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

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

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

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

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

How is the cattle shortage affecting the beef market?

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

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

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

What does the future hold?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Style and design’

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

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

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

‘We want to be careful’

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

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Prized’ fruit

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

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

A ‘sizable drop’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Common sight in border towns’

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

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

Congress is not buying

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

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

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

What next?

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

How big is true crime?

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

How did the genre become so popular?

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

Who are true crime’s biggest fans? 

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

What happens when a crime is spotlighted?

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

Are there other problems with the genre?

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

Can such shows keep our attention? 

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

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

What is fractional working?

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

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

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

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

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

Can this be the future of labor?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Become the one app for everything’

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

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

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

‘There’s a catch’

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

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

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

‘Ramblings of a supervillain’

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

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

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

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

‘Blackening’ NHS values

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Market discipline’ versus ‘Moral hazard’

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

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

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

‘Fundamentally flawed’

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

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

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

Why are ‘new girls’ clubs’ being targeted?

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

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

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

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

Are women’s networks exclusionary?

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

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

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

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

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

Risk of escalation

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

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

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

Regime change

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

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

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

Android

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

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

Nintendo

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

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

Nokia

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

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

Slack

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

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

Volkswagen

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

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

YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Draconian’ measures

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

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

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

A ‘catalyst’ for energy reform?

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

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

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

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

AI is creating wealth

Will AI spending hold up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will it work?

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

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

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

What will the effect be?

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

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

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

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

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

What did experts say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why Latinos join ICE’

Geraldo L. Cadava at The Atlantic

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

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

Blake Fontenay at USA Today

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

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

Margaret Morganroth Gullette at The Boston Globe

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

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

Ahana Datta Fasel at Foreign Policy

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

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

From $4 billion to $39 million

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

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

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

Hit a ceiling

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

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

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

The best investing strategy during periods of geopolitical strife is to have no strategy at all, said Jeff Sommer in The New York Times. Rather than “panic about what the Iran war may be doing to your investments, try to forget about all of it.” That’s been “the standard long-term investing playbook for times of crisis,” and it still applies today, even as global markets whipsaw on the latest news developments. According to market researcher Jeffrey Yale Rubin, there have been seven major U.S. military campaigns since Operation Desert Storm in 1991. “One year after the start of these conflicts, the S&P 500, on average, rose 12.5%.” Investors who fled to cash missed out on those supersize gains. That’s a good “case for doing nothing” again this time around.

It’s easy to stick your head in the sand if you’re an investor with a long-term horizon, said Annie Nova and Ryan Ermey in CNBC.com. But “those on the precipice of retirement” aren’t so fortunate. They may need to re-evaluate their risk to ensure they can “get through a downturn without needing to sell their stocks at a discount.” Financial experts recommend having “at least five years’ worth of portfolio spending in cash or short-term bonds” or two years “if that goal feels daunting.” Those who haven’t rebalanced their portfolio in a while may be surprised by their allocations. Due to the strong performance of the stock market in recent years, a portfolio that was 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds in 2020 “would now be more than 68% in stocks and around 31% in bonds.”

That traditional 60-40 portfolio split “no longer works” as it should, said Jamie McGeever in Reuters. Investors have long viewed Treasurys as a “hedge against geopolitical, economic, or financial market risk.” But since the pandemic, America’s ballooning debt and elevated inflation have “steadily eroded Treasurys’ status.” Stocks and bonds now “move in tandem, especially during sharp market sell-offs.” That means traditional risk playbooks and diversification methods “go out the window.” Some wealth managers are pushing investors to “explore alternative hedging and diversification strategies,” such as private-credit funds or gold, but those have also come under pressure lately.

Investors should be on the defensive, said Jason Zweig in The Wall Street Journal—against bad ideas. Wars usually bring on a blitz of “opportunistic marketing messages from the financial industry” that promise to keep your money safe by buying into “these funds, this asset, that industry, these AI-driven recommendations, this secret set of trading signals, these proprietary algorithms.” A good financial adviser, though, should talk you out of taking drastic action. A sensible strategy would be selling a few losing investments to offset taxable gains. “Making wholesale shifts in response to fears that might never materialize is not.”

OpenAI abruptly shut down its AI video generator this week only six months after its launch sent Hollywood scrambling, said Rachel Metz in Bloomberg. Sora, which could produce “realistic-looking AI videos” from
a text prompt, was packaged in a TikTok-style consumer app that let users share and comment on posts.

The ChatGPT maker and Disney “are also winding down their partnership, which had centered on Sora,” Metz said. Disney previously agreed to take a $1 billion stake in the startup and license 200 iconic characters to Sora in what some entertainment executives considered a watershed deal. In a note to staff, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company “is focusing its efforts on AI agents and a new artificial intelligence model.” The move coincides with “a push by OpenAI” to cut down expenses as it prepares to go public.

“OpenAI retrenching to focus on things like its core product and AI robotics makes sense,” said Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. AI video generation “gobbles up a vast amount of computing power”—by some estimates, a 10-second Sora video was 2,000 times more costly than an AI text output. That’s “a problem until all of OpenAI’s massive data centers are actually completed.” But after all the hype that came along with Sora when it launched in September, its fast implosion “could prove to be a moment” that suggests the AI bubble is beginning to deflate.

Oil prices jumped last night after Donald Trump said the Iran conflict was “nearing completion”. Despite the US president saying the attacks on Tehran would end in “two to three weeks” and America doesn’t “need their oil”, the markets were not soothed.

“A word – or social media post” – from Trump “used to spark big moves in prices”, said the BBC. Investors would leap on “signs” that things “could escalate or come to an end”. But now traders seem “to be growing more sceptical about the value of his comments”.

What did the commentators say?

