip the mojito emoji and ‘Off to South Beach, baby!’ Nobody wants your travelogue.”

Another big mistake is not fully shutting it off when you’re back. Doing so the night before logging back on is usually best. “Don’t be that person who leaves the OOO on until three people have reminded you to turn it off.”

‘Set expectations’ before you go

There are some clear “dos and don’ts” when it comes to out-of-office messages, said BBC. And getting it wrong can have “more serious consequences than you might think”.

The optimum reply is “polite and concise”, gives a “specific return date” and at least one other point of contact if appropriate, said the etiquette consultancy Debretts . “Virtue signalling” – or going into too much detail about your time off – is another big “no-no”: it can come across as boastful, “smug”, or that you’re “trying too hard”.

It’s not really about the out-of-office message at all, said Stylist. The most effective team members “set expectations before” they go, outlining how “online” they will be, if at all. This stops colleagues of whatever seniority “second-guessing whether they should follow up” or being confused over what “contactable in an emergency” actually means.

Even sharing good news – whether from your desk or on holiday – can be a detrimental form of “presenteeism”. This can throw someone else into work mode, confuse the boundaries you have set or subliminally pressurise others to follow your example.

Most importantly, it is vital to just “trust your team. We all like to think the place will fall apart without us, but this is a damaging view that will only stop you from fully enjoying your time off.” Planning ahead of time and handing things over properly removes most of the need for communicating while on holiday. Many people forget this but “really, most things can wait”.

Mark Walter promised a bright future when he bought the Los Angeles Lakers last year. That future is already passed. Walter flipped the team to new owners this month, netting a reported $2.5 billion profit. Dollar signs have always dominated the big leagues, but sports ownership is increasingly reserved for corporations, private equity and superrich investors. Where does that leave fans?

‘Highly sticky consumer base’

Jerry Buss and his children ran the Lakers as the “NBA’s version of a mom-and-pop shop” for decades before last year’s sale to Walter, Benjamin Wilhelm and Samuel Agini said at the Financial Times. The days when a local businessman would buy and run a team as a sort of community trust are over. Instead, the “shock sale” of the Lakers demonstrates how pro teams are “no longer treated as vanity assets but legitimate investment vehicles.”

The new generation of sports owners look like Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO who now co-owns the Lakers. They are “billionaire financiers” who see professional sports as a business sector “resistant to potential disruption from AI” and have access to “deep pools of capital,” said the Financial Times.

Sports are good business thanks to a “highly sticky consumer base” of die-hard fans and “contractual revenue streams” for broadcast rights that produce massive revenues, MAI Capital Management’s Kurt Nye said to Investment News. Pro teams are thus selling at “prices that would have seemed implausible a decade ago,” said the outlet. The NFL’s Seattle Seahawks sold for $9.612 billion in July, while the Chicago Bulls were valued at $6.45 billion when Walmart heir Lukas Walton bought a 10% stake in June. Those sky-high valuations now make franchises “legitimate portfolio planning territory” for the highest-dollar investors.

It can be messy territory. The Buss family announced this week it is selling its remaining minority stake in the Lakers, said The Athletic. But that sale is opposed by Jeanie Buss, who led the franchise in recent years. The “bitter dispute” between Buss and her siblings could end up in court.

Fans ‘pay through the nose’

Team owners are “flush and want to be even flusher,” Mike Lupica said at the New York Daily News. The “sure thing” profits from ownership come in part because owners like Walter and the Knicks’ James Dolan “charge vulgar amounts for ticket prices” for the fans who keep the enterprise going. Many Knicks fans could not afford tickets to Madison Square Garden during the team’s recent championship run. Fans pay “through the nose” while team owners keep winning big money “whether their teams win or not.”

The Lakers sale is “exactly why we need publicly owned sports teams,” Dave Zirin said at The Nation. Team owners have long had “zero regard” for communities where their franchises “have taken root.” But franchises belonged to their communities “spiritually, psychologically, personally” before they became “just another asset” in private equity portfolios. When sports billionaires buy our teams they are “buying our joy.”

Government borrowing is getting more expensive. Bond yields — the amount the government pays investors to borrow their money — this week hit their highest rate since the financial crisis of 2007, as investors demonstrated their nervousness about the U.S. economy with a massive bond sell-off. The market turmoil could spread, raising borrowing costs for consumers and businesses.

What did the commentators say?

Bond investors are “mainly concerned about two things,” said NPR. The first is that persistent inflation, driven in part by the war with Iran, is eroding the value of the bonds they hold. The second is the federal government’s longstanding and bipartisan “habit of spending more money than it collects in taxes.” The U.S. federal debt hit a “record-shattering” $40 trillion this week. Most observers do not believe the government will “find itself unable to pay back investors,” but investors are increasingly “worried.” This week’s bond jitters are their way of “sounding alarm bells” about the American economy.

Government bonds are also “under pressure from a wave of new corporate debt,” said CNN. Companies like Alphabet and Meta are borrowing massive amounts of money to fund their build-out of artificial intelligence networks, and those corporate bonds are “competing with government bonds for investors’ attention.” That creates less demand and forces higher yields for the government bonds. Big Tech and big government are “competing for the same pool of buyers at the same moment governments need those buyers most,” deVere Group’s Nigel Green said in a note, per CNN.

The return to pre-2008 rates for bond yields “isn’t cause for panic,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. It might sound frightening to hear that “rates are higher than they’ve been in nearly 20 years,” but in truth the low rates of that era were “abnormal.” The rising rates will create “new budgetary stresses” for the federal government: Servicing the debt now costs $1 trillion a year, making it the “second- or third-largest line item in the federal budget.” The government can no longer borrow “as if near-zero interest rates would last forever.”

“America is about to get more expensive,” Wharton School’s Mohamed A. El-Erian said at The New York Times. The pain is likely to spread to “sectors that are traditionally sensitive to interest rates” such as the home and auto markets, which will “sideline even more prospective first-time home buyers” and raise the cost of transportation. That in turn will feed an “affordability crisis that already sits atop voter anxieties” ahead of the midterm elections.

What next?

Bond markets calmed briefly on Wednesday after the Treasury Department announced it would “more than double the size of its government debt repurchases,” said CNBC. But that relief will probably be “short-lived,” said the Journal, because the buyback program does not address the fundamental concerns about “high levels of debt and government spending.” As of Thursday morning, yield rates were once again on the rise.

What happened

The U.S. gross national debt on Wednesday hit $40 trillion for the first time, just five months after reaching $39 trillion. The new debt figure is an “ominous milestone for an economy that sits on a shaky fiscal foundation after decades of borrowing to pay for the rising costs of the military, social safety net programs” and, especially since last year, President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, The New York Times said.

Who said what

The “federal government’s IOU has now more than doubled in less than a decade,” from $19.95 trillion when Trump was first sworn in, Reuters said. Much of that debt funded the Covid-19 response, including $8.4 trillion added under former President Joe Biden. But Trump has also “largely ignored the dwindling number of fiscal hawks in his Republican Party,” and his “landmark second-term” tax-and-spending bill “will ​add another $4.7 trillion in debt.”

The bipartisan “inability of lawmakers to confront the debt comes with long-term risks,” the Times said. The “best-case scenario” in an “unsustainable” fiscal trajectory, said Margaret Spellings of the Bipartisan Policy Center in a statement. “AI disruption, a recession, global war or any number of other events could quickly push us over the edge from a challenge into a full-blown crisis.”

What next?

The “exploding debt” is “already affecting Americans’ pocketbooks by raising borrowing costs” and squeezing wages, said The Associated Press. The U.S. is expected to hit the current $41.1 trillion statutory debt limit “sometime between late winter and mid-summer” of 2027, forcing Congress to “again vote on whether to raise or suspend it.”

