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The federal workers union representing TSA officers has chided the Trump Administration’s decision to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into airports, arguing the agents are not qualified to handle airport security.

“ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Sunday. “TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats specifically designed to evade detection at checkpoints—skills that require specialized instruction, hands-on practice, and ongoing recertification. 

“You cannot improvise that. Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap,” he added. “It creates one.”

Instead of solving the problem of the 50,000-plus TSA employees who “have worked without pay for over five weeks,” Kelley said, “Washington’s answer isn’t to pay them. It’s to send ICE agents to do their jobs.”

The American Federation of Government Employees is the only union representing TSA officers.

President Donald Trump on Sunday announced on social media plans to order federal immigration officers to oversee airport security on Monday amid an ongoing partial government shutdown. The shutdown, entering its 43rd day, ceased funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as Democrats demanded reform policies after ICE officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

Trump told reporters on Monday that ICE agents would also be able to conduct immigration checks and make arrests, though it was not the primary reason for their placement.

“They’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the ​country. That’s ⁠very fertile territory. But that’s not why they’re there. They’re really there to help,” he said.

TSA receives its funding from DHS, meaning its more than 50,000 frontline officers are not getting paid but are required to work as they are deemed “essential employees.” More than 400 TSA employees have quit and thousands more have called out of work, according to DHS. 

Kelley asserted ICE agents should still not replace absent TSA employees, who “deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be,” he said.

After an initial training period, TSA transportation security officers are put through an additional two-to-three week training program, according to job postings.

One whistleblower previously raised concerns about training for ICE deportation agents being cut, saying in a Congressional testimony that instruction for incoming agents was slashed in an effort to increase recruitment to increase arrests. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that ICE removed about 240 hours of basic training from its program, equivalent to about 40% of instructional time, according to government records.

White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview with CNN that immigration officers could cover exits typically monitored by TSA agents to allow them to better staff screening lines, as well as check identification for passengers entering screening lines. According to Homan, ICE agents will likely not oversee X-ray machines because of lack of training. “ICE agents are assigned at many airports across the country already,” Homan said. “They do a lot of investigation, criminal investigation on smuggling at airports.”

DHS acting assistant secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement to Fortune that the department would not disclose where ICE agents were deployed for security reasons. 

Ongoing travel disruptions

TSA officers’ call-out rates reached their highest level of the shutdown on Sunday, with 11.76% of workers, or more than 3,450 employees, not showing up to work, DHS data showed. That included about 40% of TSA officers from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, according to DHS data.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian lambasted the federal government over the shutdown, saying in an interview with CNBC last week that politicians should “do their job” to ensure TSA officers are paid during the shutdown. 

“It’s inexcusable that our security agents, our frontline agents, that are essential to what we do, are not being paid, and it’s ridiculous to see them being used as political chips,” he said.

Bastian joined a host of airline CEOs asking Congress—which is now heading into a two-week recess without a deal in sight—to resume DHS funding. In an open letter, the executives from Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airways, among others, suggested air travel has become political collateral during shutdown, and that providing compensation for TSA employees was particularly prudent ahead of a busy spring travel season that would be punctuated by both the FIFA World Cup and the U.S.’s 250th anniversary.

Short-staffed airports have shut down checkpoints, leaving passengers to endure three-hour or even longer wait times in security lines. The shortages have also contributed to thousands of flight delays and cancellations.

These disturbances have only mounted pressure on airports and airlines also contending with threats of increased fuel prices and cancelled flights as a result of the war in Iran, as well as safety concerns. LaGuardia Airport in New York is closed following a deadly collision of an Air Canada jet into a fire truck on Sunday night, killing a pilot and copilot and injuring dozens of passengers. Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey temporarily shut down operations on Monday as a result of a burning smell in an elevator, forcing air traffic controllers to evacuate a tower.

Meanwhile, TSA agents working without pay are experiencing eviction notices, vehicle repossessions, and trouble buying groceries, union and federal officials warned. A 2024 Government Accountability Office report found TSA officers have struggled with some of the lowest morale levels in the federal government, with employees citing poor management, work-life balance, and pay as reasons for their frustrations. The starting salary for TSA agents is about $34,500, with the average annual pay between $46,000 and $55,000.

“I’ve heard from officers who cannot afford copayments for cancer treatments or office visits for their sick children,” Aaron Barker, a local TSA union leader based in Atlanta, told reporters earlier this week.