At the outset of the conflict, oil prices were “sensitive to Trump’s comments” but his view of the war “seems to change hour by hour”, said Tom Saunders and Eir Nolsoe in The Telegraph. “His stream of often contradictory statements” have made many wonder “whether they can trust the messaging” coming from the US administration, and some traders have drawn back from the market, “leaving prices increasingly untethered from reality”.

However many solutions to the current global oil crisis Donald Trump comes up with, the oil market isn’t listening anymore – “and the price of oil keeps rising”, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. There’s simply no point in Trump “trying to talk the price of oil back down again. It just won’t work.”

His “Persian Taco” tactic “may have run its course”, said Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. “Making extreme threats” and then walking them back may “provide Trump with the illusion of agency” but he “no longer has control of events in Iran”. The markets are “figuring out” that it will probably be Tehran, not the US, that gets to decide when the conflict ends.

What’s next?

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is today chairing a virtual summit with almost three dozen nations, to explore measures to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said his government is determined to find a solution to the energy challenges, although “it will not be easy”.

And yet, “after nearly three weeks of this conflict”, the global financial system is “functioning without panic or alarming signs of stress”, said Zachary Karabell in the The Washington Post. “It’s important to distinguish between price movements” and stability. “The smooth functioning” of the financial system, “in the face” of crises like the oil shock, “gets little attention, probably because stability is not news”. But central banks, financial institutions and governments have “improved at monitoring” risks, and that should “at least provide some relief in a world full enough of fears”.

With oil and gas prices soaring and supply severely disrupted by conflict in the Middle East, households fear a corresponding spike in their energy bills and calls are coming for the government to act.

Keir Starmer today outlined government measures to “bear down on costs”. The prime minister pointed to Ofgem’s new energy price cap, which amounts to a 7% decrease in energy bills, as well as increases to minimum wages. Starmer also pointed to the £1 billion-a-year Crisis and Resilience Fund that will help vulnerable households with heating oil prices. But the best way to bring down costs for families is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Starmer stressed. That means “pushing for de-escalation in the Middle East”.

The price cap resets at the end of June – and according to forecasts, the next is set to increase by 18%. The Conservatives have called on the government to remove VAT from household energy bills for the next three years, while the Green Party said ministers should increase the tax on energy firms’ profits. Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick accused Rachel Reeves of “acting like a bystander” and not the chancellor.

What did the commentators say?

“The prime minister seems to be suffering from a dangerous degree of complacency in the face of the mounting energy crisis,” said The Independent in an editorial. While other countries’ governments implement measures to conserve energy and support families, such as Australia making some public transport free and Ireland cutting fuel duty, Starmer “has merely urged the British people to ‘act as normal’”. The government is “silent” on any plans it might have to “ameliorate prospectively crippling gas and electricity bills later in the year”.

The soaring price of fuel oil and petrol is playing out against “stagnating living standards” and a “succession of tax rises on work and employment”, more of which kick in this month.

Charities say this month’s increases to council tax, water, broadband and mobile phone tariffs are also “threatening to stretch many households to breaking point”, said the Press Association.

Businesses aren’t protected by the price cap, either. They’re set for “painful increases in their gas and electricity tariffs” as the situation in the Middle East “sends wholesale prices soaring”. Electricity costs have already increased by between 10% and 30% since the conflict began, while gas prices have soared by between 25% and 80%, according to energy analyst Cornwall Insight.

This April 1st is “no joke” for millions of families and small businesses, said the Liberal Democrats in a statement. We need an “urgent cost-of-living plan”.

But we can’t afford more state aid in the form of energy bill subsidies, said The Times. Reeves talks of “targeted” help, but with millions of pensions and welfare claimants, “that could be a very big target”.

The “ruinous spending” of lockdown “crippled this country’s finances”, which Liz Truss ignored when she proposed a universal cap to blunt the impact of the Ukraine war. Gilts “went into freefall” and Truss “was toast”. Since then, the bond market has “consigned Britain to the naughty step”.

Our national debt is at a “crippling 96%” of GDP, the servicing of which will cost £112 billion this year. Inflation and interest rates are set to keep rising, and recession is a “distinct possibility” if the war continues. The government “dare not increase the debt with another universal handout”. The bond markets “will not wear it”.

What next?

Reeves told BBC Breakfast that any support for energy bills would be based on household income, targeted at those who need it most, unlike the universal support rolled out in 2022. “I want to learn the lessons of the past because when Russia invaded Ukraine, the richest, the best-off third of households got more than a third of the support,” the chancellor said. “That makes no sense at all.”

The chancellor said it was “too early” to say who would get help, as demand for energy is at its lowest in the summer. But she “hinted help might not come” until autumn, said the broadcaster.

The Bank of England published its financial stability report today, its first since the US-Israeli war broke out. Domestically, the “economic outlook has deteriorated”, but the UK banking system “has the capacity to support households and businesses”, it said, “even if economic and financial conditions were to be substantially worse than expected”.

“It’s not easy to topple a $30 trillion economy,” said Alicia Wallace in CNN.com. But if the war in Iran keeps driving fuel prices higher, things will soon “start getting dodgy” for America. With Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz stopping the export of oil from many Gulf Arab states, and missiles and drones raining down on oil and natural gas facilities across the Middle East, the International Energy Agency warned last week that the world is facing the biggest energy crisis in history.

The U.S. is already feeling the shock waves. Oil has rocketed by roughly 30% to about $100 a barrel. Gasoline has hit a national average of $3.98 a gallon—up by a dollar since February—and is over $5 in California, Washington, and Hawaii. Understandably, some 45% of Americans say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about gas prices, according to an Associated Press poll. For a “first glimpse” of where we may be headed, “look at Asia,” said Alexandra Stevenson in The New York Times. In a region that relies on Middle Eastern energy, gas stations in Thailand and Vietnam are posting “Sold Out” signs. People in India are hoarding cooking gas. Asian airlines have canceled thousands of flights, after the price of jet fuel more than doubled—and all this after only one month of a conflict “with no clear end in sight.”