Could Tennessee become America’s movie capital? That scenario is on the table. Paramount chief David Ellison is threatening to move the studio’s headquarters out of California, a bid to force the state and its partners to end their lawsuit challenging Paramount’s planned merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

What did the commentators say?

The vow to abandon Hollywood is “obvious brinksmanship” but also “not that far-fetched,” said The Hollywood Reporter. Paramount really could leave the “entertainment capital of the world” for Tennessee, Texas or Georgia. Still, Ellison is in the “talent business,” and a critical mass of creative TV and movie talent is “largely based in Los Angeles and New York.” Ellison’s threat is an “attempt to blackmail the regulators,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a Politico event.

The antimerger lawsuit led by Bonta and a dozen other Democratic attorneys general could “make California’s Hollywood exit even worse,” Tosin Akintola said at Reason. An already-weakened Hollywood TV and movie production system “stands to lose the most should the merger collapse.” If it happens, the state could “lose $500 million annually in corporate tax revenue” as well as “thousands” of Paramount jobs. Bonta is working against the “economic interests” of his state in order to “bolster his bona fides as an antitrust crusader.”

“No one really wants to move from Beverly Hills to Nashville,” Sharon Waxman said at The New York Times. But the move would perhaps fulfill a “dream from the right to create an alternative to left-leaning Hollywood.” Tennessee, after all, is already home to the country music industry and has long been seen as a potential “Hollywood for conservatives.” Business needs might win out over ideology, however, and a lawsuit settlement may come before a dramatic departure. “Certainly no one wants this chaos.”

Ellison’s ultimatum is “more a temper tantrum than a master plan,” Brian Lowry said at Talking Points Memo. The son of billionaire Oracle chief Larry Ellison appears to be a “guy who wanted to become a movie mogul” and now finds his ambitions complicated. His legacy could end up being the “wreckage that the studio’s wild ride leaves in its wake.”

What next?

A big deadline looms. Paramount must pay a $7 million per day “ticking fee” to Warner Bros. shareholders if the deal is not complete by Oct. 1, said Deadline. The “better path” would be a settlement to resolve the case before the antitrust trial, the studio said in a public statement.

Ellison is upping the stakes. Paramount this week asked a court to order California and the other plaintiffs in the antitrust suit to “cover the costs of the delay created by their lawsuit” with a $1.88 billion bond, said The New York Times. Delaying the “merger carries substantial and quantifiable financial consequences,” Paramount said in a statement.

Economists have argued the U.S. is experiencing a K-shaped economy in which the rich get richer while working Americans increasingly fall behind. Now the Trump administration is pushing back. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is “sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy,” he said on CNBC this month, insisting that lower-wage workers are seeing improvements under GOP policies.

Is the gap narrowing?

The U.S. wealth gap “appears to be narrowing,” David Goldman and Rachel Siegel said at CNN. Wages and spending for the rich outpace “growth in paychecks and expenses for the poor” in a K-shaped economy, but recent reporting suggests “those lines seem to be getting closer together.” One June report found the gap in spending growth between high- and low-wage earners is the “narrowest it has been in three years.” The remaining disparity is “not getting wider in absolute terms,” PNC economist Brian LeBlanc said to the outlet.

The K-shaped economy was “increasingly reliant” on the spending of wealthy Americans on goods and services, said Axios. That made the U.S. economy vulnerable to a “wealth shock” if the rich were forced to curtail their spending due to a falling stock market or another crisis. But “lower- and middle-income Americans are catching up” and putting U.S. consumer spending “on a more resilient footing.” One indicator: After-tax wages among lower-income workers “rose 5.2% in July from the same period a year ago.”

Analysts believe the “shrinking gap largely reflects an improving labor market” in which “more lower-income households are working and collecting paychecks,” said Axios. That signifies there is not “much there in terms of support for the K-shape narrative,” JPMorgan Chase’s Jeremy Barnum said to investors last month.

There are skeptics. The K-shaped economy “remains firmly intact,” Moody Analytics’ Mark Zandi said in a July post at LinkedIn. Households with incomes above $200,000 “are powering overall spending,” with the top 20% of earners accounting for an “astonishing nearly 60% of personal outlays.” Spending by the bottom 80% of the country, meanwhile, remains “unchanged after inflation.” It is a gap that has “persisted since the pandemic,” and the numbers show “no sign that the trend line will reverse soon.”

‘Slightly softer prongs’

It is “tempting to conclude that the K-shaped recovery is behind us,” former JPMorgan Chase economist Anthony Chan said at The People’s Economist. The U.S. does “seem to be making progress,” but more evidence is necessary to determine that the trends have changed. “We may need more than one calendar quarter of good news to fully eliminate the K-shaped economy designation.”

For now, the U.S. economy might best be described as K-shaped but with “slightly softer prongs,” Juliana Kaplan said at Business Insider. Lower earners are “seeing slightly more stability” even if higher earners are still propelling consumer spending. “Trying to describe the economy with a letter shape might just be alphabet soup.”

When the young Greek-Cypriot entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou launched easyJet in 1995, in a bid “to democratise travel”, the no-frills airline operated just two routes, said Angharad Carrick on This is Money.

Since then, it has grown into the UK’s largest airline by passenger numbers – becoming synonymous with cheap holidays across Europe and setting the pace for change in the industry.

But now the orange upstart is being taken private after 26 years on the London Stock Exchange, having agreed a £5.7 billion takeover by the US private equity giant Apollo, “which some analysts believe is something of a cut-price fare in itself”.

Other airlines ‘in the crosshairs’

The words “private equity” might spark fear among easyJet customers, said Carrick, “who have seen other well-loved British brands being taken over and stripped of their assets”. Whether or not these forebodings are realised, it’s the end of an era.

Unlike its rival bidder, fellow US investment firm Castlelake, Apollo has at least obtained the royal consent of Haji-Ioannou, whose backing of the bid was vital to its success, said Ali Lyon in City AM. He described the firm as “one of the most well-resourced and experienced institutional investors in the world” and said he planned to remain an investor.

But, ultimately, it was probably the price that swung the matter: Apollo’s offer is an 81% premium on the airline’s share price prior to takeover speculation. EasyJet now becomes “the first large European carrier to be held in private markets” – assuming Apollo’s formula for persuading EU regulators to nod through the deal works.

It may not be the last, said Hugh Leask on CNBC. This deal could presage a flurry of interest in European budget airlines from private equity buyers, with Jet2 especially “in the crosshairs”.

‘Blow the budget-airline market wide open’

Reports that easyJet will be “loaded” with £3 billion in debt after the takeover are disturbing, said Dominic O’Connell in The Times. Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, has already signalled its disquiet.

Still, Apollo has some experience of airlines, said Peter Campbell in the Financial Times: previous investments include Aeroméxico and Sun Country Airlines, which it listed on Nasdaq in 2021. It has already signalled its intention to take easyJet “upmarket”, with more “business-focused product features on key routes”.

That might suit rivals like Ryanair, but it won’t please cash-conscious travellers. Indeed, this deal could “blow the budget-airline market wide open”, said Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph – as well as fuelling more soul-searching in the City about leading British companies being taken private on the cheap. “It may not be long before we need a FTSE 50, or even a FTSE 30, to reflect how few significant companies are left.”

Millions of older Americans who are already struggling with rising gas and food prices will soon have to pay more for prescription drugs, said Anna Wilde Mathews in The Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration announced last week that it is scrapping a Biden-era subsidy program for Medicare drug plans, known as Part D, starting next year. The program, which this year will give insurers an estimated $3.6 billion to “blunt increases in premiums,” lowered average premiums by about 40% in 2025 for Part D’s 25 million enrollees. About 75% of enrollees, who today pay an average monthly premium of $36, will be hit with higher bills in 2027 because of the cancellation. The Trump administration said the subsidies encouraged insurers to hike rates, knowing the government would pick up the tab. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, said the insurance industry “bailout” was “no longer needed,” and that the administration was working with pharma companies to lower drug costs.

