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A scientist who pioneered the modern food processing safety standards used around the world was awarded this year’s World Food Prize, the organization announced Wednesday, crediting his work for averting millions of cases of foodborne illness and reducing food waste.

Huub Lelieveld of the Netherlands earned the award after six decades spent advancing ways to improve food safety and advocating for trade regulations that allow safe food to get around the world more easily.

“I just did what I thought was right,” Lelieveld said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I want everybody to have enough food but … it should also be safe.”

Lelieveld began his career as a food researcher at Unilever at a time when mechanisms for manufacturing safe food products were, to him, “illogical,” he said.

Food was often sterilized or chemically preserved after production, and equipment needed to be shut off once or twice each day to be cleaned, which was both difficult and time consuming. The processed food also required heavy use of preservatives, salt, sugar and acids to reduce the risk of contamination, which detracted from flavor and nutrition.

“I realized very soon that they did things in the wrong way, in my view,” Lelieveld said. “From the beginning, I’ve been working on … convincing people that you should do it in a different way.”

Lelieveld worked with colleagues to develop hygienic production methods and equipment, making food manufacturing more efficient and less reliant on chemicals.

Having scaled the processes at Unilever and shown that they worked, Lelieveld said the company gave him permission to publish the research for dissemination and use globally.

“My philosophy was: You should not compete on food safety,” Lelieveld said. “Spreading the technology, the hygienic technology, was very important.”

Unsafe food causes 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization.

“Lelieveld was selected for translating food safety science into global regulations, legislation and practice, a movement spanning dozens of countries,” Gebisa Ejeta, chair of the Laureate selection committee, said in a statement. “His initiatives are estimated to have benefited millions of consumers worldwide.”

The Iowa-based World Food Prize was founded by Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work to dramatically increase crop yields and reduce the threat of starvation in many countries. The agricultural science honor includes a $500,000 award.

“Lelieveld lives by his conviction that access to safe food is a universal right—a philosophy shared by the late Dr. Norman Borlaug,” Mashal Husain, World Food Prize Foundation president, said in a statement.

After four decades at Unilever, Lelieveld founded the Global Harmonization Initiative in 2004 to promote consensus in food and trade regulations around the world. Drawing on a network of a few thousand scientists around the world, the nonprofit organization also works to address critical food security challenges and to facilitate food safety education.

GHI “is extremely useful because it has this enormous pool of knowledge about food safety and food protection,” Lelieveld said.

Lelieveld said challenges for broad access to safe food and water persist, and he hopes to see a system where people can produce safe food and water locally even if the movement of goods across borders is restricted.

“You can’t stop the transport of water through the air, with the clouds,” he said. “You can produce safe water everywhere, but we need to distribute this knowledge to the people that need it and that is the biggest challenge.”

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Harvard University has had a turbulent few months. The school has faced leadership turmoil, renewed scrutiny over its former president Larry Summers’ past ties to Jeffery Epstein, and an escalating clash with the Trump administration—including a federal lawsuit filed just last week alleging antisemitism on campus. 

None of it has knocked it off its perch. The Ivy league institution was once again deemed the No. 1 “dream school” among college applicants, according to a new survey by The Princeton Review.

Harvard has consistently ranked near the top throughout the survey’s 24-year history. Although it was dethroned last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this year’s revival suggests that sustained controversy has done little to dent its appeal. 

“Harvard ultimately reigns as the world’s most desirable university with unparalleled brand recognition, alumni achievement and history,” Jamie Beaton, founder and CEO of Crimson Education—who holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the university—told Fortune. “Trump’s battle with Harvard has only made the school more notable and famous.”

While admissions for the incoming fall cohort are still being finalized, Harvard has only become more competitive over the years. Of the nearly 48,000 applications to its class of 2029—who started this past fall—only about 2,000 were admitted, an acceptance rate of around 4%. By comparison, the acceptance rate 18 years ago was about 9%.

Harvard graduates are entering the workforce with near six-figure salaries—and little student debt

For many Harvard students, the payoff of making it through the rigorous application process appears to be tangible. 

In a survey of the class of 2025 by The Harvard Crimson, 95% of seniors said they would choose Harvard again. Early career earnings are likely part of the reason: roughly half of respondents expected to earn more than $90,000 in their first job, while about one in five anticipated salaries of $130,000 or higher—figures that far outpace national averages for new graduates.

The price tag, meanwhile, keeps climbing. Total billable costs this academic year—tuition, fees, housing, and food—reached $86,926, a roughly 9% increase over the past two years. Yet only 17% of seniors reported graduating with student loan debt. Harvard waives tuition entirely for undergraduates whose families earn $200,000 or less annually.

But Harvard isn’t alone in driving demand—and the composition of this year’s list suggests that prestige reigns supreme in the minds of most applicants. Adam Nguyen, founder of admissions consulting firm Ivy Link, isn’t surprised.

“Even in a market where families talk constantly about cost, practicality, and ROI, the schools that continue to dominate the imagination are still the ones with the strongest prestige, signaling power, alumni networks, and global brand value,” Nguyen told Fortune. 

The 10 top “dream colleges” of students in 2026

1. Harvard University
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Stanford University
4. Princeton University
5. New York University
6. Yale University
7. Columbia University
8. University of Pennsylvania
9. University of Texas–Austin
10. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

More Gen Z are questioning the value of degrees—and seeking alternatives in the skilled trades

For all the allure of the Ivy League, those institutions represent a sliver of the American college experience—and the broader picture is more conflicted.

Cost anxiety has become the defining concern of the application process. The plurality of student and parent respondents in this year’s Princeton Review survey, 35%, cited impending debt levels as the biggest concern about the college application process. That’s a dramatic shift from the survey’s early years: in 2003, only 6% of respondents chose cost as their top concern. 

The skepticism doesn’t end at graduation. More than a third of all graduates now say their college diploma was a “waste of money,” according to a survey by Indeed. Among Gen Z specifically, that figure rises to 51%. And with artificial intelligence reshaping the job market for entry-level talent, these worries are only expected to grow.

It’s pushing a growing number of young people to take a harder look at alternatives. Enrollment in vocational and trade programs has grown more than 20% between 2020 and 2025, according to National Student Clearinghouse Data. And business leaders like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have highlighted that opportunities to land secure, six-figure-paying blue-collar jobs are on the rise—thanks in part to the data center boom. 

“This is the largest infrastructure build-out in human history that’s going to create a lot of jobs,” Huang said at the World Economic Forum earlier this year.

“We’re talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building chip factories or computer factories or AI factories.”

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Jamie Dimon, who has led America’s largest bank JPMorgan for 20 years and through multiple recessions, blasted remote work and offered a stern warning for any younger generations who want to move up the career ladder: get into the office. 

“If you go to a meeting with me, you got my full friggin attention the whole time,” he said at the Hill and Valley Forum, which brought together leaders from Washington and Silicon Valley, on Tuesday. 

During the session titled “Wealth, Power, and the Next American Century” Dimon said remote work only works well for certain jobs like call centers, but for everyone else, including young people and managers alike, in-person working is best. Young people, especially, he said, need to work in-person because they are still learning.

“They learn by going on a sales call. They learn by seeing you make a mistake. They learn by how you deal with the mistake,” Dimon said, adding that remote work also fails to help young people develop their emotional intelligence.

The problem is universal, Dimon said, and managers should also get comfortable sitting in the office. Video calls, which he compared to game show Hollywood Squares where contestants sit in a real life tic-tac-toe board, allow for much fewer checkups than would happen in person when you can ask someone directly for an update. Working from home, Dimon said, causes less ownership of a project, less curiosity, and, using a Muhammad Ali tactic, tires people faster.

“There’s very little follow up, a lot more game playing, you know, rope-a-dope type of politics,” he said.

Plus, he added, “a lot of people aren’t paying attention at all,” as many of them are on their phones while on a video call, a trend which he didn’t notice early on, he said.

The remarks are not new for the 70-year-old, who has often protested remote work for early-career employees, advocating for an “apprentice system” where younger workers learn from more experienced veterans.

“You can’t learn working from your basement,” he said in a Bloomberg interview last year.

Previously, Dimon has complained that remote work has made it more difficult to reach employees, especially on Fridays, which he said is “not how you run a great company.”

Other executives, such as Amazon’s Andy Jassy and Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri, have also pushed to bring employees back to the office for a full five days a week in the past two years. Still, not every business leader agrees. Shark Tank star and O’Leary Ventures chairman Kevin O’Leary has often advocated for remote work to better attract top candidates. In a video earlier this month, O’Leary said, “I’d rather hire somebody who can execute and sit in their basement or in their backyard.”

JPMorgan announced its own five-day in-office policy last year, prompting more than 1,200 employees to sign a petition urging the company to keep its flexible hybrid work model. During a town hall meeting last February, Dimon lashed out at employees for signing what he saw as a meaningless petition.

“Don’t waste time on it,” Dimon reportedly said during the town hall. “I don’t care how many people sign that f—ing petition.”

Gen Z Pushes Back

Despite what Dimon says, young people are not thrilled at the prospect of working from an office full time. While employers have leveraged the shaky job market to force employees back to the office full time, nearly 40% of Gen Z and Millennial employees said they would take a pay cut in exchange for more flexibility with where they work, compared to 32% across generations.