The war is also “driving the world toward a food crisis,” said Heather Stewart in The Guardian. Hormuz is a “key choke point” in the global supply of urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer that’s made using natural gas, and sulfur, “a by-product of oil and gas refining and another critical fertilizer ingredient.” Once farmers get hit by the “double whammy of higher energy bills and more costly fertilizer,” it could push some 45 million people around the planet into “acute hunger,” according to a U.N. estimate. Americans won’t starve, said Max Zahn in ABCNews.com, but they will pay more for everything “from groceries to smartphones.” A third of the world’s helium travels through the strait; that gas is essential for the production of microchips used in phones, AI servers, and almost all electronics. The chaos in the Middle East is also pushing up the cost of plastics, which are made of petrochemicals, and aluminum, because the region is home to several key smelters.

There is some “good news” for Americans, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Thanks to decades of tightened emissions standards—so detested by President Trump—our economy is “far less energy-intensive” than it used to be, with “every dollar of GDP created” requiring only half the energy it needed back in 1980. As long as the war ends soon, many economists think the U.S. can probably “scrape through this year without a recession.”

It’s already too late, said The Economist in an editorial. Even if fighting stopped today, it would take at least four months for oil facilities in the Middle East to restart production and process back-logged crude into usable fuel, and for markets and prices to regain “some semblance of normality.” And that’s a best-case scenario, said Rogé Karma in The Atlantic. If fighting escalates instead, Iran could reach for the “doomsday option” it previewed last week, when it responded to an Israeli strike on its largest natural gas field by attacking a Qatari facility that produces 20% of the world’s supply of liquified natural gas—causing natural gas prices to spike 35% in Europe. If there are more such attacks on energy infrastructure in the target-rich Middle East, our current energy crisis may become a global “economic catastrophe” that we’ll be living with for years.

Given the current uncertainty, the Bank of England’s decision to hold interest rates at 3.75% last week was “the only one possible”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “Policymakers are as clueless on the length of the war, and the cost of energy six weeks or six months from now, as stock market investors.” So why did the London bond market throw such a wobbly?

UK borrowing costs soared to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis on the day after the Bank’s meeting, with the yield on benchmark 10-year gilts surging to 5%, “deepening a three-week long rout”, said the Financial Times. Two-year gilts – the part of the market most sensitive to interest-rate moves – were also pummelled.

Britain has been hit hardest in the global bond sell-off since the outbreak of war, because our dependency on imported energy means spiking oil and gas prices “quickly feed through to broader inflation”. When combined with flatlining growth and rising household borrowing costs, the risk of recession is plain.

‘The spectre of stagnation’

Perhaps last week’s turmoil was “a weird overreaction” to the Bank’s hawkish new tone, said Katie Martin in the same paper – rather than interest rate cuts this year, we are now contemplating hikes. But “the spectre of stagnation stalks the land”. The market has stabilised, but “in aggregate, more than £100 billion has been erased from the market value of UK government bonds in a matter of weeks”, said Stuart Fieldhouse on The Armchair Trader.

“UK rate expectations have been on a remarkable journey in barely a month,” said Chris Beauchamp at IG. “A full 100 basis points rise in rates is now expected for this year.” The bad news for consumers and business is compounded by the implications for the Government of “a fiscal squeeze”. If there’s further escalation in the Middle East, “this may be just the beginning of the crisis”.

The ‘Maradona Effect’

As data on demand weakness becomes evident, the Bank of England won’t want “to compound the damage with higher interest rates”, said Karen Ward of J.P. Morgan in the Financial Times. I suspect it is deploying the “Maradona Effect”, named after the footballing legend whose greatest skill was feinting. Conveying a very hawkish signal about the outlook for rates may obviate the need to actually raise them.

The Bank “faces an acute dilemma”, said Roger Bootle in The Telegraph. As we learnt in 2022, the issue at stake is what happens to inflation after the initial, oil-induced spike. The case for higher rates is to ward off “second-round effects” and stop inflation becoming embedded. “The art of central banking lies partly in not overreacting, but also in not taking action too late.”

Valued at approximately $3 trillion, the private credit industry is showing signs of distress as investors rush to withdraw their money from their funds. Much of this shift is attributed to outside stressors like geopolitical issues and the rise of AI technology. While many are concerned about what this uncertainty means for the economy, others view it as a way for the industry to reset.

What is going on with private credit?

Private credit firms “essentially act as banks but without all the regulations that force actual banks to mitigate risk and make their balance sheets public,” said CNN. “When these ‘shadow banks’ issue loans, the terms are known only to the parties involved.” The uncertainty has led the industry into rocky waters, as it is “facing an investor exodus and heightened scrutiny of its risky practices,” said The New York Times.

Investors in private credit “often don’t know what they’re holding,” said CNN. Rather, they invest based on the market. When larger forces, including “higher interest rates, inflation, a war in the Mideast choking energy flows” and “a collective fear of AI decimating entire sectors of the global economy” increase uncertainty in the market, “people understandably start trying to reduce their risk exposure. And they start trying to get their money back.”

During the past few weeks, business development companies, which are “funds with stakes in the alternative asset,” have “been gripped by a widespread sell-off,” said the Financial Times. Two of the biggest private credit firms, Apollo Global Management and Ares, announced in response that they were “limiting the amount of money investors can withdraw from their funds to existing thresholds,” said Axios.