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Strategy, the world’s largest holder of Bitcoin, bought more than 1,000 of the original cryptocurrency last week, worth more than $76 million. The purchase follows one from the week prior worth $1.6 billion, which the company funded primarily through its “Stretch” perpetual preferred shares. 

One analyst says that the company will get back to buying more Bitcoin and do so through its sale of these “Stretch” perpetual preferred shares, known as STRC. 

“While the cadence and size of Strategy’s Bitcoin purchases will likely remain uneven on a week-to-week basis, reflecting market conditions and opportunistic timing, we fully expect the company to aggressively lean into its Bitcoin acquisition strategy as demand for its STRC perpetual preferred stock increases,” said Mark Palmer, senior equity research analyst at The Benchmark Company. 

Strategy, run by executive chairman Michael Saylor, is a digital asset treasury—a company whose sole purpose is to acquire and hold on to vast amounts of Bitcoin. It can make these purchases through sales of its “Stretch” perpetual preferred shares, a security that offers investors an 11% annual yield.

Its common shares, the sale of which can also fund the company’s purchase of Bitcoin, are often tied to the currency’s performance. Strategy’s shares have increased about 10% in the last month, and Bitcoin is up about 9% during that time to its current price of roughly $70,000, according to Binance. Cryptocurrencies have shown growth and resilience since the beginning of the war in Iran, while traditional stock indexes like the S&P 500 have struggled. 

Palmer, the analyst at The Benchmark Company, expects Strategy to continue to pivot back to its sales of “Stretch”, “We expect STRC to become established as Strategy’s primary vehicle for fueling its Bitcoin purchases going forward.”

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As Gen Z college graduates struggle to jumpstart their careers, skepticism about the value of higher education is reaching new heights. 

But at one private university in suburban North Carolina, graduates are defying that trend. At High Point University, 99.2% of the class of 2024 were employed or pursuing further education within six months of graduation—14 points above the national average.

The secret, according to the school, isn’t exclusively leaning on traditional academic offerings to prepare students for the real world. Instead, High Point brands itself as the nation’s “premier life skills university.” 

“It’s clear that students and parents expect maximum return on investment from a college education,” a High Point University spokesperson told Fortune. “It’s also clear that employers need graduates who have not only technical skills but also life skills that outlast technical skills, which are constantly changing.”

In practice, that means required courses like Life Skills 101, which University President Nido Qubein teaches himself on confidence, communication, and personal branding. It also means bringing in top business minds, such as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who serves as the school’s “innovator in residence,” to mentor students directly.

While similar programs elsewhere are often limited to students in their last year of school or even just business majors, High Point has made career readiness and soft skills the core of its entire curriculum.

The school also caught the country’s attention this year by making it to the NCAA College Basketball Tournament as a No. 12 seed and upsetting No. 5 Wisconsin. The High Point Panthers then lost to Arkansas on March 22.

What skills are Gen Z graduates missing—and how does HPU fix it?

Throughout students’ time at High Point, the school emphasizes teaching what they say “employers want in new hires,” including motivation, emotional intelligence, coachability, technical competence, temperament, and work ethic—traits that are increasingly rare to find among young professionals. 

According to a report from tech education company General Assembly, fewer than half of all workers, and just 12% of mid-level executives, are confident that entry-level workers are adequately prepared for the workforce.

It’s a concern echoed by many business leaders. Jon Gray, president and COO of asset firm Blackstone, told employees in 2025:

“Most of you went to elite universities. You did really well, you were in the top of your class. You are people who are successful by nature and hardworking,” Gray said in a video posted to his LinkedIn account. “But when I look around at the people who truly succeeded at Blackstone, it’s not the ‘good enough’ crowd, right? It’s the people who are like, hey, ‘I’m gonna make sure I get this absolutely right.’”

Even tech leaders have weighed in. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has questioned whether college is living up to its promise.

“It would be one thing if [college] was just kind of like a social experience, but you started off neutral. The fact that it’s not preparing you for the jobs that you need and you’re kind of starting off in this big [financial] hole then I think that’s not good,” Zuckerberg said on This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von.

For High Point, these critiques have represented opportunity. The school’s pitch is simple: “HPU is about more than degrees; it’s about life skills. Our students learn practical wisdom and career skills that prepare them for success in any field.”