The research on remote work also doesn’t quite align with what executives like Dimon have said. A Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis from 2024 found a statistically significant positive correlation across 61 industries between the pandemic-era rise in remote work and productivity growth, among other positive outcomes. At the same time, Gallup’s State of the Workplace report from 2025 found fully remote workers actually report the highest engagement rates at 31%, compared to 23% for hybrid and on-site workers who are remote capable.

While Dimon acknowledged JPMorgan wants to keep its workers happy, he also said the company has to adapt to what its customers want. 

“We’re not in business so my employee’s happy. I’m in business so my customer’s happy, and I want my employee to be happy, but not at the expense of the customer.” 

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Women are no longer being siloed into secretary and back-room jobs; for decades, they’ve been breaking into male-dominated jobs they were once locked out of. Trading pencil skirts for scrubs and pilot uniforms, many women are making waves by taking up space in high-paying industries. 

Women have been steadily flocking to six-figure roles in traditionally male-dominated industries like healthcare and engineering, according to a new report from Resume Genius analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

The number one role with rising female representation is dentistry; in the early 2000s only around 25% of dentists were women, but today they represent nearly 40% of the field, one of the biggest increases over the past two decades. And with a median annual salary of $179,210, women are also stepping into cushy tax brackets. 

Surgeon roles, which pay 239,200 annually, have also become a bright spot for women in the rapidly growing healthcare industry, with their representation more than doubling in the past two decades. 

And the report notes that the profession’s shift to women actually stems from college; in 2019, women became the majority of U.S. medical school students for the first time ever. 

Women are stepping into six-figure STEM roles—and slowly taking over the C-suite

Aside from high-paying healthcare jobs, women are also funnelling into lucrative STEM careers. 

Women have steadily been increasing their headcounts in software developer jobs, which boasts an median annual salary of $131,450, as well as in mechanical engineer ($102,320) and industrial engineer ($101,140) roles. Their rise is a result of greater outreach to get women into these technical fields through scholarships, mentorships, and broader recruitment efforts. 

Other jobs like informational security analysts (124,910), architects ($96,690), and airline pilots ($198,100) have seen women gain ground over the last two decades. 

Women are also breaking into the C-suite; chief executives, who earn a median salary of $206,680, made the list of rising women’s representation. It comes as the number of women leading Fortune 500 companies hit a record of 55 in 2025; while they only account for 11% of executives on the list, this trend among others signals women’s growing presence in affluent jobs. 

“While no country has reached full gender parity across all industries, more women are entering a wider range of fields than ever before,” the report noted. 

Women are flocking to high-paying AI and recession-proof healthcare careers

Women have been dominating a fast-growing industry that can hold up against AI and recessionary headwinds: healthcare. They make up nearly 78% of all workers in the field, according to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, but men still outnumber women in high-paying doctor roles. 

Even women who didn’t attend college are still taking advantage of the healthcare boom. Nursing, pediatric, and home health aids were among the hottest jobs for women without degrees, according to a 2025 report from Pew Research Center. Many roles in the profession don’t require a bachelor’s and can pay anywhere from $66,000 to $119,000 annually. These are all skills-based occupations, with no degree required—just a lot of patience, empathy, and mental fortitude.

And unlike other industries rocked by AI automation and sweeping layoffs, home health, doctor, and nursing job postings have hit a combined 162% growth since pre-pandemic, according to a 2025 report from Indeed. And it’s not expected to slow down anytime soon—the sector is resistant to AI jobs disruption and traditional economic downturns. 

“Healthcare is a classic recession-resistant industry because medical care is always in demand,” Priya Rathod, career expert at Indeed, told Fortune in 2025. “During the 2007–2009 Great Recession, healthcare employment continued to grow even as overall U.S. payrolls shrank.”

10 roles with rising female representation—and they come with big paychecks

Men may still dominate these high-paying professions, but women have been taking up space over time. Here are 10 roles in many traditionally male-dominated fields where women’s participation has steadily increased, according to Resume Genius.

1. Dentist ($179,210)
2. Surgeon ($239,200)
3. Software developer ($131,450)
4. Information security analyst ($124,910)
5. Architect ($96,690)
6. Airline pilot ($198,100)
7. Industrial engineer ($101,140)
8. Chief executive ($206,680)
9. Police and detective ($77,270)
10. Mechanical engineer ($102,320)

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Many entrepreneurs dream of that moment when they know they’ve really “made it.” That might look like turning a profit for the first time, or seeing how their product or service changes the lives of customers. It should feel like a moment of pride and celebration, but one multimillionaire serial entrepreneur admits it felt quite the opposite for her.

“The first time I made real money, I cried in a parking lot,” Emily Lyons wrote in a LinkedIn post in October. “Not because I was happy. Because I was terrified I’d lose it.”

Lyons, the founder and CEO of Femme Fatale Media Group and Lyons Elite, said this moment was so scary for her because she had grown up watching her parents fight about money. They had even been evicted from their home, and counted coins to take the subway. 

“That kind of stress doesn’t leave your body,” Lyons wrote. “It just waits.”

Lyons founded Femme Fatale, a leading North American event-staffing and marketing agency headquartered in Toronto in 2009. She started the company at age 23 with just $80, a cracked laptop, and a vision to revolutionize event staffing. The company has grown to become a multimillion-dollar agency with a network of more than 20,000 event professionals serving clients like L’Oréal, Red Bull, Sony, and Grey Goose as well as other Fortune 500 companies. She was also recently named Entrepreneur of the Year at the CanadianSME Small Business Awards.

“I didn’t have investors or a safety net,” Lyons said in a statement. “I had a dream, and I was stubborn enough to keep going.” 

Lyons also launched luxury dating service Lyons Elite, which was recognized three years in a row as the best matchmaking service in Canada by the Consumer Choice Awards. She also launched True Glue, a clean fake-lashes beauty brand in 2014, and founded the Julia Lyons Foundation, a charity supporting people with cystic fibrosis, inspired by the loss of her sister, Julia, to the disease. 

What is imposter syndrome in business?

Despite her success, Lyons said when her business finally took off and there were “commas in my bank account instead of panic, she “didn’t feel rich.”

“Money didn’t fix the fear,” she wrote. “It just exposed it.”

She references the old adage of “more money, more problems,” saying “wealth doesn’t erase your problems. It magnifies them.”

That anxiety encouraged Lyons to reframe her newfound wealth, though. She said she had to learn “earning it wasn’t a fluke,” and that she “deserved to keep” the money she had earned. 

She learned “success wasn’t something that would be taken away the second I stopped looking,” she wrote. 

This case study illustrates one of the innate challenges in being an entrepreneur or successful business person: imposter syndrome, or the psychological phenomenon of persistent self-doubt and the feeling of being a fraud despite evidence of competence and success.  

“Turns out you can have everything you ever wanted and still not feel like enough,” Lyons wrote. “That’s the part they don’t put in the success stories.”

A study by Cambridge International City Montessori School, Lucknow published in January 2025 provides evidence that especially women transitioning from traditional employment to entrepreneurship often face imposter syndrome, but that cognitive restructuring, mentorship, networking, and social support can help.

Many other successful female entrepreneurs have said they’ve experienced imposter syndrome. Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, said not having female role models growing up contributed to feelings of imposter syndrome despite her company’s $120 million IPO in 2017. Writer and researcher Ali Kriegsman argued, though, imposter syndrome doesn’t have to be a weakness for women business owners to solve on their own—but there are resources to help.

“Success doesn’t heal you,” Lyons wrote. “It just gives you the resources to finally start.”

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on October 8, 2025.

More on imposter syndrome:

• Scott Galloway says it’s actually good to have imposter syndrome: ‘If you’re not in rooms you don’t deserve to be in, you’re not trying that hard’
• How imposter syndrome sneaks up on high-performing people—and how to beat it
• Imposter syndrome isn’t exclusive to women. In fact, men are more likely to experience it at work

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AI is making workers more productive than ever. In fact, it’s already quietly handing workers back chunks of their day—and instead of taking on more tasks, most are stepping away from their desks entirely.

New research from Zoom, conducted with Morning Consult across more than 1,000 knowledge workers, finds that among those already using AI tools, 76% say they’re saving at least 30 minutes a day, and 43% are saving an hour or more.

And they’re using that clawed-back time for a real break, not more work.

They’re sneaking in gym classes, running errands, and reclaiming the lunch break that corporate culture quietly killed off.

The always-on workday that killed the lunch break

The survey paints a bleak picture of a workforce quietly suffocating under the weight of its own schedule. Three-quarters of respondents say they eat lunch while working at their desk, 60% shorten it to squeeze between meetings. 

The irony? The majority acknowledge taking a real lunch break actually improves their stress levels and productivity. They know it helps. They just can’t stop. And they’re getting so burned out, experts are calling the crisis a “competence hangover.”

Enter AI. Among workers already using it, 80% say they’d use that time gained for a genuine break. In fact, 70% say AI is helping them step away from their screen. Remote workers are running errands and exercising. In-office workers are scrolling for a social reset or catching up with colleagues. Millennials and parents are leading the charge, with 70% more likely to reclaim that midday slot. 

And increasingly, workers see AI as the tool that makes it structurally possible: Two in three believe AI can help them block out a full lunch hour; 66% say they’d be open to skipping lunch meetings now; and 70% say it can help restore work-life balance altogether.

“What we’re seeing isn’t just that AI makes work faster, it’s that AI is starting to take away a lot of the busywork that fills the day,” Kimberly Storin, Zoom CMO, told Fortune. “Time saved doesn’t come from one big thing, but instead from all the small, constant tasks that usually happen after a conversation, like writing notes, figuring out next steps, chasing follow-ups, updating different systems… all of that work adds up.”