“Letting these Medicare subsidies expire is the right thing to do,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. The program began in 2024 with an administrative action by President Joe Biden, with no authorization from Congress. It was always a “Band-Aid for bad policy, not a long-term solution for health-care costs.” Rather than addressing why Part D premiums were going up, the subsidies shifted more of the bill to taxpayers. “If a health policy can’t work without taxpayers bailing out insurance companies when costs rise more than expected, the underlying policy is the problem, not the planned expiration of the bailout.” The subsidy was always intended to be temporary, said Aliss Higham in Newsweek. It was designed to “limit volatility and variation in Part D premiums” as insurers adapted to changes in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which reduced Medicare enrollees’ out-of-pocket expenses and capped insulin and vaccine costs. Ultimately, more than half the subsidy money flowed to just one company, UnitedHealth Group, which Oz called “unacceptable.”

The cancellation “comes at a curious time,” said Miranda Yaver in MS.now. Midterm elections are just around the corner and Democrats are pressuring Republicans on affordability issues. And now “America’s most reliable voting bloc will receive notice of higher health-care costs”—in most cases, up to $20 more per month. That might not sound like a lot, but it matters greatly to seniors who live on fixed incomes. “This policy shift undercuts Trump’s expressed commitment to prescription drug affordability,” especially because his other efforts, like the direct-to-consumer drug portal, TrumpRx, and most favored nation drug pricing, “have shown little progress” in actually lowering costs. As a political issue, Medicare “should remain untouchable.” The Trump administration is testing the “third rail.”

‘Before more E15 reaches the pump, boaters deserve a real warning’

David Kennedy at The Hill

An E15 ethanol “blend, although approved for many cars and trucks, is not for boats,” and “using higher ethanol blends can damage fuel systems, create performance problems, increase safety risks and even void warranties,” says David Kennedy. “Clearer labeling at the pump could have saved me that expense and time lost on the water,” and it is a “warning for policymakers to inform their constituents of potential risks to their boats as E15 becomes more widely available.”

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‘An HBCU has banned durags and bonnets. That reinforces anti-Blackness.’

A.D. Carson at The Guardian

Tuskegee University’s bonnet and durag ban “has produced polarized responses,” says A.D. Carson. The “policy is ultimately rooted in politics of respectability.” One of the “damaging implications of such a dress code is the reinforcement of anti-Black standards that have been externally and internally imposed on Black people in the United States for decades and have never equaled success or safety.” Debates “about ‘proper attire’ have polarized the country throughout its history” and are “tied to violence.”

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‘How science fiction hijacked our political imagination’

David Albertson and Jason Blakely at The Boston Globe

The “most extravagant sci-fi utopians today are also the richest men on the planet,” say David Albertson and Jason Blakely. But it is “not only the billionaires and Marxists who dream of sci-fi abundance.” It is “high time to dispense with outdated nostrums that assume utopianism is either silly or dangerous.” Utopianism “ought to be considered a plausible politics, alongside progressivism, libertarianism and neoliberal realism.” But the “contemporary menu of futuristic imaginings offers rather limited and bizarre fare.”

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‘America’s manufacturing future starts with industrial hemp’

David M. Klein at Newsweek

America is “making a costly mistake by treating industrial hemp as just another crop,” says David M. Klein. It is an “industrial material that can strengthen manufacturing, create jobs, reduce dependence on imported raw materials and help build more resilient supply chains.” If Americans “keep limiting hemp to an agricultural debate, we will hand another major manufacturing opportunity to other countries.” If “we build the industries that process and manufacture hemp-based products here at home, America wins.”

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With Saudi Arabia ending its funding of LIV Golf after this season, the league is at a crossroads, moving away from its largest controversy while still in need of new financial backing. Now it appears LIV may have found some, announcing last week that it has secured investors to bring it into the 2027 season and beyond. But some major questions about the tour’s future linger.

‘Supporting the path forward’

LIV Golf has an “agreement in place with a lead investor, signed by the investor and approved by the board, to anchor the transaction and play a key role in supporting the path forward for the league’s next era, driven by and for the players,” the tour’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, said in a statement. O’Neil “didn’t identify the investor or how much money will be injected into the league,” said ESPN, though he hopes to “finalize terms in the coming weeks.”

A new backer would mark a significant changing of the guard for LIV Golf, which has been financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund since its 2022 founding. This partnership has elicited backlash, as the fund is “chaired by Mohammed bin Salman — the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the man who a U.S. intelligence report named as responsible for approving the operation that led to the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said CNN. Saudi Arabia has also been accused of widespread human rights abuses.

With bin Salman pulling his funding after 2026, there is “no need to root for LIV’s demise, especially since the moral argument against it — the Saudi backing — is now out of the picture,” said The Athletic. Whoever the new investors are, however, they “won’t remotely approach the fantasy golf funding of Saudi Arabia’s trillion-dollar Public Investment Fund,” meaning the next season of LIV Golf will likely look very different.

‘A talent exodus’

It is a “reality that the Saudi Public Investment Fund invested billions into the league with no return,” and any newer investments “won't stretch as far as the previous financial backing did,” said Bleacher Report. It also remains to be seen how the players themselves will factor into the new-look league, as LIV Golf finds itself looking to bring in fresh golfers for the upcoming season.

LIV Golf “must contend with a talent exodus,” as it has seen “major winners Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed return to the PGA Tour under a program that caps some of their future earning opportunities,” said Sportico. Other big-name golfers “left the league for different reasons.” One of the main question marks is Bryson DeChambeau, the “league’s biggest star” whose expiring contract “looms large over LIV’s future.” Golf industry insiders believe DeChambeau “could command a deal with a total value somewhere between $200 million and $500 million.”

The tour wants to put golfers at the forefront either way, as during the next phase, players “will be majority equity holders in the league,” said Sportico. But “how that structure will play out, especially with the prospect of new investors coming on board, is unclear.” Many are still looking forward to the potential new phase of LIV Golf despite all the current unknowns. If the “league is reduced to a parade of fading 40-somethings who want to play 10 team-centric events a season while bouncing from continent to continent, what’s the harm in that?” said The Athletic. “More golf is better than less golf.”

Kevin Warsh is new to his job as chair of the Federal Reserve, but he is already making one big change that is reverberating through the financial markets. He is no longer providing forward guidance about how the Fed might react to future U.S. economic developments. Are rate hikes likely to control inflation? Warsh will not say. That leaves financial analysts uncertain how to navigate the economy.

‘Learning to play the ball’

Warsh “just broke one of the Fed’s most powerful habits,” Phil Rosen said at Inc. Fed officials voted to keep interest rates steady last week, but that decision “was the least interesting news of the afternoon.” Instead, Warsh’s decision not to signal what might happen next was the “most important” thing he did. This is a departure from “years of clear and frequent forward guidance” under former chair Jerome Powell. Warsh seems to believe that keeping future plans close to the vest “will force markets to think for themselves rather than waiting to be told which way to swing.” The markets are “learning to play the ball not the referee,” Warsh said to reporters.

That is discomfiting to market players. “No really, what is Kevin Warsh thinking?” Kai Ryssdal and Sean McHenry said at Marketplace. The chairman has signaled “commitment to getting inflation under control,” but the absence of forward guidance means the Fed’s plans for how to do that are “still a little unclear.” Markets understandably want to know “what are the contingency plans? What would it take for the Fed to raise rates?” New Century Advisors’ Claudia Sahm said to the outlet. Warsh’s new strategy potentially “obscures the Fed’s framework for understanding and reacting to economic conditions,” Maria Eloisa Capurro said at Bloomberg.