While this is not yet a death song for private credit, it is not a good sign for what is coming: Banks also invest in private credit, which could spell disaster. If “private credit sours, big banks that lent to the industry would lose money,” said CNN. “Those banks could be forced to tighten lending across the board, including to everyday consumers and small businesses,” a similar pattern to what happened in 2008.

What does this indicate?

Requests for withdrawals, also called redemption requests, are expected to “continue to increase in the coming quarters,” John Cocke, the deputy chief investment officer of credit at Corbin Capital Partners, said to Bloomberg. “In benign environments, there’s lots of liquidity and new subscriptions to satisfy redemptions.” However, “in times of perceived stress, inflows slow to a trickle and thus significantly more clients are asking for liquidity than providing it.”

The private credit industry has been growing significantly since the 2008 financial crisis. For years, these funds “performed better than most other debt funds, and they have been billed as relatively safe investments,” said the Times.

But investors have become concerned about whether the firms “have been valuing their loans appropriately,” especially without the strict regulations banks have, said the Times. A big reason for this is that a “large chunk of private credit loans have been made to software companies, an industry that has come under pressure from the swift rise of artificial intelligence firms.” If AI is “really as apocalyptic” as many say, then a “lot of companies could end up going out of business and defaulting on loans,” said CNN.

The withdrawal requests show that the market “cannot be sustained on the promise of higher yields alone,” said the Financial Times. This is the chance for the industry to increase its efforts to “boost transparency and data-sharing across jurisdictions to better monitor risk.” Unfortunately, while there is hope that private credit will rise from the ashes, the industry is “so interconnected with the economics of everything," Laks Ganapathi, the CEO and founder of Unicus Research, said to Axios. People must be prepared, said CNN, in case “tremors go from rattling your cupboard to swallowing your house.”

A little-known corner of the investment world is sending worrisome signals to the broader market, said Shawn Tully in Fortune. Until recently, it was “a glorious time to make money” if you happened to have parked your cash with one of the institutional investors that operates a private credit fund. These funds provide loans to companies that are too high risk to be serviced by traditional banks, and they became one of Wall Street’s “hottest investment crazes” when interest rates were high. But private credit is an opaque market, with no organized exchange and little accessible information, which can make investors jittery when the winds shift. Many of the borrowers were software and technology companies that are now under threat from artificial intelligence, and some investors are now “demanding their money back.” Shares of Blue Owl Capital, the largest publicly traded private lending firm, have fallen 50% in the past year, and it has “restricted withdrawals” and “ended its quarterly liquidity payments.”

“Is this 2008 all over again?” asked Martin Baccardax in Barron’s. When the housing market began to sour, “banks didn’t know where all the mortgage-bond risks lay,” and some prevented investors from exiting funds tied to the housing market. “There are worrying similarities today” with Blue Owl and other private lending firms. “The truth is we simply don’t know” where “the true risks in private-credit portfolios lie,” and that’s troubling. Investors may feel some global financial crisis “déjà vu,” said Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. But some perspective is warranted. The private credit industry is about $2 trillion in size, “so fairly small for the system as a whole,” reducing the risk of contagion. The wider financial system is also “better prepared for shocks,” thanks to post-2008 regulation that ensures big banks can absorb some pretty hefty losses. Nonetheless, the private capital bubble is “deflating”—perhaps “with a long hiss, not a pop.”

“Bad loans and failures are an ordinary part of a capitalist system,” said Judge Glock in City Journal, but private lending fills “a vital economic need” and should not be to blame for any wider financial meltdown. Private credit “is almost entirely devoted to lending to working companies that need money to grow,” particularly in the tech world. Investors can take their money out of these funds at any time, but the withdrawals are capped at 5% per quarter. This infuriates investors, but it makes the funds less likely to “suffer devastating runs or get forced into asset fire sales.” They are also “far less leveraged” than traditional banks that hold much more debt on their balance sheets. There are reasons to be worried about the economy. But private credit isn’t one of them.

If the price of oil continues to rise, it could trigger a “steep and stark” global recession, said Larry Fink, CEO of US financial giant BlackRock. There will be “profound implications” for the world economy if Iran “remains a threat” and oil prices hit $150 a barrel.

The BlackRock boss has a “unique insight into the health of the global economy”, said the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack, because of his investment management company’s colossal “size and spread”, controlling assets worth £11 billion across the world.

What did the commentators say?

“The Iran war is metastasising into a global economic calamity,” said the Financial Times’ editorial board. Until now, financial markets have been “lulled by the belief that the conflict would not last long” but, as hostilities enter a fourth week, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “lasting damage” has been inflicted on critical energy infrastructure in the region, and “the worst-case scenarios for investors and policymakers are coming into view”.

If this crisis continues, “no country will be immune to the effects”, said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency on Monday. The global economy faces a “major, major threat” as the Iran war has a worse impact on energy prices than the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Prepare for the price of oil to reach $200 a barrel,” said Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesman for Iranian militias last week. And what seemed then “like bravado” is now “closer to becoming reality”, said Jesus Servulo Gonzales in El Pais. Were prices to rise above $150, let alone near $200, there would be “an inflationary crisis”: “the world would become poorer, and economic activity would grind to a halt until the situation recovered”.

The current oil-price “ructions” would have “to get much worse” to trigger a global recession but “less happily, they will almost certainly further stoke popular anger over the cost of living”, said The Economist. The price of Brent Crude is currently around $100 a barrel (it was $60 at the start of the year); two months at $140 “would push parts of the global economy” into a slump. Consumer confidence is already “close to an all-time low in America and scarcely higher elsewhere”, given many countries “seemed primed” for an economic downturn “even before the Middle Eastern chaos began”.

In the US, “many economists believe” the country “will scrape through this year without a recession”, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. “But this is simply guesswork.” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has said the surge in oil prices is “an energy shock” that has created so much uncertainty, “we just don’t know” what will happen.