Workers aren’t waiting for their bosses to give them a shorter workday: They’re quietly taking their time back

For a long time, any efficiency gain in the workplace came with a catch: more output expected in return. 

Plus, in a tougher job market where promotions are stalling and AI is quietly threatening whole categories of white-collar work, many high performers feel they have no choice but to over-deliver just to stay safe. 

But Storin says something different is happening now.

“We’re starting to see people use that time to step away, even briefly, and reset, and leaders have a choice in how they respond to that,” she says.

Mark Cuban also made headlines this week, predicting the smartest companies will officially cut the workday by a full hour, with no change to salaries. But not everyone is convinced bosses will be so generous. 

Mark Dixon, CEO of IWG, the world’s largest flexible workspace provider, told Fortune flatly a shorter workweek (or shorter work days, in this case) isn’t coming “any time soon.” His reasoning: Companies are under too much cost pressure to hand back time for nothing.

“Everyone’s having to control their labor costs because all costs have gone up so much, and you can’t get any more money from customers, so therefore you have to get more out of people,” he said.

But whether or not bosses officially shorten the day, workers aren’t waiting for permission. For now, they’re carving out 30-minute pockets of freedom and taking back the minutes the modern workplace took away. 

“You can fill the space with more activity, or you can recognize that better work doesn’t always come from more hours,” Storin says. 

“I do think giving people some of that time back matters, not necessarily as a perk, but as a reflection of how work should function,” she adds. “If the system is working, people shouldn’t have to grind through every minute of the day to keep up. “

“AI shouldn’t just help us do more,” she continues. “It should help work feel more manageable, and ultimately more human.” 

And ultimately, many workers are already doing it—letting the AI handle the follow-up email while they finally step outside.

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OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls the artificial intelligence company OpenAI and its flagship product ChatGPT, pledged Tuesday to grant out $1 billion over the next year and to build up its capacity as a philanthropic funder.

The pledge represents a major development in OpenAI’s philanthropic activities and offers insight into how the company, which started as a nonprofit, plans to carry out its charitable mission to develop AI to benefit “all of humanity.”

“We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives — while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances,” OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement Tuesday.

The new funding will support life science and health research and will seek to mitigate some of the impacts of AI technologies on jobs, the economy and mental health, especially of children, the nonprofit said. It follows a commitment to spend $25 billion to support similar causes that OpenAI Foundation made in October, though without providing a time frame.

OpenAI Foundation will also recruit a new executive director to oversee its grantmaking, it said.

Ups and downs in OpenAI’s nonprofit activities

OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 but has sought to escape that structure over the past several years as it built out its commercial technologies like ChatGPT and its for-profit subsidiary, which is now one of the most highly valued startups in the world.

In October, OpenAI finalized an agreement with regulators that left the nonprofit’s board in charge of its for-profit business but eased the way for investors and the company to profit from its technologies. The deal also clarified the nonprofit’s ownership stake in the company, which OpenAI said at the time was valued at $130 billion, making it one of the best-resourced nonprofits in the country.

Since the incorporation of its for-profit business in 2019, OpenAI’s nonprofit significantly scaled back its activities, going from listing $51 million in expenses in 2018 to $3.3 million the following year, according to its public tax filings. In 2024, the most recent year that the nonprofit reported its activities to the Internal Revenue Service, OpenAI’s nonprofit received $4,433 in contributions and granted out $7.6 million.

Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting and public affairs at The Ohio State University who specializes in nonprofits, cautioned that the tax forms were not well suited to capture OpenAI’s activities and the extent to which they were focused on achieving its charitable mission.

“People tend to focus on the financial part of that,” said Mittendorf in an email. “Is the immense value creation being used to further a charitable objective? But an equally important piece is whether the product they are developing is serving humanity as they envisioned.”

It’s a question that Elon Musk, an early financial backer of OpenAI, has also raised. Musk sued the company, claiming that CEO Sam Altman and others betrayed the nonprofit’s mission in pursuit of profit in a case that will go to trial in California.

Recent revision to nonprofit’s role

In 2025, OpenAI made an effort to revitalize the nonprofit. It convened a temporary nonprofit advisory board to offer it nonbinding guidance about how to structure its philanthropic activities while it continued to negotiate with regulators and its investors about the extent to which the nonprofit board would remain in charge of its business.

The advisory board, which included labor leader Dolores Huerta, eventually recommended that OpenAI significantly increase the resources it provided to its nonprofit and to consult extensively with communities about how AI is impacting them as it shapes its grant making.

The nonprofit announced $40.5 million in grants to community-based nonprofits in December to support AI literacy, strengthen civic life and foster economic opportunity.

OpenAI’s new vision for its charitable grantmaking comes at the same time that communities around the country worry about data centers increasing electricity costs, lawsuits accuse AI chatbots of exacerbating mental health crises, and companies and advocates question the fitness of new AI technologies to be used in war.

In addition to hiring a new director, OpenAI Foundation said Wojciech Zaremba, one of a handful of OpenAI co-founders still working for the company, will become the foundation’s head of AI resilience, which is focused on the “new challenges that inevitably arise from more capable AI.”

Additionally, the nonprofit has brought on Jacob Trefethen to lead its life sciences and health grantmaking. Trefethen led a similar portfolio at the philanthropic organization, Coefficient Giving, which is a major funder of the effective altruism community that has sometimes clashed with OpenAI’s vision for artificial intelligence.

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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The assignment involves no laptop, no chatbot and no technology of any kind. In fact, there’s no pen or paper, either.

Instead, students in Chris Schaffer’s biomedical engineering class at Cornell University are required to speak directly to an instructor in what he calls an “oral defense.”

It’s a testing method as old as Socrates and making a comeback in the AI age. A growing number of college professors say they are turning to oral exams, and combining a variety of old-fashioned and cutting-edge techniques, to help address a crisis in higher education.

“You won’t be able to AI your way through an oral exam,” says Schaffer, who introduced the oral defense last semester.

Educators are no longer naively wondering if students will use generative AI to do their homework for them. A big question now is how to determine what students are actually learning.

College instructors across the U.S. are noticing troubling new trends as generative artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated. Take-home essays and other written assignments are coming back perfect. But when students are asked to explain their work, they can’t. The long-term impact of AI use on critical thinking remains to be seen, but educators worry students increasingly see the hard work of thinking as optional.

Some colleges shift toward in-person tests

At the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Hammer, an associate professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, now pairs oral exams with written papers in her seminar classes.

“It comes across as if we’re trying to prevent cheating,” Hammer says. “That’s not why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because students are actually losing skills, losing cognitive capacity and creativity.”

Hammer forbids AI use on all writing assignments but tells her class she knows she can’t enforce that. However, if they haven’t written their papers themselves, defending the material face-to-face will likely be “a very stressful situation.”

Hammer’s class is part of “a massive shift toward in-person assessments,” both written and oral, at Penn, says Bruce Lenthall, executive director of the school’s Center for Teaching and Learning. The Ivy League school is one of a small but growing number of universities that have started running faculty workshops on oral exams.

Oral exams are not traditionally part of the modern American undergraduate system, unlike certain European universities. For instance, in the Oxbridge tutorial system in England, students meet faculty for weekly discussions. Some U.S. colleges saw a move toward oral exams during the COVID-19 pandemic to address concerns about online cheating, and interest has intensified since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

During the pandemic, engineering professor Huihui Qi launched a three-year study at the University of California, San Diego on how to scale oral exams. Several universities have since invited her to provide faculty workshops or discuss her research.

Harnessing AI to fight ‘fire with fire’

At New York University, several types of oral assessments are on the rise. More faculty are requiring office hours, assigning presentations and cold-calling on students in class. Instructors are saying, “I need to look my students in the eye and ask, ‘Do you know this material?’” says Clay Shirky, vice provost for AI and technology in education.

One NYU professor has put a modern spin on the traditional oral test.

Panos Ipeirotis, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, unveiled an AI-powered oral exam last semester for the final exam in a class on AI product management. He calls it “fighting fire with fire.”

Students log in from home, at any time that fits their schedule. A voice cloned from a business school professor greets them.

“Hi there,” says the voice on their screen. It asks for the student’s name and school ID number and then says, “I’m ready to conduct your exam today.”

The chatbot starts with questions about a final group project and drills into details based on each student’s answers. If the student stumbles, the AI agent gives them clues, along with criticism and positive feedback. Ipeirotis grades the exams separately, also with the help of AI.

“We wanted to check: Do you know what your team did? Were you a free rider? Did you outsource everything to AI?” says Ipeirotis, who designed the tool with ElevenLabs, a company that develops generative AI voice agents to conduct job interviews.

Students in the class this semester are redesigning the AI agent to smooth out some kinks, and Ipeirotis plans to use it in all his future classes.

“I want oral exams everywhere now. I want to pair it with every single written assignment,” says Ipeirotis. “I don’t trust written assignments anymore to be the result of actual thinking.”

Feedback from students last semester was mixed.

Business major Andrea Liu found the chatbot’s voice to be surprisingly human, but the conversation felt choppy with odd pauses. It asked multiple questions at once, which was confusing. And it was jarring to hear a voice but not see a person.

“It felt kind of awkward to be talking to what was pretty much a blank screen,” says Liu, 21.

But, she agreed with worried educators: “There is no perfect world where AI exists and kids are not abusing it.”

