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

‘Undiplomatic’ bargaining

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

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

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

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

‘United against Donald Trump’

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

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

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

What is happening in Florida?

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

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

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

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

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

Who is feeling the impact?

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

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

What has changed?

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

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

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

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

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

Can it last?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booming demand

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

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

‘Tough’ questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Cry for help’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Set expectations’ before you go

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Highly sticky consumer base’

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

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

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

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

Fans ‘pay through the nose’

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

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

What next?

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

Is the gap narrowing?

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

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

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

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

‘Slightly softer prongs’

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

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

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

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

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

Other airlines ‘in the crosshairs’

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

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

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

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

‘Blow the budget-airline market wide open’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Kennedy at The Hill

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

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

A.D. Carson at The Guardian

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

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‘How science fiction hijacked our political imagination’

David Albertson and Jason Blakely at The Boston Globe

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

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‘America’s manufacturing future starts with industrial hemp’

David M. Klein at Newsweek

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

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

‘Supporting the path forward’

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

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

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

‘A talent exodus’

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

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

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

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

‘Learning to play the ball’

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

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

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

A ‘less transparent Fed’

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

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

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

‘Expensive, onerous process’

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

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

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

‘Existential threat’

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

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

‘Retaliate against retailers’

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

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

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

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

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

What next?

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restaurants

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

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

Groceries

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

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

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

Alcohol

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

Retail

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

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

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

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

Airlines

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

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

Workforce

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

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

What next?

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

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

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

No shelter

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

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

Challenge for Burnham

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

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

Gendered habit

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

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

Harder job

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

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

Need for courage

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

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

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

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

No longer ‘no-frills’

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

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

Destination ‘largely the same’

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

What is Germany doing?

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

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

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

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

What are sickness policies like elsewhere?

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

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

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

How many sick days do people take?

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

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

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

1873 by Liaquat Ahamed

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

Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald

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

Suing the Kremlin by Martin Sixsmith

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

Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs by Lloyd Blankfein

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

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

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

Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

Chip-wreck

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

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

Long, hot summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good? Or lucky?

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

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

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

Lessons for Kevin Warsh

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

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

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

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

‘A little bit of autonomy’

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

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

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

‘It’s good to take breaks’

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

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

‘Tremendous amount of discipline’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eye-popping valuation

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

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

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

A move to Mars?

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding ‘could take years’

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

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

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

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

Volatility ‘already baked in’

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

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

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

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

Defying ‘fascists’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Establishing trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

What next?

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

What happened

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

Who said what

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

What next?

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

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

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

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

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

What happeed

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

Who said what

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

What next?

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

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

Why are aircraft engines becoming more expensive?

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

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

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

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

How are airlines reacting?

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

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

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

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

‘Confluence’ of issues

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

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

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

Too ‘temperamental’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is the cattle shortage affecting the beef market?

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

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

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

What does the future hold?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did the commentators say?

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

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

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

What next?

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

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