These lessons are reinforced through lectures and seminars on topics such as how to land a job, how to pitch yourself, and how to thrive in the workplace, giving students tangible tools to turn their education into real-world success.

Why Wall Street parents choose High Point University

Nestled in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina, High Point faces the challenge of being down the road from other top universities in the Tar Heel state—something that only exacerbates the pressure to attract students—and stay afloat financially. Since March 2020, over 80 public or nonprofit colleges have announced closures or mergers, according to Best Colleges.

During Qubein’s now 20 years at the helm of the university, High Point’s student population has tripled. Last fall, High Point welcomed its largest class of first-year students as well as its largest total enrollment growth in history—topping at 6,550 students.

Part of High Point’s growth strategy has been to attract wealthier students and their families.

“Half of Wall Street sends their kids to this school,” Qubein told The Wall Street Journal in 2025.

Many elite universities—including Harvard and MIT—have also expanded financial aid for lower-income families, banking that wealthier students paying full price will help balance the books. High Point, for its part, offers an average student aid package of about $23,000. Its total annual cost of attendance is just over $71,000.

For that price, students can take advantage of free car inspections before holiday breaks, a campus steakhouse, six outdoor heated pools—each with its own hot tub—and even a mock airplane cabin, designed to help students practice networking for chance encounters at 30,000 feet.

Still, Qubein rejects the idea that these are luxuries—but rather what’s needed to get young people ready for the real world.

“As far as I’m concerned, we have no amenities,” Qubein added to the WSJ. “We are not in the business of pampering students. We are in the business of preparing our students.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on November 7, 2025.

More on education:

• Meet the billionaires bankrolling March Madness Sweet 16 schools—from the Dallas Cowboys owner to Carlyle Group’s founder
• Liberal arts degrees have long paid the worst salaries—but Microsoft chief scientist says in the age of AI, they will be ‘really important’ for Gen Z
• Former Goldman Sachs CEO got into Harvard University at just 16 from public housing in Brooklyn—and says higher education is still the best way of breaking into the middle class

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Prediction market Kalshi loves a publicity stunt. In February, the company handed out free groceries to hundreds of New Yorkers. Now, it’s taking a page from Warren Buffett’s playbook and offering a $1 billion prize to any user who has the perfect March Madness bracket. 

In 2014, he offered $1 billion to any Berkshire Hathaway (or subsidiary) employee who picked the winner of all 63 games correctly. Nobody won, and the company has since modified its payouts multiple times because a perfect bracket is harder than you might think. 

Taking teams’ stats, history, and general basketball knowledge into account, the NCAA estimates that the chances of perfection are 1 in 120.2 billion. The longest verified streak came from an Ohio man who correctly guessed 49 consecutive games in 2019. 

Kalshi admits that it knows “the odds aren’t in your favor.” In the unlikely chance of a payout, the winner would receive $100 million each year for 10 years, according to the contest rules. SIG Parametrics, a member of the Susquehanna International Group of Companies, is financially backing the contest.

If no one has the perfect bracket, the person with the highest score, based on the company’s point system, will receive $1 million. If there’s a tie, the prize will be split equally among the winners. 

All U.S. citizens over 18 years old were eligible to enter the contest before the competition’s first game on March 19. But New York or Florida residents are not eligible, and Kalshi did not immediately respond to Fortune’s comment on why people in those states were excluded. 

Berkshire’s long-standing tradition

Kalshi is mimicking a longtime Berkshire Hathaway tradition that drew about 65,000 of its nearly 400,000 employees in 2024, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Since 2014, Buffett has offered his employees millions for their brackets. And even though he stepped down as CEO in December, the competition will continue this year, according to Front Office Sports. 

Over the years, the rules and prizes have changed as the long odds weighed on participants, while Buffett was eager to give away money.

After kicking off the yearly competition with a $1 billion prize for a perfect bracket, Buffett switched to a $1 million reward from 2015 to 2024 to anyone who perfectly guessed the Sweet 16. 

But no employees met the target. A $100,000 consolation prize was given to the bracket that stayed perfect the longest. Buffett is known to personally congratulate the winners. 