Schools see benefits even for shy students

Across the humanities and STEM disciplines, like computer science, educators worry that students who skip the mental struggle that is necessary for problem solving won’t develop the skills they need to advance in upper-level classes and careers.

That’s why Schaffer, the Cornell professor, introduced the oral defense in his biomedical engineering class. He requires students to sign up for 20-minute sessions of Socratic-style questioning after submitting written problem sets, which are assigned several times each semester.

With a class of 70 students, Schaffer splits the job with his teaching assistants. They no longer grade the written problem sets, just the oral defenses. He calls it “incentivizing” his students to do the work, or at least understand it enough to explain.

Schaffer’s class is highlighted in a new “Oral Assessment Workshop” offered by Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation.

Other examples at Cornell: a religious studies professor who now holds 30-minute “final conversations” with students instead of a final exam; and another engineering course where the professor gives four-minute mock interviews to each student in a 180-person class.

Skeptics point out oral exams can be unsettling for students who are shy or have serious anxiety, but clarifying the format ahead of time and starting with softball questions can help, says Carolyn Aslan, who leads Cornell’s oral exam training.

“Sometimes it’s actually good to get that quiet student one-on-one, and you finally get to hear from them. Sometimes that is the breakthrough,” Aslan says.

Several of Schaffer’s students say they felt nervous at first but ended up preferring the oral exam.

“I honestly liked it a lot,” says Cornell junior Olivia Piserchia, a biomedical engineering major. She initially found the oral defense nerve-wracking but came to value the one-on-one time with instructors. It kept her from feeling lost in a large class and helped her build the skill of articulating her technical knowledge, as she would need to in a job.

“Having that live check-in holds you accountable,” says Piserchia. “It’s a lot harder to look people in the eyes and say out loud, ‘I don’t know this.’ And, that makes you realize, ‘I should study this.’”

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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Travelers passing through Philadelphia International Airport on Monday may have expected long security lines. But the longest line was made of cheesesteaks.

Organizers say they achieved a new Guinness World Record for the longest line of cheesesteak sandwiches, with 1,291 lined up inside a departure hall to mark National Cheesesteak Day. The display far surpassed the previous benchmark of 500 sandwiches.

“We went for the world record for the longest cheesesteak in history,” said Clarence LeJeune of MarketPlace PHL, a company that operates airport concessions. “Today we accomplished that goal here in Philadelphia.”

The cheesesteak, which originated in Philadelphia in the early 1900s, is widely considered the city’s signature food. LeJeune called it “synonymous” with Philadelphia, alongside its sports culture.

People in black aprons assembled cheesesteaks along tables set up in the walkway between Terminals B and C, filling rolls from silver buckets as they moved past storefronts.

After the record was certified, volunteers handed out the sandwiches to travelers, airport workers and Transportation Security Administration staff, who have been working without pay during the government shutdown.

LeJeune joked there are few hard rules for cheesesteaks, which is part of the “beauty of the experience” — except, he said, “You don’t ask for Swiss cheese,” referencing a 2003 moment when then-presidential candidate John Kerry drew criticism in Philadelphia for ordering one with Swiss.

Michael Empric, a Guinness World Records adjudicator, said rules require all food used in record attempts to be eaten or donated.

“In this case, they are going to TSA agents who definitely could use some lunch,” Empric said.

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Iran has received an American plan to pause the war in the Middle East, officials said Wednesday — a proposal sent even as Washington deploys paratroopers and more Marines to the region.

Tehran did not confirm receiving the plan and publicly dismissed the diplomatic effort while launching more attacks on Israel and Gulf Arab countries, including an assault that sparked a huge fire at Kuwait International Airport. Iran also continued to come under attack.

Two officials from Pakistan, which delivered the plan to Iran, described the 15-point proposal broadly, saying it addressed sanctions relief, a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program, limits on missiles and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped. An Egyptian official involved in the mediation efforts added that the proposal includes restrictions on Iran’s support for armed groups. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet released.

Some of those points were nonstarters in negotiations before the war: Iran has insisted it won’t discuss its ballistic missile program or its support of regional militias, which it views as key to its security. And its ability to control passage through the Strait of Hormuz represents one of its biggest strategic advantages.

Iran’s attacks on regional energy infrastructure along with its restrictions on the strait have sent oil prices skyrocketing and rocked world markets over fears of a global energy crisis, in turn putting pressure on the U.S. to find a way to end the chokehold and calm markets.

More US troops are on the way to the region

At least 1,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division will be sent to the Mideast in the coming days, three people with knowledge of the plans told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.

The paratroopers are trained to jump into hostile or contested areas to secure key territory and airfields.

The Pentagon is also in the process of sending about 5,000 more Marines, trained in amphibious assaults, and thousands of sailors to the region.

Diplomatic efforts face major challenges

The 15-point plan now in Iranian hands is “a comprehensive deal” to reach a ceasefire, according to the Egyptian official.

Mediators are pushing for possible in-person talks between the Iranians and the Americans, perhaps as soon as Friday in Pakistan, the Egyptian and Pakistani officials said.

Speaking Tuesday at the White House, Trump said the U.S. is “in negotiations right now” and that the participants included special envoy Steve Witkoff, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. He has not said who from Iran they are in contact with.

“We have a number of people doing it,” Trump said. “And the other side, I can tell you, they’d like to make a deal.”

Iran’s Khatam Al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, which commands both the regular military and the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, dismissed the idea of talks. Iranian leaders have repeatedly denied they are happening, while acknowledging that the foreign minister is in contact with various countries but not the U.S. or Israel.

“Our first and last word has been the same from day one, and it will stay that way: Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you,” Lt. Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for the headquarters, said in the video statement aired on state television. “Not now, not ever.”

Israeli officials, who have been advocating for Trump to continue the war against Iran, were surprised by the submission of a ceasefire plan, according to a person who was briefed on the contours of the proposal and also confirmed it had been submitted. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Any talks between the U.S. and Iran would face monumental challenges. It’s not clear who in Iran’s government has the authority to negotiate — or would be willing to, as Israel has vowed to continue killing the country’s leaders.

Iran remains highly suspicious of the United States, which twice under the Trump administration has attacked during high-level diplomatic talks, including with the Feb. 28 strikes that started the current war.

“We have a very catastrophic experience with U.S. diplomacy,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told India Today on Tuesday.

Israel launches new strikes on Iran

The Israeli military announced new wide-scale attacks on Iran early Wednesday targeting government infrastructure, and witnesses reported airstrikes in the northwestern city of Qazvin.

Missile alert sirens sounded multiple times in Israel as Iran launched its own attacks.

Iran also kept up the pressure on its Gulf Arab neighbors, with Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry saying it had destroyed at least eight drones in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province, and missile alert sirens sounding in Bahrain.

Kuwait said it shot down multiple drones but one hit a fuel tank at Kuwait International Airport, sparking a fire, the General Civil Aviation Authority said. Firefighters were working to contain the blaze.

Iran’s death toll has passed 1,500, its Health Ministry has said. In Israel, 16 people have died. At least 13 U.S. military members have been killed, along with more than a dozen civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gulf Arab states.

Meanwhile, authorities say more than 1,000 people have died in Lebanon, where Israel has targeted the Iran-linked Hezbollah militant group, which has also fired on Israel.

Energy prices fall back but remain high

The news of potential negotiations drove down the price of oil — after it skyrocketed in recent weeks.

Brent crude oil, the international standard, has neared $120 a barrel during the conflict but was trading below $100 Wednesday. It is still up around 35% from the start of the war.

Economists and leaders have warned of far-reaching effects if energy prices remain high — from rising prices on food and other basics to higher rates for mortgages and auto loans.

A big driver of the spike in the oil price has been Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, which leads from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. Iran has allowed a small number of ships through the strait, but has said no ships from the U.S., Israel or countries seen as linked to them can pass.

Asked in the interview with India Today whether Iran was charging ships for passage, Baghaei, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said “absolutely.” He did not elaborate.

___

Madhani reported from Washington, Rising from Bangkok and Ahmed from Islamabad. Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo, Natalie Melzer in Tel Aviv, Israel and E. Eduardo Castillo in Beijing contributed to this report.

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At 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time today, the price of oil sits at $99.75 per barrel, using Brent as the benchmark (we’ll explain what that means shortly). That’s a decrease of $2.72 since yesterday morning—but $26.64 more than at this time last year.

Will oil prices go up?

Nobody can predict the future path of oil prices with certainty. A range of factors influence how oil trades, yet supply and demand remain the main drivers. When fears of economic slowdown, conflict, or similar shocks rise, oil prices can move sharply.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

The price you see at the gas pump reflects more than just crude oil. Also built in are the costs of refining, distribution through wholesalers, various taxes, and the margin your neighborhood station charges.

Crude oil is still the largest single driver of the final pump price, typically representing over half of each gallon’s cost. Spikes in oil prices tend to push gas prices higher in short order. But when oil prices decline, gas prices often ease down gradually, a behavior known as “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In the event of an emergency, the U.S. maintains a stockpile of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its main goal is to safeguard energy security when disasters strike—think sanctions, severe storm damage, or war. It can also do a lot to ease the pain of sudden price jumps when supply gets disrupted.