It is a “good thing” that the “Fed is staying quiet” under Warsh, Benn Steil said at The Washington Post. The Fed’s forward guidance under Powell often relied on “faulty forecasts” that “regularly undershot actual inflation.” That “doesn’t enhance credibility” for the Federal Reserve. “The most useful forecast is no forecast at all.”

A ‘less transparent Fed’

“Silence isn’t golden for a world looking to Kevin Warsh’s Fed,” Nicholas Spiro said at South China Morning Post. Warsh and his allies are correct that the Fed’s “forward guidance often proved counterproductive” under Powell. But a “less transparent Fed” creates “uncertainty in an already messy and unpredictable world.” Warsh has a “credibility problem” in that it is not clear to investors “how willing he is to push for interest rate increases” in the face of inflation. His silence “could be a pretext for ducking hard questions” about Fed policies.

Stocks dropped and bond yields rose following last week’s Fed meeting, said The Wall Street Journal, a sign that Warsh’s silent treatment has not reassured markets he will aggressively confront inflation with higher interest rates. Investors “want to feel comfortable that the Fed knows what it is doing,” Loretta Mester, the former president of the Cleveland Fed, said to the outlet. “Not saying anything” may not be sustainable.

Disputing credit card charges may be the new way to stick it to corporations. More consumers are engaging in friendly fraud, disputing real charges or purchases in order to get their money back. The trend reflects a distrust in corporations as well as overall economic instability.

‘Expensive, onerous process’

Friendly fraud involves the use of charge-backs, which are “when a customer goes to their bank, as opposed to the merchant, to dispute a charge,” said NerdWallet. “When the customer requests their money back, the bank contacts the business’s payment processor.”

Then the “bank verifies whether the charge-back request is legitimate” and reverses the charge if it is, said NerdWallet. Most incorrect charge-backs tend to be honest mistakes as a “cardholder identifies a purchase on their transaction statement as fraudulent and disputes it,” when in reality, “they or someone else in their household may have made the purchase,” said Mastercard.

Transaction disputes have also “traditionally been used to address certain types of crimes committed against consumers,” like if “someone steals your wallet and goes on a shopping spree, or if you put a deposit on a wedding venue that goes out of business before the big day,” said Bloomberg. The credit card issuer “claws the funds back from the offending merchant’s bank, on top of a charge-back penalty fee,” which is an “expensive, onerous process” that “incentivizes merchants to be honest transactors and resolve issues with customers before charge-backs are filed.”

‘Existential threat’

What was once an accidental error or a way to stop theft is now sometimes a tool to obtain free merchandise. Friendly fraud is a “costly form of charge-back abuse in which consumers dispute legitimate credit card transactions to recover their money while keeping the purchased goods or services,” said the technology publication Tekedia. Though the phenomenon is not new, it is becoming more common. There were “158 million transaction disputes in 2025, an increase of 29% from 2021, significantly outpacing general growth in card transactions,” said Bloomberg.

The trend takes an economic toll. The “volume of disputes has become so cumbersome that more retailers are farming out the whole process of investigating and defending against fraud claims to third-party vendors that specialize in helping them hold on to more of consumers’ money,” said Bloomberg. Increased levels of chargebacks can also affect prices. “Large retailers fold the cost of lost revenue, lost product and lost labor that fraudulent charge-backs create into the prices everyone pays.” But “for small merchants those losses quickly become an existential threat to their ability to continue operating.”

‘Retaliate against retailers’

The rise of friendly fraud is directly tied to growing distrust of companies and corporations. Friendly fraud is a “way to retaliate against retailers over poor customer service, delayed deliveries, strict return policies or dissatisfaction with purchases,” said Tekedia. People may not even be aware they are committing fraud, as many small value disputes are approved quickly and without much investigation. There are “people that feel like, oh, this is just sticking it to the man, so to speak,” Jim Mortensen, a strategic adviser in the fraud and anti-money-laundering practice at the research firm Datos Insights, said to Bloomberg.

Economic circumstances also contribute to the rise of stealing and fraud. “One thing in the last two to three years has been that the cost of living in most developed markets has put quite a significant squeeze on consumers, particularly younger consumers on lower income,” a senior research analyst at Juniper Research who focuses on digital payments told Bloomberg. While engaging in friendly fraud sounds intriguing, it is “unethical and, in some jurisdictions, may constitute fraud,” said Tekedia. “Repeated abuse can result in account closures, damaged relationships with financial institutions and even legal consequences.”

Women are being left behind again in the race up the corporate ladder, said The Economist. Women today vastly outnumber men on university campuses, and “their representation among the highest-paying professions, including medicine and law, has nearly tripled in America since 1980.” However, even with “the most highly qualified cohort of women in human history,” the share of those leading American corporations dropped last year for the first time in 20 years. Last month, Marianne Lake, one of the leading candidates to replace JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, “was relegated,” leaving “an unusually pale and male lineup” for the top job at the country’s biggest bank. Beyond Wall Street, the gender pay gap is widening again “after consistently closing for years.” And women’s eagerness to lead—which surged following the release of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 call to action, Lean In—seems to have has plateaued. In 2023, 80% of men and women were “keen on a promotion”; that number has since risen to 90% for men but remained static for women.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” said Beth Kowitt in Bloomberg. “These stats paint a grim picture.” The question used to be “how many years would it take for women to attain the corner office in significant numbers.” Now the question is “whether corporate America even thinks it’s important to get them there at all.” We know where the Trump administration stands on this issue, said Tanzina Vega in The Boston Globe. It has led a “war on working women,” in part by firing and replacing Democratic officials on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), two agencies that ensure employers don’t discriminate against women in the workplace. New EEOC chair Andrea Lucas said the agency “aims to pursue more discrimination lawsuits”—from white men. Fearing repercussions if they don’t go along with Trump’s agenda, fewer than half of companies today say they are “prioritizing women’s advancement,” threatening to undo “many of the economic and workplace gains of the past 50 years.”

But the job market has actually given women “the upper hand,” said Allison Schrager in Bloomberg. Out of more than 4 million jobs created since 2023, more than 2.5 million have gone to women. That’s because most new jobs being created are in female-dominated industries like health care, caregiving, and education. These are stable and well-paying positions that, in this graying nation, will be around awhile. They’re also reflective of an economy that is “shifting away from manufacturing, transport, and other traditional male jobs and into services and caregiving.” As much as “some economists would like men to change their preferences and become nurses,” it’s not going to happen. The economy of the future is one that favors women, not men.

What happened

The Federal Reserve Bank on Wednesday held its benchmark interest rate steady, but it “left the door open” to future rate changes “if inflation remains elevated,” said NPR. By a vote of 9-3, the bank’s rate-setting committee left short-term borrowing rates “in a range between 3.5% and 3.75%.” Holding the rate steady will impact the “cost of credit throughout the economy,” including for “auto loans, business financing and credit cards.”

Who said what

The split vote shows Fed officials have “splintered over how the central bank should tackle elevated inflation,” said The New York Times. “Pressure is building” at the Fed to “act on inflation that has run above its target for five years,” said The Wall Street Journal. The no-votes have “underscored officials’ fraying patience with looking past another price shock” amid tariff and AI-related market turbulence.

What next?

That three policymakers voted to increase the rates suggests that “in the coming months,” said the Times, the debate among economists “will center not on whether the central bank will lift borrowing costs, but when.”

What happened

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has hemorrhaged more than $1.2 trillion in market capital since its record-setting IPO in June, as the market scrutinizes the viability of the company’s Starship rocket. The spacecraft, which SpaceX describes as a “fully reusable transportation system,” has been “marred by reliability concerns and repeated explosions,” The Washington Post said. Following another sharp drop in SpaceX shares Monday, CEO Musk’s net worth has fallen from an estimated mid-June peak of $1.45 trillion to below $700 billion.