“I’m getting older,” Buffett told WSJ in 2025. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”

Last year, Buffett’s wish came true after he changed the rules again to offer $1 million to anyone who correctly guessed at least 30 of 32 first-round games. A FlightSafety International employee (a pilot training company subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway) won $1 million for correctly guessing 31 out of 32 first round games. 

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The Supreme Court ‘s conservative majority on Monday sounded skeptical of state laws that allow the counting of late-arriving mail ballots, a persistent target of President Donald Trump.

The court heard arguments in a case from Mississippi that also could affect voters in 13 other states and the District of Columbia, which have grace periods for ballots cast by mail. An additional 15 states that have more forgiving deadlines for ballots from military and overseas voters also could be impacted.

A ruling is expected by late June, early enough to govern the counting of ballots in the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

The court challenge is part of Trump’s broader attack on most mail balloting, which he has said breeds fraud despite strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states.

Several conservative justices gave voice to some of Trump’s complaints. Justice Samuel Alito wondered about the appearance of fraud in situations where “a big stash of ballots” that arrive late “radically flipped” an election.

Defending the state law, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart pointed out that the Trump administration and its allies in the case have yet to submit a single case of fraud due to late-arriving mail ballots.

The court’s liberal justices indicated they would uphold state laws with post-Election Day deadlines.

“The people who should decide this issue are not the courts, but Congress, the states and Congress,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said.

Forcing states to change their practices just a few months before the election risks “confusion and disenfranchisement,” especially in places that have had relaxed deadlines for years, state and big-city election officials told the court in a written filing.

California, Texas, New York and Illinois are among the states with post-Election Day deadlines. Alaska, with its vast distances and often unpredictable weather, also counts late-arriving ballots.

Lawyers for the Republican and Libertarian parties, as well as Trump’s administration, are asking the justices to affirm an appellate ruling that struck down a Mississippi law allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of the election and are postmarked by Election Day.

Justices worried over the slippery-slope problems that could arise no matter who wins the case.

Ballots could be received until the start of the next Congress, two months after the election, Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested.

On the other side, Justice Elena Kagan said the logic of the challenge to late-arriving ballots also would be used to rule out early voting and absentee ballots.

Limits on early-voting also seemed to bother Chief Justice John Roberts, who seemed the conservative member of the court most likely to side with Mississippi.

The court also grappled with whether state laws allowing for late-arriving ballots from military and overseas ballots could survive.

Last year, Trump signed an executive order on elections that aims to require votes to be “cast and received” by Election Day. The order has been blocked in pending court challenges.

At the same time, four Republican-dominated states — Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota and Utah — eliminated grace periods last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and Voting Rights Lab.

The issue at the Supreme Court is whether federal law sets a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast by voters and received by state officials.

In striking down Mississippi’s grace period, Judge Andrew Oldham of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the state law allowing the late-arriving ballots to be counted violated federal law.

Oldham and the other two judges who joined the unanimous ruling, James Ho and Stuart Kyle Duncan, all were appointed by Trump during his first term.

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More federal immigration officers are making their way to U.S. airports after President Donald Trump said he’d deploy them to supplement the Transportation Security Administration during a government shutdown that has caused long lines at security checkpoints across the country.

On Monday morning, a handful of federal officers were seen by The Associated Press near busy lines at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. And a handful of other airports — including Louis Armstrong International in New Orleans, as well as Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental and William P. Hobby airports — said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would also be on site to support TSA operations.

Federal officers are a routine presence at international airports, where Customs and Border Protection officers screen arriving travelers and Homeland Security Investigations agents handle criminal cases tied to smuggling, trafficking and fraud. But what’s unusual in the current moment is their visibility at TSA security checkpoints.

Monday’s deployments came as hundreds of thousands of Homeland Security workers, including from the TSA, U.S. Secret Service and Coast Guard, have worked without pay since Congress failed to renew DHS funding last month. That’s led many TSA agents to call in sick — or even quit their jobs — as financial strains pile up. The staffing shortages have forced some airports to close checkpoints at times, with wait times swinging dramatically for travelers.

On Sunday, the Trump administration signaled it would deploy federal immigration officers to large airports with the longest wait times — and Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis said that would include “hundreds” of ICE officers, but she did not disclose all the airports they would go to, citing security reasons.

Some fear the move to deploy federal immigration agents will only escalate tensions.