It’s not a permanent fix, as it’s more meant to provide immediate support for consumers and ensure critical parts of the economy like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, and so on can keep operating.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Both oil and natural gas play key roles as major sources of energy. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by proxy. If oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, increasing the demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

Oil prices are often measured by two key benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Between the two, Brent is a better representation of global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. It’s also often the best way to review historical oil trends. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration now leans on Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

When you look at the Brent benchmark across multiple decades, you’ll see that oil has been anything but consistent. It has experienced spikes driven by wars and supply cuts, as well as crashes linked to global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as weaker demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with rising global demand, but soon crashed alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before, bringing prices to under $20 per barrel.

In short, oil’s historical performance has been far from steady. It’s massively affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Iran war ends in abundance, growth, and oil at $40 a barrel—or global recession and years of oil at $150
• Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years
• $580 million in suspicious oil futures traded minutes before Trump’s Iran reversal

Frequently asked questions

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Even as global unemployment hits historic lows, a sweeping new study of the global workforce by one of the definitive workforce data sources finds that “anxiety”—not confidence—defines how most workers feel about their job, their future, and AI transforming both.

The numbers don’t lie, and they don’t comfort. Only 22% of workers worldwide strongly agreed that their job was safe from elimination, according to a new report from ADP Research released Wednesday. The finding comes from one of the largest workforce sentiment surveys ever conducted—more than 39,000 workers across 36 countries—and lands with the force of a gut punch: The world’s workers are consumed by fear.​

“Despite three years of historically low global unemployment and steady economic growth, our data reveals widespread job insecurity expressed by workers worldwide,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.​

The culprit is hiding in plain sight: artificial intelligence. As generative AI tools race into the workplace at breakneck speed, workers from Tokyo to Topeka are struggling to process what it means for their livelihoods—and they’re not reassured by what they see.​ “AI is not like the weather. It is not just going to descend upon us,” Richardson told reporters in a briefing on the survey results in New York City. “It really is hitting us at the task level—by augmenting and making certain tasks more high value.”

A world of anxious workers

The ADP Research Today at Work 2026 report, based on survey responses collected in late summer 2025, paints a portrait of a global workforce caught in the crosscurrents of technological disruption, demographic upheaval, and deep uncertainty. The anxiety cuts across borders and industries, but ADP found that it hits hardest at the bottom of the organizational ladder.​

Among individual contributors—the frontline workers who make up the bulk of most companies’ headcount—only 18% felt their job was safe. Frontline managers fared only slightly better at 21%. Confidence rose predictably with seniority: Middle managers came in at 23%, upper managers at 31%, and C-suite executives at 35%. In other words, the higher your perch in the org chart, the less afraid you are of falling.​ But even then, only barely more than a third of top executives feel like they have job security, according to the results.

The geographic divides are equally stark. In Japan—a country long defined by lifetime employment culture—only 5% of workers felt their jobs were secure, the lowest reading of any market in the survey. Nigeria, by contrast, registered the most confident workforce, with 38% of workers expressing job security, driven largely by a young, tech-savvy population and booming AI adoption. In the United States, the figure was 28%.​

AI is making it worse—and better, sort of

The paradox at the heart of the report is this: AI use is correlated with higher engagement and less stress, yet it’s also making workers feel dramatically less productive. Daily AI users were four times as likely as nonusers to say they weren’t as productive as they could be.​

The explanation, researchers suggest, is psychological. AI has taken over the small, checklist-style tasks that gave workers a sense of daily accomplishment—answering emails, summarizing documents, generating first drafts. Without those quick wins, people feel as if they’ve done less, even when they’ve arguably done more. “AI does the things that we used to say make us feel productive,” Richardson explained to reporters. “It writes our emails for us. It responds. It summarizes documents for us. And so we have to kind of remeasure productivity in a different way; it’s shifting from productivity based on volume of work to value [of work].”

The flip side: 30% of daily AI users were fully engaged at work, versus just 14% of those who never use AI. Heavy AI users were also significantly less likely to experience negative stress: 11% reported feeling overloaded, compared with 23% of nonusers. The data suggests AI may be a powerful tool for worker well-being, if companies can figure out how to deploy it without triggering dread.​

The creeping, unpaid extension of the workday isn’t helping with this angst over productivity: 62% of global workers said they put in up to five hours of unpaid work per week, while 38% reported working off the clock for six hours or more; 12%—disproportionately executives and upper managers—said they work without pay for 16 hours or more weekly.​

The data reveals a troubling paradox: Workers logging the most unpaid hours are simultaneously the most engaged and the most likely to be looking for another job. They’re dedicated enough to give their time for free, yet burned out enough to be quietly interviewing elsewhere. “Free work comes at a cost,” the report concludes. “People who put in unpaid hours are more likely to feel unproductive and stressed. They’re also more likely to quit.”

“AI is entering a workforce that is anxious,” said Jay Caldwell, ADP’s chief talent officer. “And to me, that’s very, very risky. And the importance for HR professionals right now is not as much about the technology. It’s more around, ‘How do we lead through the technology? And how do we bring our workforce along?’ And the transformation that comes with that.”

Five generations, one nervous breakdown

Compounding the AI anxiety is a demographic collision unlike anything the modern workplace has ever seen. For the first time in history, five generations are working side by side—from teenagers to great-grandparents. And they are not on the same page.​

Young workers ages 18 to 26 were the most optimistic, with 29% saying they had the skills needed to advance. But older workers ages 55 to 64 told a bleaker story: Only 18% felt similarly equipped, and just 12% believed their employer was investing in their development. Meanwhile, 20% of young workers strongly agreed AI would positively impact their jobs in the next year—a figure that dropped to just 10% among workers ages 55 to 64.​

“Younger workers are definitely more optimistic about their skill set,” Richardson told reporters. “Older workers are also, you know, more likely to say that they’re financially unprepared. Which is interesting. They make more money, but they feel more stretched financially. They’re more likely to say that they’re less productive and less engaged than younger workers. Youth and optimism go hand in hand.” She connected these findings back to Japan, which has a culture famously respectful towards elders. Fortune has previously covered the madogiwazoku, or “window workers,” who are so named because they sometimes just stare out the window. The upshot is that jobs for younger workers are harder to come by.

The data also exposes a troubling engagement crisis hiding beneath the surface calm of low unemployment. Only 19% of workers globally were fully engaged on the job in 2025—unchanged from the year before—meaning more than 80% of the world’s workforce is, by some measure, just going through the motions. Workers who find meaning in their jobs are 12.5 times as likely to be fully engaged as those who don’t.​

What employers must do

ADP researchers are emphatic that the anxiety gripping workers is not inevitable; it is, in large part, a leadership failure. Workers who feel their employers are investing in their skills were 5.3 times as likely to feel their jobs were secure. Among those who strongly agreed their employer was investing in them, 53% were fully engaged. Among those who didn’t feel that investment, only 12% were.​

The prescription is clear: Communicate, upskill, and stop treating workers as passive recipients of technological change. “Upskilling isn’t just a strategy,” Richardson said at the briefing. “It’s a reassurance. It’s a trust pact between the employer and the worker.”

Caldwell urged HR professionals to help workers reframe what productivity even means in an AI-driven world—away from task volume and toward judgment, creativity, and long-term impact. “Workers who clearly see the role their existing skill sets will play in an organization’s future,” Caldwell said, “will be more engaged, productive, and have the confidence to thrive in this next era of work.”

For now, though, the world’s workers are mostly not thriving. They’re waiting, watching, and wondering whether their jobs will survive the machines. The survey suggests that the answer—for most—remains maddeningly unclear.

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Good morning. AI is escaping the screen and that should be setting off both alarms and opportunities in the finance function.

Deloitte’s new CFO Guide to Tech Trends 2026 explores how finance leaders can think strategically about emerging technologies and embrace what’s possible, which in turn elevates their function’s value and helps shape what’s next for their entire organization.

One tech trend on the rise is AI-enabled robotics. AI is no longer confined to dashboards and copilots. “Physical AI,” which is the convergence of AI with robotics, sensors, and real-world systems, marks a turning point. As Deloitte notes, intelligence is becoming “embodied” in factories, warehouses, and supply chains, where autonomous systems can optimize operations in real time. For example, BMW is testing humanoid robots to handle tasks that traditional industrial robots cannot perform, according to Deloitte. Meanwhile, the Bank of America Institute projects that the material costs of a humanoid robot could fall from $35,000 in 2025 to between $13,000 and $17,000 by 2035.

Why should CFOs care about AI-driven robots? According to the report, they directly affect both costs and ROI. Adopting physical AI can reshape products, operations, and supply chains, influencing everything from manufacturing to quality control. Finance leaders must ensure these changes are accurately reflected in KPIs and financial reporting to drive competitive advantage. At the same time, CFOs need to strengthen how they measure ROI in a hybrid human–AI workforce and invest in upskilling finance teams to understand and manage the financial implications of this technology.

But physical AI is just one piece of a broader transformation. Deloitte highlights a surge in agentic AI, systems that don’t just analyze but act, alongside a resurgence in hardware investment, as AI workloads demand specialized infrastructure. These shifts introduce new cost structures, including rising energy consumption and capital intensity, placing CFOs at the center of critical trade-off decisions.

The finance function’s role is expanding from measuring performance to shaping the technological bets that will determine it.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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The question on Wall Street’s lips this week has been about Iran: When and how will the war end? President Trump issued some positive updates over the past 48 hours, though some analysts have pointed out there’s little verifiable action at present to support those claims.

BlackRock CEO and founder Larry Fink sees the conflict ending in one of two extremes: Global powers accept Iran, and its goods and services (most importantly, its oil) is released onto the world market, pushing prices down. Or, the Iranian regime continues to stand at odds with global adversaries, and oil prices stay significantly elevated not for mere months, but for years.