What next?

We urgently need to get the Strait of Hormuz opened, oil market expert Rory Johnston told The New Statesman. It’s “too important” to the global economy to remain closed. The most likely path “is that the Trump administration and Israel pull back on their attacks in Iran, and Iran says, OK, we’ll re-allow” tankers down the waterway. But even if the strait “reopened to 100% of its prior flow” today, it would take two to three months “to renormalise the global system”.

Under the “doomsday scenario”, in which the strait stays closed indefinitely, “we’re not talking recession; we are talking depression”.

While the stock market continues to pad the bottom lines of many of the world's richest people, 2026 has been a challenging year for the Gulf royal families who hold three spots in our ranking of the world's ten richest families. These clans spent years building close relationships with President Donald Trump, including controversial business partnerships like a sprawling, Trump-branded luxury hotel and resort in Oman, a $1 billion skyscraper development in Dubai and multiple projects including a golf course in Saudi Arabia. With these deals, the ruling families of the small, militarily weak Gulf monarchies hoped to tie their countries so close to the president himself that he would feel obliged to consider their security and economic interests in American regional policy.

Yet the potentates and princes who courted Trump and lavished his business empire with new investments were not consulted before he launched a massive campaign of airstrikes against Iran on February 28, 2026. Despite hopes for a swift decapitation of the Iranian clerical regime, the war has dragged on for months, with Iran succeeding in halting almost all shipping traffic transiting a vital economic chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz. That blockade, which was later joined by an American naval blockade of ships leaving Iranian ports, has ground the economy of the Persian Gulf to a halt and done untold billions of dollars in damage to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

While it is impossible to estimate the impact of the war on the net worth of these ruling families, there is no question that this list may see significant movement and change if their economic positions continue to slide. The Iran conflict has also been disastrous for the Ambani family of India, given the importance of their petrochemical interests, which have been drastically impacted by the spike in energy prices worldwide. As for the rest of the world's wealthiest families, they are likely benefitting from the resilience of the stock market, which dipped in the early stages of the conflict but has mostly shrugged off warnings from economists about potential damage to the global economy stemming from the extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Today, indices like the Dow Jones Industrial Average sit at or near their all-time highs, as the AI-driven economic expansion continues in spite of headwinds from the war.

Our list only looks at families where the wealth is already intergenerational; this means that we exclude, for example, the family of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, given that his phenomenal riches have yet to be passed down to heirs. The economic boom driven by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that began in the late 20th century created an entirely new class of moneyed elites, most of whom did not start out in life with anything like the riches they have now. Many of them, like Oracle founder Larry Ellison, are also still alive. As a consequence, this list is likely to evolve when individuals from the current cohort of elderly billionaires, like investor Warren Buffet, pass away and distribute their fortunes to their children and extended families.

The Walton family ($521 billion)

Sam Walton opened his first discount variety store in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1962 and turned it into a retail empire "by buying up low-cost goods and selling them at lower prices than his competitors," said Fox Business. Today, Walmart operates more than 10,500 stores in 19 countries, and Walton's heirs are worth $513.4 billion. There are now three Waltons — Jim, Rob and Alice — who are worth more than $100 billion each, and their largesse "largely stems from the Walmart shares given to them by their father," said Business Insider. One of the family's heiresses, Christy Walton, made waves when she "promoted a planned nationwide protest against President Trump by placing a full-page advertisement that ran in the New York Times" in June 2025, bucking a trend of the country's wealthiest elites seeking to curry favor with the president.

The al-Nahyan family ($335.9 billion)

The discovery of oil in the 1960s set off a "breathtaking transformation" of the United Arab Emirates from a society of subsistence "date farmers, camel herders and pearl fishermen" to one of the richest countries in the world, said The New York Times. The al-Nahyan family is the hereditary monarchy of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which has increased its natural resource wealth with its pioneering sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA). Among many other endeavors, the ADIA purchased a stake in the city of Chicago's parking meters in 2008, and now the "revenue from these meters has reportedly reached over $150 million annually — all flowing to the investor group led in part by ADIA," said Driven Magazine. Adding to the good times is the fact that the United Arab Emirates "has become a hub for the Trump Organization's international expansion," said Forbes, and in 2025 alone the president and his family "entered into at least nine agreements with ties to the gulf nation — some involving government entities in the country, many stemming from business relationships developed there."

The Emirates, and the al-Nahyan family, have much at stake following the descent of the Persian Gulf into war in February 2026, having turned the country into a commercial, banking and aviation hub. In particular, attacks are undermining the country's position in the global economy and threatening its long-term growth, even if total revenue losses from exports have been modest. "Businesses linked to travel and hospitality in Dubai are reporting sharp declines in bookings, alongside cancellations and reduced footfall," said the BBC, threatening jobs and economic stability.

The Al-Saud family ($213.6 billion)

Perhaps the only family in the world with a country named after them, the Al-Saud dynasty completed their conquest of the Hejaz (now Saudi Arabia) in the 1920s. While this wasn't clear then, over the years Saudi Arabia would come to control "about 20-25% of all the world's oil reserves while producing about 10-15% of the world's daily oil consumption," said Epicenter. Because the "family contains as many as 15,000 extended members," it is challenging to "accurately assess the wealth of the House of Saud," said Investopedia. The Saudis also threw themselves into the movie business in 2025, and the country's "sovereign wealth fund now backs some of Hollywood's biggest deals, including a $24-billion financing package for Paramount's $78-billion Warner bid," said The Los Angeles Times.

Saudi Arabia, like many Gulf countries allied with the United States, has been subject to retaliatory attacks following President Trump's decision to launch a regime decapitation strike against Iran in 2026. Yet unlike some other countries in the Gulf, the country's total revenues are up since the war began, partly because leaders "invested years ago in oil pipelines that go around the strait, an expensive form of insurance that is paying off," said The New York Times.