Who said what

SpaceX conducted a “near-perfect” Starship flight test on Friday, MarketWatch said, but it “wasn’t enough to reverse the stock’s steady decline.” The downside of being publicly traded is that “everything will be evaluated and information transmitted through market prices,” Motley Fool senior investment analyst David Meier told the Post. Musk last week posted a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement on X of his changing fortunes, calling himself a “(Former) Trillionaire.” Even with “just” $700 billion, he remains the wealthiest person in the world “several times over,” Intelligencer said.

What next?

Investors will be watching closely on August 4, when SpaceX releases its first earnings report since its IPO.

Apple just declared war on OpenAI, said Rolfe Winkle in The Wall Street Journal. In a lawsuit filed last week, the iPhone maker accused the artificial-intelligence startup of a corporate espionage campaign “at every level.” It claims that former Apple engineer Chang Liu kept a company MacBook after joining OpenAI and exploited a software flaw to access Apple servers and download privileged data—while allegedly bragging about it. “LOL, I found out I can access the [network storage], so funny,” said Liu in one text message. Apple also alleges that OpenAI’s hardware chief, Tang Tan, who worked at Apple for 24 years as a key product designer, solicited confidential information from current and former Apple employees during interviews and even encouraged poached employees to bring “actual parts” for “show and tell.” Tan has worked closely with Jony Ive, the industrial artist who designed the iPhone, at io products, which OpenAI bought in 2025 to develop “a mystery device” aimed at supplanting existing smartphones. OpenAI said that it takes the allegations in Apple’s suit “seriously,” but is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”

This is just Apple’s m.o., said Patrick McGee in The Free Press. It’s “not the first time Apple used litigation as a weapon.” In 2010, Steve Jobs declared “thermonuclear war” on Google after calling Android devices a “stolen product.” Tim Cook “looks to be using the same playbook.” But Apple isn’t upset only about the fact that “OpenAI harbors ambitions to be a hardware company.” It’s that OpenAI is pursuing them “with former Apple employees it has been relentlessly poaching.” Twice now “OpenAI has aligned itself with a leading tech giant,” said Peter Kafka in Business Insider, “and ended up in a messy breakup.” The first big rift was with Microsoft, which was OpenAI’s most crucial ally—until OpenAI started making deals with Amazon behind Microsoft’s back. Apple, too, once had an agreement to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone software. But that ended once it became clear OpenAI was building an iPhone rival. It’s a disturbing pattern that raises questions about the AI firm’s leadership. If I’m a Big Tech executive who’s working with OpenAI, I’d have many “reasons to fret.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for OpenAI, said Hayden Field in The Verge. Most AI leaders have “at least one lawsuit or accusation to their name.” But for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, it’s been a “roller-coaster six months full of drama.” The company has faced multiple lawsuits, including ones from co-founder Elon Musk, the families of young people negatively affected by ChatGPT, and The New York Times over copyright infringement. Altman said he’s “not afraid of Apple,” but perhaps he should be. Apple is a “tenacious litigant” that doesn’t like to back down.

OpenAI never stood a chance of toppling the iPhone anyway, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. The challenges—from design to integration to mass production and distribution—“are insurmountable.” It wanted a big consumer splash to pair with its initial public offering. But Apple has perhaps forced OpenAI “to give up the folly sooner rather than later,” a change of course that could save it “billions of its desperately needed dollars.” It may look back at this episode as a blessing in disguise.

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have undoubtedly made their mark on healthcare. But they have also begun to shape the broader economy.

While there are those “salivating at the prospect of where AI can go in the years ahead,” perhaps the “bigger leap in the near term” is the “technological miracle that is stopping us salivating at all,” Jim Reid, the global head of macro and thematic strategy at Deutsche Bank, said in a commentary. Perhaps the GLP-1 is the “real short-term general-purpose technology for a wider range of consumers, especially in the U.S.” In other words, the age of the Ozempic economy has arrived. These are some of the ways you might feel the impact.

Restaurants

People on GLP-1s have shifted how they spend money on eating out. People taking the drugs go to restaurants and order out half as often as they did before, according to a survey by Deutsche Bank, though they spend slightly more each visit. Brands with “differentiated, healthier offerings or more occasion-based demand” are likely to be more competitive, said Investopedia^.

Still, restaurants in the U.S. appear to be “going through a rough period,” and some attribute the difficulty to the “growing use of weight-loss drugs,” said The Motley Fool. Sales are down while “inflation rages for salaries, food and other input costs.” If chains can “pivot to lighter, higher-protein meals,” demand may “bounce back in the years ahead.” But if Americans “start consuming vastly fewer calories” because of weight-loss drugs, this could be a “permanent reset for the entire sector.”

Groceries

Because GLP-1’s help eliminate “food noise,” which can “lead to bingeing and distracting thoughts about eating,” patients are “cutting back on snacks and spending more on healthy items,” said The Washington Post. Compared with non-GLP-1 households, GLP-1 users “reduced their spending by 10%” over a year across “100 categories including groceries, quick-service restaurants and tobacco,” according to data company Numerator.

The “fallout could hurt the snack food industry,” but some companies are “innovating and acquiring health food brands.” They’re focused on “high-protein items,” which “support muscle mass, are highly satiating and boost metabolism,” as well as buying more “quick and healthy frozen meals.”

Researchers increasingly see a “shift away from volume” with customers’ grocery shopping and instead note a move toward what economists call “premiumization,” Benzinga said. Consumers may eat less, but they seem willing to “spend more on nutrient-dense products,” especially protein.

Alcohol

Studies have shown that GLP-1 drugs can suppress alcohol cravings among heavy drinkers. According to NielsenIQ data, users spent “14.5% less in the category after starting the treatment,” while nonalcoholic wine and beer purchases among the group “ballooned by 1,158% and 935%, respectively,” said the Post. Meanwhile, “high-protein drinks and probiotic soda brands that promote gut health” are seeing significant growth, as they are popular among users of weight-loss drugs.

Retail

Sales of smaller-sized clothing for both men and women have increased, according to a study by Impact Analytics. Demand for women’s tops in sizes extra small and small rose by two percentage points between 2022 and 2024, while demand for large and extra large sizes was down by two percentage points. Analysts believe it will “probably be more difficult to find larger sizes in stores,” with retailers “shifting most of that inventory to online only,” said the Post.

Meanwhile, credit and debit card data, according to Consumer Edge, shows that “formal-wear sales surged 80%,” and sporting goods “jumped 24%” in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. The shift could indicate a “need [or] desire to buy new clothing and accessories after undergoing a positive life change,” said Michael Gunther, Consumer Edge’s head of insights.

There are also more “affordable and eco-friendly ways to spend on apparel,” the Post added. Consignment and thrift shop spending surged 80%, according to Consumer Edge, as “consumers look to save as they go down sizes.” Meanwhile, resale outlets are “seeing an uptick in larger sizes for donations and consigning.” They are also contributing to the “estimated $47 billion in apparel that customers send back to online retailers each year because it doesn’t fit,” said Investopedia.

Due to the risk of muscle mass loss, GLP-1 users are encouraged to exercise and strength train. They’re also spending more on items linked to a more active lifestyle, like wearable electronics, which saw sales rise 29% over six months among the group, according to Consumer Edge.

Airlines

Analysts are also predicting future winners in the Ozempic economy. The dropped pounds may have a “surprising perk for airlines too,” said The New York Times: “lower fuel costs, as slimmer passengers lighten their aircraft’s loads.” The four largest U.S. carriers, “American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines,” could save upwards of $580 million a year altogether in fuel costs, according to a study by financial firm Jefferies.