Wall Street has been determinedly upbeat about the war in Iran resolving in a relatively short window—even the ever-skeptical Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said he is a “little optimistic” about the long-term outcome of the current chaos in the Middle East.

Fink also wants to be hopeful, and outlined there is a best-case scenario: “I could paint a scenario where I could see, a year from now, oil at $40 a barrel, I could see it above $150—we have two very extreme outcomes,” Fink told the BBC this morning.

“Everybody has to recognise that there’s not going to come somewhere in the middle. It’s going to be [one] of two extremes: Is Iran a country that can be accepted by the international community, can it be a country that participates in the world again?” Fink mused. Such an outcome could slash oil prices, flooding the market with supply currently choked by military threats in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf through which exports from the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq all flow. Some 20 million barrels of oil typically flow through the strait every day, about 20% of the global oil supply. Iran has said it controls the strait, littering it with mines, meaning shipmasters are too nervous to enter the waterway—only certain ships, paying a hefty price tag, have been allowed to pass by the Iranian authorities.

The worst-case scenario

Oil prices have already spiked in response to the chokehold, with analysts questioning how quickly normal trade may resume once the conflict draws to a close. If the conflict does rumble on for longer than the roughly month-long window President Trump had indicated, this will have longer-lasting impacts on gas and energy prices—a particular concern for consumers already sensitive to affordability shocks.

“Iran remains a threat,” Fink continued. “A threat to trade, a threat to the Strait of Hormuz, a threat to the peaceful coexistence of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) region—I would argue that we could have years of above-$100, closer to $150 oil, which has profound implications in the economy. The $40 oil implication is one of abundance and growth; the other is an outcome of probably stark and steep recession. I don’t think anybody knows what the outcome will be.”

The U.S. and Israel, to some extent, have already achieved their aim in Iran: The country’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed earlier this month. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, now leads the country. Indeed, if the younger Khamenei is more open to working alongside the West, then Trump could easily wind down the conflict and maintain the rhetoric that he achieved his aim of eliminating a threat.

If Iran’s leadership wants to continue to be an “exporter of fear” and chooses to work against international trade, Fink added: “We’ll have global recession. Think about what it means for agricultural prices, fertilisers is a by-product from gas … it really disrupts a lot of supply chains.”

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Good morning. On Fortune‘s radar today:

• The U.S. and Iran appear to be exchanging messages about a proposed peace deal, and the markets are loving it. Oil is down, stocks are up. Iran said “non-hostile vessels” could pass through the Strait of Hormuz, with its permission. But President Trump is still sending thousands of ground troops to the region.
• Exclusive: Alphabet is No. 1 on Fortune’s America’s Most Innovative Companies list.
• Anthropic may be target of “attempted corporate murder,” a judge says.
• Yikes: Growth in corporate investment is now reliant solely on AI.
• Polymarket thinks the war will last until May.

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As I’ve been rewatching HBO’s Silicon Valley, my favorite roast of the first season is the incessant refrain that tech is “making the world a better place.”

But that isn’t always true, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been thinking that I’ve spent a lot of time covering the capital and companies, but not nearly enough time writing about the world this technology creates. I was especially thinking that as I read my colleague Kristin Stoller’s new feature about tech addiction, published this week. It’s a story that spans years and companies. Case in point:

At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”

At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”

Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction. 

Though some say tech addiction doesn’t exist, evidence is mounting that the growing string of legal cases against startups like Character and giants like Meta, Alphabet-owned YouTube, and TikTok could create an unambiguous inflection point.

Read more about who gets addicted—and whether tech is approaching a “Big Tobacco” moment here.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady profiles Centene CEO Sarah London.
• The big leadership story: CFOs plan AI-related layoffs—but not as many as you might think.
• The markets: Up globally on reports of an Iran breakthrough
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Sarah London, the youngest-ever female CEO to run a Fortune 500 company, isn’t leading from a place of comfort. As federal cuts and new regulations reshape U.S. health care, the chief executive of Centene, the country’s biggest Medicaid insurer, is reimagining what it means to innovate in a constrained environment. Her playbook is less about bold spending and more about disciplined reinvention; she’s streamlining operations, shedding noncore businesses, and using predictive algorithms to help manage care for vulnerable populations. At a moment when “the country is getting poorer and sicker,” as she puts it, London’s version of innovation isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about using technology to keep the social safety net intact.

Centene grew revenue almost 20% last year amid drastic cuts to federal Medicaid spending that have inflicted pain on the bottom line and customers. That hasn’t stopped London from focusing on programs that tie affordable housing to health care or leveraging AI to identify and deliver a suite of services to members with high-risk pregnancies.

“There is an opportunity in this moment to innovate and deliver within the construct of these programs,” she told me. “We’re harnessing this moment to transform and simplify the organization, to lean into our mission and the levers that are going to fundamentally change how we power that mission.”

Companies that stand the test of time tend to draw on their strong foundation to lean into the future. They’re focused on what’s ahead without ignoring the value that comes with expertise, relationships and brand. Case in point: the pioneering giants on Fortune’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies list, out this morning. As many of you know, we’re holding a Fortune 500 Innovation Forum in Detroit on Nov. 17 and 18 to look at the next 250 years of American innovation. It’s part of a broader push to dig into the issues and opportunities around innovation, and to highlight the companies that are shaping what’s next. Get in touch with me or find out more here if you’re interested in joining us.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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Millions of Americans don’t have enough saved for retirement — and millions more don’t know where to start. With President Trump recently pointing to Australia’s retirement system as a potential U.S. blueprint, this is a rare moment when reform momentum is actually building. Policymakers should seize it.

Consider a young worker starting their first job today. Recent legislation means they’re likely automatically enrolled in a 401(k) from day one — real progress. But fast-forward a few decades: that same worker may have cycled through six employers, accumulated a tangle of small accounts, and still face the question that haunts millions of Americans: Will this be enough?

That story is increasingly the norm. Longer lifespans, less linear careers, a rising cost of living, and tighter government budgets are redefining what retirement security even means. The 2019 SECURE Act and its 2022 successor made meaningful progress — but gaps in longevity protection, savings adequacy, and coverage persist. With 401(k) and 403(b) plans now the backbone of retirement for most Americans, the case for deeper reform is urgent.

The Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index — which benchmarks retirement systems across 50+ markets on adequacy, sustainability, and integrity — makes the problem concrete. The U.S. scores well on integrity but consistently lags on adequacy and sustainability, exactly where reform could have the most immediate impact.

The result: the U.S. sits in the middle of the global rankings while countries like Australia lead the pack. Without reform, more Americans risk reaching retirement without enough income — or the tools to access what they’ve saved.

Where reform is needed most

1. Turn savings into income that lasts

Saving is only half the challenge. The harder problem is converting a 401(k) balance into reliable income that doesn’t run out. Too often, workers change jobs and cash out small accounts rather than rolling them over — permanently shrinking their retirement nest egg.

With the U.S. population over 60 projected to double by 2050, longevity risk isn’t abstract. Simpler rollover processes and clearer disclosures would go a long way toward helping workers preserve their savings — and plan for a retirement that could last 30 years.

2. Close the coverage gaps

Retirement savings in the U.S. remain deeply uneven. Younger workers, part-timers, and caregivers are the most underserved — and many have little visibility into whether they’re on track.

Three targeted fixes could close much of that gap: automatic reenrollment for workers who previously opted out; extending coverage to workers under 21, building on the SECURE Act’s expansion for part-timers; and special catch-up contributions for caregivers who temporarily leave the workforce. Together, these changes would broaden access and reward the workers most likely to fall behind.

3. Modernize investments — and reduce legal risk

In 2025, the President signed an executive order directing regulators to ease restrictions on private market investments in 401(k) plans — following Australia’s long-standing approach. Giving savers access to private equity, venture capital, and digital assets could improve diversification and returns. But many employers are still waiting on clear guidance around fiduciary safe harbors, liquidity, and fees before they act.

Allowing 403(b) plans — which cover millions of government and nonprofit workers — to invest in collective investment trusts, as 401(k) plans already can, would lower costs and broaden access for an underserved segment of the workforce.

Legal risk is also a growing deterrent. Employer-sponsored plans have faced a surge of litigation in recent years, and policymakers should explore targeted ways to deter frivolous lawsuits while keeping legitimate claims viable.

Pensions still matter

Most new retirement savings now flow into 401(k)s and 403(b)s, but a significant share of existing retirement wealth still sits in traditional defined benefit pensions. Modernizing the system can’t mean abandoning what still works.

Lowering Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) premiums would encourage employers to keep sponsoring DB plans. Greater flexibility in deploying surplus DB assets could also benefit both workers and plan sponsors.

Policymakers should also support DB designs that reduce financial volatility for sponsors — such as pooled employer plans, which would make it easier for smaller organizations to offer a pension at all.

The bottom line

Better retirement policy isn’t about winning a global ranking. It’s about ensuring future generations can retire with dignity — even as careers grow less linear and lifespans grow longer.

The reforms outlined here — expanding lifetime income options, closing coverage gaps, modernizing investment rules, reducing legal risk, and strengthening pension protections — would make the U.S. system more resilient and more fair. The window for action is open. Policymakers shouldn’t let it close.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Goldman Sachs is sounding a cautious note on the U.S. economy, raising its inflation forecast and trimming its growth outlook in response to surging oil prices caused by disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz. But even as recession risks climb, most of Wall Street’s base case remains slower growth — not an outright downturn.