The al-Thani family ($199.5 billion)

Another family of Gulf royalty has turned natural resource wealth into a multifaceted and growing portfolio. "No ruling dynasty in the Arab Gulf has played a seemingly weak hand with more skill" than the al-Thani family, said Manara Magazine. The country's diplomatic and investment strategies are all about "building Qatar into an international brand that can underpin its existence and the family's longevity," said Bloomberg. Former Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani is a superyacht enthusiast who owns the Katara, a "$400 million mega yacht" that "comfortably accommodates up to 34 guests in 14 cabins serviced by 95 crew members," said the South China Morning Post. The family is so flush that Qatar "gave America a $200 million jet that could eventually be used as Air Force One" in May 2025, said Politico.

Iran has also targeted Qatar for retaliation following the Iran war outbreak, and severely damaged a major Liquid Natural Gas facility on March 18, 2026, with uncertain consequences for the country's economic future. Consequently, "about 17% of Qatar's LNG export capacity was knocked out by Iranian strikes, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue," said Forbes, suggesting that the family fortune could now be considerably lower than $199.5 billion.

The Hermès family ($184.5 billion)

Thierry Hermès was the "sixth child of an innkeeper," said Vanity Fair, who "went to Paris an orphan, proved gifted in leatherwork and opened a shop in 1837." He and his descendants built a luxury fashion empire that has survived world wars, multiple French regime changes, and an era of globalization that has led to dizzying change and competition. The luxury brand's business model is the polar opposite of Walmart, which presumably would not have much luck selling scarves that cost $4,125 each. Sales remained strong in 2025 despite a price hike in the U.S. "aimed at passing on the burden of tariffs to its clients," said Reuters. While Hermes stock tumbled along with many other continental luxury brands when President Trump issued a threat of new tariffs against eight countries in the European Union in January 2026, they recovered when the president appeared to walk back his stance a few days later. You likely won't see beneficiaries of this vast fortune listed among the world's very richest people, though, given that the family's wealth is spread over more than 100 heirs.

The Koch family ($149.5 billion)

The Kochs began their ascent to the top of the global wealth hierarchy when Fred Koch "used his training in chemical engineering to develop an improved method of turning oil into petrol" and built oil refineries in Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, said the BBC. His son Charles was "groomed as Koch's successor, becoming president of the family business after his father died in the 1960s" and diversified the family's interests into "energy, chemicals, agriculture, finance and electronics, producing everything from toilet paper to steak." The Kochs spent more than $49 million in the 2024 election cycle, donating almost exclusively to Republicans and sending $40 million alone to the right-wing SuperPAC Americans for Prosperity Action. The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a conservative group funded in part by Koch family money, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in April 2025 contesting the legality of the president's new tariff regime. When those tariffs were overturned in a landmark February 2026 Supreme Court decision, the NCLA indicated it was looking into challenging the legal basis of the Trump administration’s next round of tariffs.

The Mars family ($148.2 billion)

You may never have heard of the Mars family, but you've almost certainly eaten its candy. The family's company, Mars Inc., based today in Virginia near the CIA's headquarters, "was founded in 1911 when Frank Mars started selling candy out of his kitchen in Tacoma, Washington," said Forbes. The family's vast confectionery empire includes Halloween staples like Snickers and M&Ms and operates 135 factories in 68 countries, employing more than 140,000 people. These bonbon barons do not enjoy the limelight and are known as a "reclusive dynasty of billionaires who spend a good deal of time on a remote ranch in Wyoming," said The Guardian. Amid the global upheaval over tariffs, the Mars empire was well-positioned to benefit from the Trump administration's changing, given that the company claims to "make 94% of its U.S. products locally," said Yahoo Finance. Still, the price of the company's Halloween-themed candy variety packs rose 12% in 2025, meaning that "working families will keep getting spooked at the checkout line," said The Century Foundation. The Mars family, however, will be just fine.

The Bettencourt Meyers Family ($92.1 billion)

Françoise Bettencourt Meyers is considered the wealthiest woman in the world and is the heiress to the fortune first amassed by the founder of cosmetics empire L'Oréal, Eugène Schueller. She plays a "pivotal role in preserving the family fortune" through her role as a L'Oréal board member and "serves as the chairwoman of the family's lucrative holding company, Téthys Invest," said Yahoo Finance. In recent years, L'Oréal has consolidated its control over the global cosmetics industry by acquiring competitors like the Australian luxury brand Aesop, hair care company Color Wow and cologne brand House of Creed, among many others. Bettencourt Meyers is "known to play the piano for several hours a day and has written two books — a five-volume study of the Bible and a genealogy of the Greek gods," said the BBC. She has two sons with her husband Jean-Pierre Meyers, Jean-Victor and Nicolas, and rarely engages with the press. In 2025, Jean-Victor Meyers succeeded his mother as vice chairman of the L'Oréal board of directors.

The Ambani family ($89.2 billion)

The Ambanis are the richest family in Asia, and their empire, which includes oil and gas, telecommunications and retail businesses, has a "valuation that is equivalent to 10% of India's Gross Domestic Product," said The Independent. It all started in 1958, when Dhirubhai Ambani launched a company based in Gujarat, India, that "began as a small firm trading commodities like spices and polyester yarn" and gradually expanded to make Reliance Industries a "global powerhouse," said People. Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani's wealth has taken a major hit in 2026, in large part from the conflict in Iran.

"Oil prices have been extremely volatile, moving with each of Trump's frequent statements on the war, making it difficult even for Asia's now second-richest man to stay ahead of the turbulence," said the Financial Times. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the Ambani family's wealth has declined by $18.5 billion this year alone.