Lower passenger weight could “reduce fuel use by 514 million gallons annually,” according to an analysis by Michigan State University, Benzinga said. The amount saved by the airlines would be “approximately $2 billion a year,” MSU economist Bill Knudson said.

Workforce

This shift is not so much about consumer spending, but it has an economic impact linked to changes in workforce potential associated with GLP-1 use. For nonworking women, those who use GLP-1s are 27% more likely to start a job within 18 months of their weight loss than those who aren’t using GLP-1s but want to, according to a study published by Harvard economics professor Rebecca Diamond.

These weight-loss treatments may also “influence broader factors tied to workplace performance,” including “energy, focus and long-term productivity,” according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine and analyses from organizations such as the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company, said Forbes.

What happened

A federal judge in California on Monday paused Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, agreeing with 12 states that the merger of two of Hollywood’s remaining five major movie studios could run afoul of antitrust laws. The combined company would also amalgamate CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Paramount+ and dozens of cable channels. The “pause will last only 14 days,” said The New York Times. But in her ruling, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín “raised the prospect of a much longer delay.”

Who said what

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, hailed the ruling as a “critical first win in our case to ensure this megamerger never sees the light of day,” he said in a statement. Paramount said the lawsuit’s “antitrust arguments are without merit” and it would “vigorously defend” its “lawful, pro-competitive” merger. Along with the dozen states, the merger is being challenged in court by a group of consumers, the Writers Guild of America and Paramount shareholders.

What next?

Martínez-Olguín said in her order she would consider issuing a longer injunction at an Aug. 3 hearing. Any lengthy delay in the merger, which had been set to be completed as soon as Tuesday, would “have huge financial costs for Paramount,” NPR said. Starting Oct. 1, it has to pay Warner shareholders “roughly $650 million for every 90 days the deal is set back.”

For months, equity markets have been able to treat higher oil prices, higher government bond yields and vast AI costs “as separate problems arriving on different days”, said Stephen Innes on Investing.com. But Wall Street is now finally on “the collision course it had spent weeks pretending would never happen”.

The catalyst was the Strait of Hormuz, where the standoff between Washington and Tehran entered a dangerous new phase, pushing the price of Brent crude up by more than 10% to $85/barrel, the highest in four weeks. For investors, central bankers and governments, the spectre of an inflation shock that many had hoped was behind us has hoved back into view.

No shelter

“I’m left wondering why the smart money failed to hedge against what was always a highly probable breakdown of this fragile ceasefire,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. “The interim peace deal was clearly resting on a knife’s edge, yet investors chose the comfort of short-term optimism over geopolitical probability. Again.” Iran isn’t the only conflict vexing the oil market, said Javier Blas on Bloomberg. “What matters for Main Street” isn’t the cost of crude, but of petrol, diesel and jet fuel. On that score, the concurrent escalation of the Ukraine War in recent weeks is troubling, given shortages in global refining capacity, in Russia and beyond.

The difficulty investors face is finding shelter from these geopolitical crises, said James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal. “In the old investment paradigm, government bonds acted as shock absorbers, with prices rising and yields falling when the economy takes a hit.” But that doesn’t work when shocks are inflationary – particularly “when government debt levels are so high”.

Challenge for Burnham

Bonds have suffered a painful sell-off on both sides of the Atlantic, with prices of benchmark ten-year UK gilts spiking above 5% for the first time since May. Bond yields have broadly tracked oil prices since the start of the Iran conflict, said Mehreen Khan in The Times. And, once again, the UK – highly exposed to global energy and food prices – is vulnerable. Andy Burnham’s economic inheritance as the incoming PM is suddenly looking much more troubling.

“Rising gilt yields eat into the government’s fiscal buffers” by raising the cost of servicing debt, and the unknown identity of the new chancellor is adding to the jitters in debt markets. Some investors are already voting with their feet. Asset manager Rathbones has slashed its gilts holding, as a hedge against potential “fiscal irresponsibility” – out of fear that Burnham “does a Truss”. Given an increasingly fragile fiscal backdrop, more may follow.

Just days away from her expected departure, Rachel Reeves defended her legacy to the “great and the good of the City” in the annual Mansion House speech, said the Financial Times.

Her “valedictory” address claimed successes in reduced government borrowing and lower NHS waiting lists. “Loud applause and even whoops of support from guests” indicated support from the finance sector, too, even if possibly not reflected across the country.

But many in the audience were preoccupied by one question: “who would be in charge of the UK’s fiscal policy next week”?

What did the commentators say?

“Farewell, Rachel Reeves, the blubbing chancellor who made us all cry,” said James Moore in The Independent. According to most polling, she is by far the “most unpopular chancellor on record”. She may have resisted “juvenile attempts” to tax the billionaires advocated by many in her party, but she opted for “one of the worst possible means” to raise funds, in hitting employers with higher National Insurance.

But by far her “darkest legacy” is the “million young people not in education, employment or training”. Ultimately, despite a handful of isolated wins, Reeves has “rarely shown the kind of bravery or instinct needed for this great office”.

Reeves’ record is the worst of “any chancellor of modern times”, said financial columnist Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph. In her Mansion House speech, she primarily presented herself as the only person who could provide stability. “The trouble is, none of it was very convincing.” The economy’s “stagnant” growth only looks “tolerable” in the context of poor performances from other G7 countries, unemployment is on the rise, and debt has “soared” to close to “100% of GDP”. Given her shortcomings, her belated attempts to appeal to Andy Burnham’s regime were “cringey” at best. “It was an embarrassing end to a dismal chancellorship.”

“Barely a sector has escaped unscathed” from Reeves’ “duplicity”, said Alys Denby in CityAM. The first, and telling, blow was her “acrobatic triangulation” over the definition of a tax on “working people”, breaking her manifesto pledge by freezing thresholds. She will be remembered for “dissembling, breaking promises and making Brits poorer”.

Not everyone will be glad to see the back of Reeves, said Politico. Her tears in the Commons once sent financial markets “spiralling”: “now they’re the ones sobbing”. She is uniquely “friendly to the City”, typified by her “smoked salmon offensive” of holding regular breakfasts with City chiefs in the run-up to the 2024 election. With uncertainty over her successor, “things can only get worse” for the financial elite.

A “fair assessment” of Reeves’ tenure in No. 11 “would not be wholly negative”, said The Times’ editorial board. “She has a couple of sizeable achievements to her name.” She relaxed some of the “onerous” regulation on businesses, made reforms to the London Stock Exchange and “consolidated” the “fragmented” pensions industry. “Regrettably”, however, Reeves’ negatives “outweigh the positives”. Labour may have inherited a “sizeable fiscal problem”, but with Reeves’ “disastrous” first budget, they “exacerbated it”.

What next?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is likely to become Reeves’ successor when Burnham’s cabinet is announced on Monday, said the Financial Times. Mahmood is on the right of the Labour Party and is viewed as a “tough operator and capable minister”, overseeing “contentious” immigration reforms. Since the reports broke, the markets have “responded positively”. Speaking on Wednesday, Burnham said that he might “ask for a little bit more” in tax, and refused to rule out a wealth tax. Whatever the selection, the future chancellor’s “big task” will be to frame a convincing autumn Budget.

“Dare I suggest there are the seeds here for a comeback” for Reeves, said Moore in The Independent. The UK is in a “precarious predication fiscally”, and we “shouldn’t underestimate” Reeves’ standing with the markets. If the Burnham project goes “horribly wrong”, he may find himself calling on someone to “steady the ship”. “The record shows that Reeves can take the blows. She could do it her way.”