In its weekly U.S. economics update published on Tuesday, Goldman said it now expects Brent crude to average $105 per barrel in March and $115 in April before retreating to $80 by year-end, assuming roughly six weeks of Hormuz supply disruptions. On the back of that revised oil outlook, the bank raised its headline PCE inflation forecast by 0.2 percentage points to 3.1% by December 2026 and nudged its full-year GDP growth estimate down to 2.1%. Goldman also raised its recession probability by 5 percentage points — to 30% — while stressing that a recession is still not its base case.​

One relative reassurance: Goldman does not expect the oil shock to durably unhinge inflation expectations. Even major energy shocks in recent history did not produce lasting shifts in where consumers and businesses expect prices to settle, the bank noted, though it flagged post-pandemic inflation psychology as a risk worth watching.​

Some analysts see even higher recession odds

Opinions across Wall Street diverge meaningfully, with some offering more dramatic warnings than Goldman about a potential recession. JPMorgan’s Bob Michele has warned the Iran war is not merely an inflation “speed bump,” pushing back on the Fed’s own projections and arguing that price pressures could stay sticky well into the second half of the year. EY-Parthenon puts recession odds at 40%, citing cascading effects on LNG infrastructure and refining systems beyond the oil market itself. Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi has argued that recession odds were near even—before war broke out.

But others see the economy’s glass as considerably more than half full. BNP Paribas argues the U.S. is “well-positioned to absorb the shock,” pointing to America’s status as the world’s largest crude producer and net energy exporter — a structural advantage that simply didn’t exist during the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. Higher oil prices redistribute income within the U.S. economy rather than draining it abroad, limiting the macro damage. The U.S. also uses significantly less energy per unit of GDP than in prior decades, blunting the inflationary punch that past supply shocks delivered.

The Fed Walks a fine line

The Federal Reserve held its policy rate steady at 3.5%–3.75% at last week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting — a decision Goldman characterized as “a bit more hawkish than expected”. Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the inflation risk from oil while placing employment and price concerns on equal footing, signaling that rate cuts remain possible but are not imminent. Goldman still expects two 25-basis-point cuts in September and December, bringing rates to 3–3.25% by year-end, and pushed back on market pricing that has begun to bake in rate hikes.​

The outcome hinges heavily on one variable: how long the Hormuz disruptions last. A swift de-escalation would allow oil risk premiums to fade and limit economic damage to a few tenths of a percentage point of growth. A prolonged conflict, by contrast, would entrench energy costs, crimp consumer spending, and force the Fed into an increasingly uncomfortable corner. Goldman currently puts that worst-case scenario—severe and sustained—as just that: a tail risk, not a forecast.​​

For now, the base case across most of Wall Street is an economy that slows but holds — with inflation running hotter than the Fed would like, growth below its long-run potential, and the next few months of geopolitical news determining which scenario ultimately wins out.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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Europe is living through its third energy price shock in four years. In 2022, Russia weaponized its gas pipelines. In 2023–24, conflict in the Red Sea disrupted shipping lanes. Now, war in the Middle East has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil has breached $100 a barrel for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stock markets are in freefall. European gas prices have surged roughly 70%. Each time the trigger is different. The vulnerability is always the same: Europe runs on fuel it does not own, shipped through waters it does not control.

Wind and solar cannot be embargoed, blockaded, or shut off by a foreign power. Every terawatt-hour of domestic renewable generation is a terawatt-hour that no adversary can weaponize. Unlike the U.S., Europe has no shale gas. Unlike China, it cannot fall back on cheap domestic coal. The only energy Europe can produce at scale, on its own soil, is renewable electricity. Europe must now become the world’s first Electro-Continent.

This is not only about shielding against the next geopolitical shock. It is about building the foundation for the next industrial era.

The AI Race Is an Energy Race

The IEA projects that global data-center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, reaching roughly 945 terawatt-hours — more than Japan consumes today. The winner of the next industrial revolution will not be the region with the best engineers. It will be the region that can deliver the cheapest, most abundant, fastest-to-deploy power.

Europe is being squeezed from both sides. Industrial electricity prices in the EU are roughly twice those in the U.S. and about 50% higher than in China — a gap that is widening. European founders are already world-class at innovation. But no amount of innovation can overcome a 100% overhead on your primary industrial input.

Both superpowers have understood that energy abundance is a strategic necessity. China invested over $1 trillion in clean energy in 2025. The U.S. enjoys the double advantage of cheap domestic shale gas and the massive capital commitments of Big Tech. As former ECB President Mario Draghi’s landmark competitiveness report made clear, Europe’s industrial base is bleeding out because of energy costs. If Europe wants to host the next generation of €100 billion companies, it must fix the foundation.

Renewables Won the Market. Now Let Them Build.

The good news: renewable energy prices have dropped more than 90% over the past decade. In 2025, over 90% of new renewable capacity was cheaper than the fossil fuel alternative. Clean energy is the cheapest and fastest form of new generation available.

Wind and solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in 2025. Yet the gas tail still wags the dog. A single dip in wind and hydro output last year forced higher gas burn, pushing the EU’s fossil gas import bill up 16%. Every remaining molecule of gas dependency is a transmission mechanism for the next foreign crisis.

China is becoming the world’s first electro-state — making cheap, domestically produced electricity its primary competitive advantage. But Europe has something China does not: the density, grid interconnection, and integrated single market to do this at continental scale. The EU’s Clean Industrial Deal, launched in February 2025, places renewables at the heart of industrial strategy. The vision is correct. The execution is failing.

The Permits Problem Is a Security Problem

While Brussels sets the right direction, member states are undermining it. Last November, Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea — projects with a combined capacity of nearly 32 gigawatts. That single decision wiped out €47 billion of private investment.

Across Europe, legislators are still listening to incumbent energy companies that need policy life-support to survive, rather than backing technologies that already stand on their own in open markets. Renewables may have needed an early push. They do not need one now.

Energy permits must be treated as national security priorities — with the same urgency as defense procurement. If a wind farm permit takes eight years, but a war can close a strait in eight hours, the permitting system is a strategic liability.

You cannot fight a trade war with China by starving your own industries of power. You cannot win the AI race with the world’s most expensive electricity. You cannot build €100 billion companies on a foundation that cracks every time a foreign government closes a shipping lane.

Europe does not need more government handouts to win this race. It needs government permissions. The capital is there. Corporate giants are desperate for green electrons. Pension funds and infrastructure investors are ready to deploy. What is missing is not money or technology. It is the political willingness to let them build.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is warning the U.S. is moving more like Europe when it comes to defense.

Speaking Tuesday at the Hill and Valley Forum, which aims to bring together leaders from Washington and Silicon Valley, the longtime JPMorgan leader who led his bank through the 2008 housing crisis, said he was “deeply frustrated” with certain policies in the U.S. that he said set the country back. 

One example is the web of rules, compliance procedures, and the involvement of Congress that he said slows the procurement process for the Department of War (DoW) and prevents it from being adaptable in times of conflict that require quick pivots.

“We’ve become like Europe, we’re unable to move and change—change budgeting, change procurement. You know, let people do what they need to do.” 

One suggestion Dimon thinks would help improve the country’s red tape? Bringing on more private companies to get involved with making military equipment. To be sure, private companies are already participating actively in the U.S. defense industrial base. Although companies such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and RTX (previously Raytheon) have dominated military contracts for years, the U.S. government is increasingly looking to newcomers such as SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril for their tech capabilities. Earlier this month, the DoW awarded Anduril a five-to-ten year enterprise contract worth up to $20 billion, which is similar to one it would sign with a major defense contractor. 

Dimon added that building up the nation’s military is especially important as it faces geopolitical issues including the threat of a conflict with China.

Relations between the U.S. and China have been icy in recent years, as the two countries seek to dominate AI. The world’s second largest economy has in some years grown its GDP at nearly double the rate of the U.S. At the same time, a trade war between the two economies has seen Washington impose sweeping export controls on advanced chips in an effort to limit China’s technological advancement, while China weaponizes its rare Earth resources with its own export controls on the materials that are essential to building semiconductors, but also advanced weapons systems and electric vehicles. 

Dimon noted that U.S. companies made a mistake over the past decades in moving their supply chain to China just to produce a good for “$10 less.” This poses a major threat as China’s economy continues growing at a faster rate than that of the U.S. and threatens to overtake the country. Dimon also noted the risk that China may invade Taiwan is likely—something that is particularly concerning as Taiwan supplies 90% of the world’s most advanced microchips.

Still, the U.S. should also emulate China to an extent in the sectors where it has made significant progress, including shipbuilding, car manufacturing, and battery production.

“We should look at our own shortcomings then and then be prepared if they ever become an adversary to, you know, to face off against them,” he said.

Dimon’s comments come as the price tag of the Iran war has skyrocketed with the Pentagon last week reportedly requesting $200 billion from Congress on top of its existing budget, which exceeds $800 billion. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said “that number could move” as the Department of War seeks to replenish munition stockpiles and prepare “for what we may have to do in the future.”

Later in the interview Tuesday, Dimon painted a picture of “permanent peace” in the Middle East partly thanks to the threat of capital flight. In the process he became one of the first CEOs of a major company to foresee a potential positive impact stemming from the Iran war.

“There’s a lot of foreign direct investment going there, but it won’t go there if  things like this are taking place,” Dimon said of the Gulf countries who are particularly affected by the conflict. “They’ve realized no, they need permanent peace. They can’t have neighbors like lob ballistic missiles into their data centers.”