“This latest threat of ICE invasion at the airports is another distraction from solutions that protect Americans,” a coalition of unions representing flight attendants and other workers — including the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers — said in a Sunday statement. Transportation security officers “can’t simply be replaced” by federal immigration officers, they noted, adding that ICE’s presence and potential attempts to question passengers about immigration status may also “distract them from ensuring airport security.”

The unions called for TSA workers to be paid immediately.

Trump said on Sunday that he would order federal immigration agents to airports to assist TSA by guarding exit lanes or checking passenger IDs unless Democrats agreed to fund the DHS. Funding for the department lapsed Feb. 14, as Democrats refused to fund ICE as well as Customs and Border Protection without changes to their operations in the wake of the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Democrats are continuing to demand major changes to federal immigration operations — including policy changes that would require ICE officers to get a warrant from a judge before forcefully entering homes, the removal of masks and clear identifying information on uniforms.

Trump on Monday directed ICE officers not to wear face coverings in their work at airports. In a social media posted, Trump said he supports ICE officers wearing masks when dealing with “hardened criminals” but suggested it isn’t necessary “when helping our Country out of the Democrat caused MESS at the airports.”

Beyond TSA operations, New York’s LaGuardia Airport shut down following a deadly collision on the runway late Sunday. An Air Canada regional jet struck a fire truck while landing, officials said — killing the pilot and copilot while around 40 passengers and crew members were taken to area hospitals, some with serious injuries.

According to the FAA, LaGuardia is expected to remain closed until at least 2 p.m. ET on Monday. Air traffic has been diverted, and Monday morning operations also were halted at Newark Liberty International Airport in neighboring New Jersey.

___

Grantham-Philips reported from New York. Associated Press writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.

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The oil crises of the 1970s prompted a range of policy changes that still exist today. For one, we invented the high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane to incentivize workers to carpool. A nationwide 55 mph speed limit made sure those carpools weren’t guzzling too much gas. Cars became more fuel efficient; we (temporarily) started driving less. But some experts say those measures, coupled with those taken during the 2022 energy shock in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, pale in comparison to what we’re about to see next thanks to the Iran war.

Earlier this month, the Paris-based intergovernmental agency International Energy Agency (IEA) released a record-breaking 400 million barrels of oil to temper rising prices. IEA executive director Fatih Birol, who coordinated the release, finally broke his three-week silence and sounded the alarms on how much damage the war is causing. In an interview Monday at the National Press Club of Australia, Birol said world leaders are underestimating the energy crisis, saying the ongoing energy shock is worse than previous ones. 

“The depth of the problem was not well appreciated by the decision makers around the world,” he said. “If you want to put in a context, this crisis as it stands now: two oil crises and one gas crisis put all together,” he said.

Even as President Donald Trump said early Monday the U.S. was in talks with Iran—and would therefore withhold from striking critical energy sources for the next five days—Brent crude last week soared north of $110 per barrel. After the president’s announcement, oil prices fell about 10%, yet remain stubbornly high at about $102 as of 12 p.m. ET. Economists expect the oil shock to reverberate across the U.S. economy, potentially jacking up food prices, jeopardizing the possibility of a Fed rate cut this year (while raising the odds of a rate hike), and even threatening to halt the entire economy if oil prices rise to $140 a barrel.

The 1970s plus the Ukraine War

Birol elaborated on the numbers behind his assertion, saying the losses already accrued are far worse than those from the 1970 oil crises and the Ukraine war. 

“Many of us remember the two consecutive oil crises in [the] 1970s: 1973 and 1979,” he said. “In each of the crises, the world has lost about 5 million barrels per day, both of them together 10 million barrels per day.”

“And today, only as of today, we lost 11 million barrels per day, so more than two major oil shocks put together.”

He added that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the gas markets, particularly in Europe, “lost about 75 billion cubic meters, 75BCM. And as of now, as a result of this crisis, we lost about 140BCM, almost twice” as much.

Beyond the energy shocks, Birol said the war is severing ties to some of the vital arteries of the global economy by disrupting other critical supply chains. The war, he said, has interrupted the trade of petrochemicals, fertilizers, sulfur, and helium, some of the most critical building blocks of the world economy. For example, roughly half of the world’s urea supply, a critical compound for fertilizer, runs through the Strait of Hormuz, potentially impacting the cost of U.S. food prices within the coming months.