If you have ever avoided giving criticism or expressing boundaries in the workplace, you may have been “bubble wrapping.” The phenomenon, in which people cushion their words or actions to protect others’ feelings, is most common among women. And this avoidance of confrontation may be inadvertently hindering upward mobility in the office.

Gendered habit

While anyone can partake in “bubble wrapping,” women are most likely to do it. Women are “often socialized to be ‘the nice one,’ ‘the helpful one’ or the person who keeps everyone together at work,” said Mukti Joy, a leadership coach and well-being strategist, to Her World. “They start confusing being valued with being easy to approve of.” More than half of women “feel pressure to be likeable at work compared with only 36% of men, and this ‘likeability labor’ means women often feel overly responsible for other people’s comfort at work,” Mandy Lehto, an executive coach and leadership expert, said to Stylist.

Examples of bubble wrapping in the workplace include apologizing unnecessarily, softening the delivery of criticism or expectations, or taking on extra tasks instead of communicating limits. Many women feel pressure to avoid confrontation because they are “far more likely to receive feedback that they’re being ‘bossy’ or ‘too direct’ when they communicate in the same way as male colleagues,” Léonie Kennepohl, a female leadership expert and co-founder of the networking platform and recruiting community Female x Finance, said to Forbes. Bubble wrapping “often comes from a good place,” but it “can make communication less effective and is arguably worse than being known as ‘bossy.’”

Harder job

This pressure to be agreeable can hinder career growth. Bubble wrapping “makes women appear less confident in leadership positions,” said Forbes. “The focus feels like it shifts from making the right business decision to protecting everyone else’s feelings,” Kennepohl said. It can “present as a person not having leadership qualities.” Bubble wrapping also “deprives people of the very feedback and challenges they need to become more resilient, capable and successful,” said Forbes.

Women often “become the colleague others vent to, the one who smooths over conflicts, explains someone’s intentions or makes sure everyone else feels comfortable,” said Her World. These added burdens often make jobs more taxing. This emotional labor has “real value because it helps build trust, psychological safety and stronger workplace relationships.” It becomes problematic “when it’s expected from the same people every time.”

Need for courage

Wanting to be kind does not mean avoiding difficult conversations. “Empathy is essential but so are boundaries,” Elaine Choi, an HR Manager, said to Her World. Practicing “carefrontation” or “being clear, honest and direct while remaining respectful and kind” can facilitate necessary conversations “without carrying everyone else’s emotional reactions on your own.” However, purposely putting yourself in uncomfortable situations may also be required at times.

It is important to “build self-trust by showing yourself that you value your own experience as much as other people’s,” Lehto said to Stylist. “You’re not being unkind or unprofessional.” A conscious effort to make yourself heard will likely lead to an “adrenaline surge and an internal wobble,” but “stay in tension anyway.” There is “so much coming at us that is trying to make us complacent, or to look the other way or to not sit in the discomfort,” Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, said to Big Think. “We actually need people to feel and to act with courage in their everyday life.”

After rejecting four previous overtures as “highly opportunistic”, easyJet has rolled over, said Kate Duffy on Bloomberg.

Following a month-long siege, the British budget airline has agreed in principle to be bought by the US private equity investor Castlelake, for an improved offer of £6.90 per share in cash, or about £5.5 billion – assuming it can steer its bid around tough EU rules on airline ownership.

No longer ‘no-frills’

Shares in easyJet – a once-ground-breaking “no-frills” venture, founded by Stelios HajiIoannou and floated in 2000 – jumped on the news, said Gwyn Topham in The Guardian, partly because the latest offer allows current shareholders to remain invested under Castlelake’s ownership, “rather than being forced to divest when it delists”.

But the gloom among some City analysts was palpable. Kathleen Brooks of brokerage XTB said the potential loss of such “an iconic British aviation name” was “symbolic” of the “massive For Sale sign above UK corporates” due to their persistently cheap shares – and could encourage foreign buyers to pick off even more FTSE-listed firms.

Destination ‘largely the same’

Minneapolis-based Castlelake, an experienced aviation financier and leaser, is no sector fly-by-night. And it promises business as usual at easyJet, said Robert Lea in The Times. Despite recent travails – the airline’s stock was pummelled by the Iran conflict – the Luton-based carrier is supposedly on course to make £1 billion in annual profits.

Investors still aren’t pricing in a definite sale, said Lex in the Financial Times: one “unknown” is the view of “the orange airline’s forthright founder and 15% owner” Haji-Ioannou. But shares in European rivals rose. The nightmare for them was that easyJet would succumb to a more muscular, expansionist player. That its “destination remains largely the same” under Castlelake is a source of some comfort.

American women in the workforce have long been outearned by their male counterparts. And though the difference narrowed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the gap is now increasing as overall wage growth slows and the economy shifts to jobs dominated by men.

What did the commentators say?

U.S. wage growth is “steadily slowing,” but for women it’s “slowing even more,” said Marketplace. The gap got narrower during the last three decades of the 20th century due to “more women entering the workforce, broader minimum wage protections and better access to contraception.” That progress has “stalled” during this century, pausing briefly when “demand for low-wage labor spiked” during the Covid-19 lockdown. Now the gap is widening again, largely because women are “more likely to be in lower-paid, stretched-thin jobs, covering the households’ basic needs,” said Elissa Braunstein, a professor of economics at Colorado State University, to the outlet. Overall, women “earn 16% less than men on average,” said Forbes.

“When women dominate a field, pay goes down,” said Mary Noble-Tolla at Lean In. When parks and recreation jobs shifted from a male-dominated field to one largely staffed by women, for example, “wages dropped by 57%.” Mothers are “hit the hardest” by the disparity, but closing the wage gap would be broadly beneficial. Paying women “fairly” would “cut the U.S. poverty rate in half and inject over $1.6 trillion” into the American economy.

“Women aren’t born wanting to earn less money,” said Maia Mindel at The Argument. Some commentators have made the case that women earn less than men “simply because they choose to” by taking less paid overtime and more unpaid time off. But the preference for “predictable, flexible schedules” comes “almost entirely” from women with children at home. Policymakers can bridge the gap by “broadening access to public services” like childcare and early childhood education.

The wage gap means most American households have “far fewer resources” to pay for “housing, food and healthcare,” Stefanie O’Connell said at MarketWatch. And that struggle “follows women throughout their lives,” as women over the age of 65 are more likely than men their age to live in poverty. The gap is also a “major drag on the economy” because women “make most household purchases.” When they do not have as much money to spend, “both businesses and investors pay the price.”

What next?

“There is no single policy that will close the wage gap,” said Emma Cohn and Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics Blog. Possible solutions would include “pay transparency” laws that require employers to “include wage information in job postings.” Expanded medical and family leave requirements, universal childcare and an improved minimum wage would also help. Such efforts could “build an equitable economy that works for all.”

There may be a few sore heads and impeccably timed phone-calls to bosses in England this morning, after last night’s win over Mexico in the World Cup, but any football fans must be thankful they don’t live in Germany where workers will have to report to a doctor in person, to get a sick note on the first day they are ill, under sweeping new reforms.

The government is “tired of its workers calling in sick”, said the Deep Dive, but unions and family doctors are opposed to the new law.

What is Germany doing?

“The number of sick days is too high,” said Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, announcing the plan. The government is “creating a set of tools that will enable those involved, both employees and companies, to correct this,” he added.

The “tough” new rules are “aimed at boosting Germany’s stagnating economy”, wrote Hans van Leeuwen, international economics editor of The Telegraph.

Although they will be “welcomed” by employers, they have “angered” the country’s “powerful trade unions”. The services sector union, Verdi, accused Merz of creating a “culture of distrust of employees”.

Doctors also have “opposed” the new system because they believe the new requirements will “swamp” GP surgeries with “unnecessary appointments”.

What are sickness policies like elsewhere?