The Wertheimer family ($74.6 billion)

In 1925, "Pierre Wertheimer, and his brother Paul struck a deal with Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel" to create "Société des Parfums Chanel with the aim of selling and producing Chanel beauty products," said Business Insider. That history means that the Wertheimer family's "destiny has been intertwined with the world's second-largest luxury brand for a century," said Women's Wear Daily. The Wertheimers are oenophiles in an era of declining wine-drinking and have acquired a large luxury wine empire, including Domaine de l'Ile on the island of Porquerolles in Provence, as well as three estates in Bordeaux and St. Supéry Estate Vineyards and Winery in California's Napa Valley, said Wine Spectator.

Industry sources speculate that current Chanel owners Alain and Gérard Wertheimer are preparing to hand the reins to their 39-year-old nephew Arthur Heilbronn, who has "taken on management positions overseeing his and his relatives' real estate, banking and media investments" in recent years, said Business Standard. If so, that would be "another quiet move in a succession symphony that's decades in the making," said Yahoo Finance.

‘So you want to be a millionaire? Don’t wait until you’re 20.’

Emil Barr at The Wall Street Journal

If you’re a “20-something and plan to get a few years of experience before taking a real swing at entrepreneurship, you’re already late,” says Emil Barr. The “best age to become an entrepreneur is between 18 and 21.” Venture capitalists “often see young blockchain and artificial-intelligence developers as more competent than those in their 50s” and “those are great industries in which to build a business.” In “fast-moving environments, native fluency can outperform seniority. But that window doesn’t stay open indefinitely.”

Read more

‘The NFL ought to throw a flag on the Pentagon. Here’s why it probably won’t.’

Kevin B. Blackistone at MS NOW

Given its “history of promoting the U.S. military, we shouldn’t be surprised that the NFL has not publicly demanded that the Trump administration cease its callous use of game footage to promote its war against Iran,” says Kevin B. Blackistone. The NFL’s “silence is disingenuous at best or hypocritical at worst given the disclaimer we hear at the end of its games: ‘Any rebroadcast or other use of this telecast without the express written consent of the NFL is prohibited.’”

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‘US promised safety. A nearly blind refugee died cold and alone.’

Khin Mai Aung at USA Today

Rohingya refugee Nurul Amin Shah Alam “represents yet another profound systemic failure in our nation’s treatment of immigrants and refugees,” says Khin Mai Aung. Shah Alam “was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and then dropped off in the middle of the night outside a closed local cafe in February,” and “later found dead.” It “has been a painful road to realize that our country of adoption may not ultimately be safer or more inclusive than our countries of origin.”

Read more

‘Ivy Leaguers are getting their “MRS” degrees’

Grey Battle at Slate

Ivy Leaguers “have classmates who came back from summer vacation married. This is “different from the story usually told about the Ivy League,” says Grey Battle. These students are “chasing marriage with the same intensity they would approach any status symbol — high school book awards, college likely letters, six-figure jobs after graduation.” Universities “will always have students who are engaged, married or parenting, but their numbers are on the rise.” Some are “directly pushing young straight people to marry.”

Read more

Just as it was starting to look like the housing market had turned a corner, the conflict in Iran is “chilling the spring home-buying season,” said Andrew Keshner in MarketWatch. When the average 30-year fixed rate finally dipped below 6% in late February for the first time since September 2022, economists began projecting that the housing market “could be busy after years of sluggish home sales.” That optimism, however, was short-lived. Mortgage rates—which are set by lenders based on “the yield on the 10-year Treasury note”— skipped back above the 6% threshold shortly after the U.S. bombed Iran, ending a downward trend. Now there’s also uncertainty about the lasting impact of the war, which could affect “the willingness of would-be buyers to make a major financial decision.”

That’s a big loss, said Rukmini Callimachi in The New York Times, because the market was finally “tilting back toward buyers.” For years, buyers were the ones courting reluctant sellers “like star-crossed lovers in a Hollywood rom-com”—making offers above asking price, even waiving inspections. Eventually, many buyers simply gave up, and now there are “47% more sellers than buyers” nationwide, the largest such gap since Redfin began collecting data in 2013. This supply/demand imbalance could begin to help lower prices. The median U.S. home price is still at a record $405,000, said Julie Z. Weil in The Washington Post. That “has prompted cities, states, and nonprofits to expand eligibility” for some down-payment assistance programs to include even middle-income households. San Francisco, for instance, now offers interest-free loans of up to $500,000 to first-time homebuyers making up to $218,200 annually.

At 6%, mortgage rates are still out of reach for many people, said Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association “show that Americans are applying for fewer mortgages than they have at any point in the past quarter century.” This is a troubling trend. Homeownership is the best path to the “long-term financial security of the American middle class” and has been “a cornerstone of wealth building.” If young and working-class people aren’t “getting on the property ladder anymore,” they will end up “poorer in retirement than their parents.” Not being able to afford a home is a “broader problem for society,” said economists Younggeun Yoo and Seung Hyeong Lee in Bloomberg Businessweek. As the dream of home- ownership fades for young renters, research shows that they “systematically shift their behavior.” They decide to live closer to their means, work less hard, and choose riskier investments, such as cryptocurrencies. “Perhaps these renters are hoping to gamble their way back into the housing market,” but “giving up” on a house “can lead to enormous gaps in lifetime wealth.”

British businesses are to be offered a £3,000 state bonus for hiring a young person who has been out of work for six months as the number of economically inactive young people nears one million.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said it was part of the government’s plans to “back Britain’s young people” after youth unemployment hit its highest level in more than a decade.

How bad is it?