“If fertilizer disruptions or inflation drives higher corn prices, that is going to be felt everywhere throughout the food supply,” Dr. Ricky Volpe, an agricultural economist and professor of agribusiness at Cal Poly, said in a recent interview with Fortune.

Even as Trump promises to withhold strikes on energy sources for several days, Birol said there are already many damaged oil refineries, gas fields, and pipelines across nine countries, which means that even when the war concludes, it could take some time for oil prices to adjust to their pre-war levels.

“Forty energy assets in the region are severely or very severely damaged,” he said. “It will take some time for these assets—these oil fields, gas fields, refineries, pipelines—[to] come to the normal capacity that they were running before the war.”

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In just weeks, Wall Street has gone from optimistically waving off the U.S. and Israel’s strikes on Iran as a short-term blip to the more pessimistic assumption that the chaos in the Middle East could have long-term ramifications.

Likewise, consumers—already sensitive to the cost of living—are struggling with yet another affordability issue as oil and gas prices shot up after supply from the region was restricted.

As Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders today: “We are living through a period where things that would’ve defined a decade have become routine: wars with global repercussions, trillion-dollar companies, a fundamental reordering of international trade, and the advent of the most significant technology since, at least, the computer.”

Frankly, it’s been hard to keep up—and the BlackRock CEO wrote that the drama and uncertainty threatened by day-to-day headlines may be obscuring longer-term trends.

Fink, worth $1.3 billion according to Forbes, said that the vast majority of wealth historically has flowed to people who owned assets, as opposed to those who earned their money by working. Since 1989, he observed, a dollar invested in the U.S. stock market has ballooned at 15 times the value of a dollar tied to median wages. This wealth effect will likely be the same in the age of AI, with those wealthy enough to invest in the technology seeing their portfolios benefit the most from increasing to asset prices.

As such, the BlackRock founder wrote: “This is where much of today’s economic anxiety comes from: a deeper feeling that capitalism is working—just not for enough people.”  

For individuals looking to make a quick buck in the rollercoaster stock market by trying to buy the dips and sell the peaks won’t see the same benefits as those holding historical wealth, Fink said: “A focus on short-term investing is not a fix for that.” Over the past two decades, the BlackRock CEO noted, every dollar invested in the S&P 500 grew by more than eight times. But if an investor were to have missed out on the 10 best days of the market then they would have earned less than half that return.

As such, “staying invested has mattered far more than getting the timing right,” and as such, “it is long-term investing that allows countries to build domestic industries, that lets people build enduring wealth and shows how their country’s growth can benefit them too.”

Fink’s take on the shifting nature of capitalist sentiment is echoed by research into the American Dream. In 2024, Pew Research asked nearly 9,000 respondents if the American Dream existed, and only a slim majority—53%—said it was still achievable. 41% said the American Dream was once possible, while 6% said it was never a reality.

There was also a marked split in opinion: Those with a college level of education, who were defined as having higher levels of income, were notably more optimistic about the possibility of achieving such a goal.

A foot on the ladder

U.S. citizens are uniquely placed to benefit from the largest economy on earth and its domestic but globally market-leading businesses. However, Fink wrote that many households don’t have enough cash on hand to make ends meet—let alone any left over to invest in volatile markets over a sustained period of time.

A BlackRock survey of 1,000 voters conducted in January found that one-third of respondents don’t have $500 dollars on-hand for an emergency like a car repair, Fink said: “In fact, many are forced to pull money out of the markets just to make ends meet. Last year, a record number of workers withdrew money from their 401(k) plans so they could cover financial emergencies. The challenge is saving enough money to invest in the first place.”

The creation of products like Trump Accounts will help families get a foot on the ladder to long-term investing, Fink said. However, a major lever which could be used to foster wealth creation and potentially address income inequality is Social Security.

Fink mused on the current structure of the program, which “emphasizes stability and predictability.” He added: “What it doesn’t do is let people grow their benefits along with the broader economy. The question is whether the Social Security system could allow both. Could a portion of the system be invested more like other long-term pension plans—carefully, broadly, and over decades—while ensuring the program remains a strong safety net?”

This is by no means a bid to privatise social security, Fink said, but some state and local government employees already contribute to public pension schemes which are invested in diversified portfolios: “If long-term investing is already helping millions of public servants build retirement security, it raises a reasonable question: Why shouldn’t more Americans have access to that same kind of long-term growth?”

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