In the Netherlands, employers are generally obliged to pay employees on sick leave 70% of their wages for up to two years. If that amount is less than minimum wage, then the employer must boost this to the minimum wage for the first year. Norway is even more generous: it provides up to a year of income replacement at 100% of salary (subject to an earnings cap).

Although the US is one of the richest countries in the world, there is no nationwide entitlement to paid sick leave in the US, so access depends largely on state laws, local ordinances and employer policies. This means coverage varies considerably. Only 14 of the 50 states have paid sick leave mandates in place, which means sick workers are often forced to rely on health insurance pay-outs to cover their wages.

In the UK employees who earn over £125 a week and are off sick for four or more days in a row, are entitled to £123.25 per week of statutory sick pay for up to 28 weeks. This equates to around 15% of the average UK weekly wage. Employees need to give their employer proof if they’re ill for more than seven days. Many employers have a sick pay policy which is more generous.

How many sick days do people take?

In 2025, 149 million working days were lost to sickness or injury in Britain – an average of more than four days per worker. On average, Americans take roughly one to three days of sick leave per year.

In Germany, workers take about three weeks, or 15 working days, of sick leave per year. This is lower than in France, but higher than Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland and Italy.

Whether you are after memoirs or analysis, here are the most compelling business books to pick up this summer.

1873 by Liaquat Ahamed

A “lively and compelling” account of how America’s Gilded Age economy broke the world, says The New York Times. Action sweeps from America’s railroad barons to Vienna’s stock market crash. Ahamed tackles “one of the great forgotten financial crises”, combining the nuances of high finance with some excellent vignettes, says Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. The cast of characters, says The Wall Street Journal, ranges from the Rothschild clan to a “still-obscure” Karl Marx.

Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald

How did a 19th-century Japanese playing-card manufacturer become one of the most influential companies in the entertainment world, asks Stephen Bush in the FT. This “engaging” history of the home of Mario, Zelda and Pokémon, by The Guardian’s video games editor, is a delight whether you’re a gamer or not.

Suing the Kremlin by Martin Sixsmith

“If you want to see Vladimir Putin’s soul, study the fate of Yukos,” says The Economist. An early indicator of his “authoritarian turn” was the “seizure and dismemberment” of the Russian oil giant and imprisonment of its boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Here, Sixsmith, a former BBC Moscow correspondent, charts how shareholders fought back. “Their unlikely champion was a cheery, phlegmatic London-based tax lawyer, Tim Osborne.”

Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs by Lloyd Blankfein

This memoir, from the “ultimate Goldman insider”, doesn’t quite break the bank’s “blood oath” of silence, says Literary Review. But it’s interesting on Blankfein’s ascent from working-class New York, and includes a “vivid retelling of the desperate days of September 2008”. Blankfein emerges as a “straight-arrow guy”.

Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent by Kim Bowes

This history examines the everyday finances, food and working practices of ordinary Romans in “thrilling detail”, said the FT. Don’t be put off by the 35 bar charts, said the Times Literary Supplement. This is “that rarest of birds”: an “utterly gripping piece of economic history”.

Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman

“A brief, deft account” of one of the most consequential family feuds of recent corporate history, says the FT – and the costs of elevating just one child to run the empire.

Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto by Barry Eichengreen

In this “timely book”, Eichengreen – an expert on the international monetary system – puts today’s concerns about the global role of the dollar into historical context, says the FT. Technological change is important, but it all depends on “trust”.

The United States mostly abandoned the construction of new nuclear power plants after 1990, but that is about to change. The Trump administration is attempting to jump-start a new atomic age with a program to build 10 new power plants by the mid-2030s. And federal officials say that dozens more facilities could come online after that.

What did the commentators say?

“This is the start,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said to reporters, per The Associated Press. The administration is providing $17.5 billion to “speed the development” of the new reactors in a bid to meet growing electricity demand from “massive data centers,” said the AP. President Donald Trump has made a goal of “quadrupling domestic production of nuclear power within the next 25 years.” But critics say the plants are “too expensive and riskier” than solar, wind and “other low-carbon energy sources.”

“Trump’s big nuclear play is here,” said Robinson Meyer at Heatmap. That is no surprise. Support for nuclear power has become “surprisingly bipartisan, at least at the elite level,” with figures as disparate as Trump and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) seeking to speed the development of new reactors. They are taking cues from countries like France and Sweden that have expanded their low-carbon power supplies by “undertaking large, state-led nuclear energy buildouts.” This should have benefits for the warming climate, but highlighting that benefit carries the “risk of discouraging the Trump administration.”

Nuclear power “should generate the cheapest electricity available,” said Alex Trembath at The Dispatch. Instead, the process of building new plants became “increasingly expensive over the decades” thanks to “overregulation, environmentalist opposition, and industrial mismanagement.” But the 57 plants that are online produce 20% of the nation’s power supply. Now it should be “time to build.”

The United States “used to be the world’s leader in nuclear power,” said The Washington Examiner editorial board. That ended because of “regulatory paralysis,” where “endless process had become an enemy of progress.” The Trump administration has now ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “speed up licensing” and created a Reactor Pilot Program that makes it easier for companies to “build, operate, and test reactors” under supervision from the Department of Energy. That has not yet resulted in a completed nuclear plant, but the “restoration of ambition” under Trump could “bring the nuclear renaissance America has needed for half a century.”

What next?

Hopes for a nuclear revival have been “longer on aspiration than action,” but the new loan program “could move the needle,” said Axios. Developing so many plants at once should “create more efficient, scaled, standardized and cheaper supply chains” that will enable the subsequent production of additional plants.

Even as the number of plants expands, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that oversees the industry is preparing to make “huge cuts” to hours devoted to safety and emergency inspections, said CNN. The changes “must be approved by five NRC commissioners to be finalized.”

“The stratospheric rally has left tech stocks vulnerable to sharp reversals,” said Jack Pitcher in The Wall Street Journal. This week saw another, as investors worried about “higher interest rates, stretched valuations and the prospect that billions of dollars of AI spending will outstrip the expectation of blockbuster profits”.

The declines dragged Wall Street’s tech-heavy Nasdaq down by nearly 4% over five days to Wednesday, with chip-makers the worst affected. Sandisk and Micron – key members of a small group of memory stocks that have made “parabolic gains” – were among the biggest US fallers, both down more than 13%. But investors can't really complain: even after these slides, their gains this year are 727% and 269%, respectively.

Chip-wreck

The fulcrum of the latest “chip-wreck”, said Bloomberg, was South Korea’s chip-centric Kospi index, where big falls in SK Hynix and Samsung shares triggered a circuit breaker, bringing trading to a halt before panic set in. The country’s top financial regulator, Lee Chan-jin, indicated the sell-off might have been prompted by his approval of “a batch of high-leverage”, single-stock exchange-traded funds tracking chip-makers, said Louis Juricic on Investing.com.

At launch, those funds held combined assets of $3 billion; they have since swelled to roughly $9.1 billion, with 92% bought by retail investors. These are “high-risk products”, and their leverage component means they amplify, rather than merely tracking, underlying moves. Yet “despite consumer warnings, trading hasn’t cooled”, said Lee.

Long, hot summer

A similar defiant bullishness is evident on Wall Street. “People are looking for reasons to hedge, yet stay invested,” said Julian Emanuel of Evercore. Lisa Shalett of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management told The Wall Street Journal that, despite the volatility, “I’m more inclined to be a buyer in today’s market than a seller.”

Traders are bracing for a roller-coaster into summer, when liquidity typically dries up, said Sagarika Jaisinghani on Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs partner Bobby Molavi reckons the current market is similar to the final months of the dotcom era, when investors took sudden 5% moves in their stride. “What happens if 10% breaks”, and there’s “no floor in sight”?

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.”