According to the Office for National Statistics’ latest labour market overview, 14% of Britons aged 18 to 24 were unemployed in the final quarter of 2025, compared with 12.7% in the same period in 2024.

This growth has largely been driven by young people who are “economically inactive”, meaning those who are out of work and not seeking it. The most recent data from the ONS says the number of young people not in employment, education or training (Neet) between October and December 2025 reached 957,000, up from around 800,000 in 2019.

Why is it so hard to find work?

For many of those not in employment or training, “the challenge is not so much a lack of skills or visibility as the dearth of openings in a stagnating labour market”, said the Financial Times. “Young people say they lack work experience and something to talk about to employers,” said Sareena Bains, chief executive of charity Movement to Work. “Those opportunities are becoming few and far between.”

The tough labour landscape has been made worse by the roll-out of AI, which threatens to erase many entry-level jobs.

Business groups have also criticised the government’s decision to raise employer’s national insurance contributions and the youth minimum wage, as well as changes to workers’ rights, all of which could make companies less inclined to take a risk on a newcomer to the workforce over an experienced worker. In February, Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, told the Commons Treasury Committee that changes around tax and the national living wage have had a “particular effect on those aged 16 to 18, and 18 to 21”.

Having analysed the effects of setting minimum wage rates by age, Alan Manning from LSE concluded that the evidence is “too weak” to blame youth unemployment on the minimum wage.

What else is to blame?

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has identified a “toxic cocktail” of “rising employment taxes, perverse incentives to claim benefits and a broken migration system”. The think tank’s Wasted Youth report found that businesses are turning to non-EU migrants while a growing number of young Britons are claiming benefits.

Health is another major factor. The share of Neet young people who report having a health condition that limits their ability to work rose from 26% in 2015 to 44% in 2025 – a 70% increase, according to The Health Foundation. This “mirrors trends among young people generally”, said the think tank. “Regardless of whether they are in work or education, 16–24-year-olds today are much more likely to report having a work-limiting health condition than they were in the past”. This increase is “driven primarily by mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions”.

What is being done?

As well as the £3,000 incentive for firms to hire young people out of work for six months, the government has also announced small and medium-sized businesses will get a £2,000 bonus if they take on a young apprentice, and jobs with training subsidised by the state are to be expanded to 22- to 24-year-olds.

Current policies to help Neet young people and expand apprenticeships were “not stacking up to the scale of the challenge”, Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning & Work Institute, told the FT.

A more radical proposal, backed by former home secretary David Blunkett and former chancellor Jeremy Hunt, is a Future Workforce Credit, a £670 million effective tax cut for employers hiring Neets that would cover 30% of their salary. CSJ modelling based on similar interventions suggests the approach would get 120,000 young people into jobs while saving £765 million in tax and welfare spending.

With everything from housing and groceries to gasoline and home and car insurance becoming increasingly expensive, both red and blue states are trying to find ways to address Americans’ hardships. State officials and policy think tanks are offering income and property tax rebates, raising wages and enacting structural reform, with varying success.

California

The biggest problem in the Golden State is housing affordability, and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is urging the state government to find an answer. Newsom has told “lawmakers they should pass a law to stop institutional investors from buying homes in bulk,” said The Associated Press, which also noted that California has about 40,000 affordable homes ready for construction.

But the state’s pro-housing laws “do a whole lot more than just make it easier to build housing: [they] preserve local autonomy, pay high construction wages, guarantee that new units are accessible to low-income renters,” said The Atlantic. In an effort to “accomplish every objective and accommodate every interest, all at once, California set up its housing agenda to fail.”

Florida

Polls show that affordability is top of the mind for Floridians, but “you wouldn’t necessarily know it if you were in the state’s Capitol,” said the Miami Herald. Efforts from lawmakers to “drive down insurance and utility rates failed,” and they have not “agreed on a way to lower property taxes.”

These property tax cuts nonetheless remain a top issue for Floridians, with a potential $18 billion in cuts on the line. If lawmakers do come to a deal on slashing taxes, it “would have to be approved by voters in November by a 60% margin,” said WFLX-TV Palm Beach.

Georgia

Unlike Florida, the Peach State has been able to get one-time income and property tax rebates passed through its legislature. Georgia lawmakers also followed that up by introducing “four more affordability measures, this time aimed at insurance costs,” said The Augusta Chronicle.

The legislation addresses the rising price of car insurance and “aims to curb excessive insurance industry billing and profits, increase what's covered and punish drivers for inadequate insurance,” said the Chronicle. Another proposed state bill would “restore regular cost-of-living adjustments for Georgia state retirees,” said WALB-TV Georgia.

Illinois

Beyond working on balancing the state’s budget, lawmakers in the Capitol are focused on passing “legislation that brings down costs for households, that brings good jobs, grows wages and opportunities,” Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch (D) said to The State Journal-Register. Legislators are also “pushing for ‘real structural reform’ surrounding affordability” following a report that grocery costs in Illinois rose by $1,781 last year.

Child care costs have been especially vexing for Americans, and one notable proposition would “create back-to-school sales tax holiday periods to lower the cost of living for Illinoisans, especially those supporting children,” WIFR-TV Rockford said. If the bill passes, it would also “require retailers to clearly label sales tax holiday items.”

New York

New York — and New York City, in particular — is known for having one of the country’s highest costs of living, and legislators have worked on raising wages to battle this. At the beginning of 2026, New York raised its state minimum wage to “$17 downstate and $16 upstate,” said Fox 5 New York. And starting in 2027, the minimum wage “will adjust annually based on the Consumer Price Index.”

Even higher wage hikes are being pushed in the Big Apple. A recent proposal in New York City means “minimum wage could climb to $30 per hour in the coming years,” said CBS News. This would be a significant rise from the current $17 minimum wage in the city and would see the $30 mark reached by 2030.