The JPMorgan CEO said he was optimistic about the war, saying it may lead to a lasting peace in the region in the long term because of the change in “attitude” among Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The Iran conflict, now in its fourth week, has made these countries realize they need peace to protect the influx of capital that has helped their economies grow and diversify over the past decade.

The Gulf states have tried for years to diversify their economies to prevent them from being entirely oil dependent, and have brought in billions in foreign investment in the process. Still, the Iran war has once again highlighted the instability of their region. Strikes by Iran on military targets as well as Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain have spooked investors who have over years flooded the region with investment, especially in low-tax emirates in the UAE like Dubai and Abu Dhabi that have marketed themselves as safe, globally connected business hubs.

While some skeptics of the Iran war have said the country didn’t pose any imminent threat to the U.S., Dimon disagreed, labeling the country “a terrorist threat.” Iran-backed militias and the proxy conflicts Iran has waged in the region have been responsible for the death of hundreds of Americans, according to the Pentagon. During the Iraq war, the White House says Iran-backed militants killed 603 American troops, along with dozens of others in the years since the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and into the present day.

“They’ve been murderers of Americans and other people for 40 or 50 years. That’s not a threat. That’s actual killing,” Dimon said.

Dimon’s comments come as President Donald Trump on Sunday said the U.S. would not strike Iranian energy infrastructure and power plants for five days as U.S. envoys negotiate with their counterparts in Iran. 

While it’s unclear whether these talks, which Iran has denied, will yield any peace accord, Dimon said he is hopeful the conflict will bring about better prospects for the whole of the Middle East.

“I think the Iran war makes it a better chance in the long run,” Dimon said. “It’s probably riskier in the short run, because we don’t know the outcome of it, but Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, America, Israel, all want permanent peace in the Middle East.”

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Today, job seekers often send hundreds of applications into the void of applicant tracking systems, where their materials may never be seen by human eyes. For many, the job search has become a full-time job in itself. Some, though, are outsourcing it. That’s where the reverse recruiter comes in.

Reverse Recruiting Agency helps find, apply to, and secure jobs on behalf of the worker, not the company. It charges $1,500 a month for their services (though clients get their first-month fee refunded), plus 10% of the job seeker’s first-year salary upon job acceptance. That $1,500 gets you personalized résumé editing services, 50 to 100 applications per week, career coaching, interview prep, and several other job readiness services, according to the company’s website.

Today, more than half of U.S. job seekers are spending six months or more shooting out résumés before landing a job, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Confidence survey. Some people have even reported applying to hundreds of jobs before landing a single interview. Long-term unemployment rate, or those lacking work for 27 weeks or longer, is also on the rise, at about 25.6% as of last month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s putting pressure on folks to get a job.

Alex Shinkarovsky, founder of Reverse Recruiting Agency, said in an interview with Fortune that this company has helped 45 clients so far, with 25 more active clients. Most clients, he describes, are high-performers coming from a range of backgrounds, from data science, program management, and engineering. Even a top exec from Apple has consulted for his help, he said. 

“Most of the people who are hiring us now are awesome candidates, as in, they’re not struggling now,” Shinkarovsky told Fortune.

Although the company helps to submit 50 to 100 applications per week, Shinkarovsky said still may not be enough to beat the odds. On average, he said his company submits 863 applications per client before they land a job offer. For difficult career searches—those facing visa complications, ageism, or location constraints—it takes up to 924 applications.

Still, Shinkarovsky said his company is slashing the time it takes to find a role in half. The average time it takes to score a job offer is about 12.7 weeks for the standard role switch with the company’s help, compared to 24.3 weeks across the market, according to a Reverse Recruiting Agency analysis.

The perils of a job market rife with AI

The rules of the game are changing, shifting the knowledge required to score an interview. The logical conclusion of a job market that prizes volume over quality is a flood of AI-generated résumés and cover letters. And recruiting experts say that’s become the norm. In fact, the whole job search ecosystem is rife with AI, as applicants submit AI-generated materials and recruiters use AI to sort through applications, many of whom are ghosting applicants because of the technology.

“It’s fundamentally broken,” Shinkarovsky said. The founder clarified the company’s workers don’t use AI to submit applications on behalf of their clients, save for some résumé optimization functions as well as outreach on LinkedIn.

He suggests that Congress could address the issue by implementing a verification system for job seekers, similar to a voter ID, to add friction to the application funnel. “That would cut out almost all the slop right away,” he said.

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When Jensen Huang praised OpenClaw last week, the ripples reached Hong Kong within hours. Shares in MiniMax and Zhipu AI jumped more than 20% after the Nvidia CEO declared in a CNBC interview that the rapidly spreading open‑source agent framework was “definitely the next ChatGPT.” 

Foreign investors once dismissed China’s AI push as a constrained, second-tier effort. Yet now, strategists argue that the country may be better positioned for AI, thanks to cheaper power, growing capital spending, and a swarm of open-source developers. Those same analysts are also wondering whether the U.S. AI boom, after years of sky-high valuations and data center spending, is running out of steam.

“We’ve actually reduced our exposure to U.S. tech,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategist, told Fortune at the investment bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong last week. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation.”

“China basically has unlimited access to cheap energy, whereas the U.S. has this massive energy bottleneck,” Jefferies’s global head of equity research Chris Wood said to Fortune. 

The country will have roughly 400 gigawatts of spare power capacity by 2030, equal to three times what the world will need to meet data center demands, according to Goldman Sachs. In contrast, the U.S. is struggling with aging infrastructure and a lack of generating capacity, leading to spiking power prices in data center states like Virginia. 

In China’s western provinces like Ningxia and Gansu, electricity can cost as little as five cents per kilowatt-hour, versus 25 cents in Beijing or Shanghai, or 40 cents in some parts of the U.S, according to Baidu’s chief finance officer Henry He, who noted for attendees that power can make up about 35% of inference costs.

China’s manufacturing sector also helps its AI sector, particularly in applications that interact with the physical world. For example, He noted that Baidu’s Apollo robotaxis can charge one yuan ($0.15) per mile and still be operating at break-even in the city of Wuhan.

In the U.S., robotaxis manufacturers have had to choose between LiDAR sensors or visual cameras due to cost. But He argued that, in China, “we don’t need to make that difficult choice,” as both are affordable thanks to Chinese manufacturing. 

The same logic extends to autonomous aviation. EHang, for example, relies on a domestic supply chain that can provide affordable batteries and electronic components to build its aerial vehicles. “We have an extremely competitive component cost, and we can turn it into a very competitive selling price,” CFO Conor Yang explained to Fortune. 

A peaking U.S. AI cycle?

Wood’s optimism in China is contrasted by his questions about the U.S. The Jefferies strategist thinks that investors are starting to ask questions about the amount of money being spent in the U.S. on AI infrastructure, and expects U.S. capital spending to peak this year.

In an interview with Fortune, Wood described the U.S. private equity market as suffering from “a giant case of financial constipation,” with tens of thousands of portfolio companies waiting to IPO. In addition, private equity has recently poured money into the software sector, right as AI now threatens to erode their business models.

Private credit has been tested since the bankruptcy of auto parts supplier First Brands Group last year, which spooked retail investors and pushed some asset managers, like Blue Owl, to restrict withdrawals. This year’s “AI scare trade” has only made matters worse as retail investors try to pull their capital from fund managers, leading other fund managers, like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley, to also cap withdrawals. 

Monetization is still difficult

Still, China’s AI companies may struggle to charge much for their products in the country’s hyper-competitive environment, where labs compete on both price and performance.

“It is very difficult for a single company to always [have] a top model globally,” He, from Baidu, said. (Baidu, an early mover in the space with its ERNIE model, has since lost ground to Chinese rivals like Alibaba and DeepSeek)

Startup MiniMax, for example, generated $79 million in revenue last year, yet reported a $1.8 billion net loss. (Investors don’t seem to care, driving shares up by over six times since the startup’s IPO in early January.)

The problem for AI labs, whether in the U.S. or in China, is that any lead in performance could disappear in a matter of months, as other labs catch up by offering models with near-frontier-level performance, often on an open-source basis.

Wood, from Jefferies, thinks that large language model providers will end up like utilities: capital-intensive, commoditized, and unlikely to earn sustainable returns. Instead, he argued that China’s AI boom “is going to be in applications—cheap applications—made possible by open‑source models and very cheap power.”

Agentic AI could be the next battleground. Chinese companies large and small are quickly rolling out their own OpenClaw frameworks, and local governments are offering subsidies to “one-person companies” building their own AI agent startups. 

Chinese tech companies already have strong consumer platforms to put AI agents in front of users. Tencent’s WeChat, for example, has over 1.3 billion monthly active users and hosts millions of mini programs spanning commerce, transport, lifestyle, and finance. 

“We’re going to see some interesting innovations in China. This is the only area where the U.S. and the West are going to be behind,” Michael Bruck, founding partner at 71 Capital, told Fortune. 

“Is it a huge stretch of imagination to think the next version of a mini program is going to be an agent built into WeChat?” 

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Almost a year ago, when QVC Group partnered with TikTok to launch the first-ever nonstop live shopping streams in the U.S., the company’s CEO called the move “our bet.” The subtext was clear: It was a bid to revive the shopping TV channel’s languishing business and rejuvenate its audience.

The rationale for QVC, best known for its namesake channel QVC and HSN (once known as the Home Shopping Network), was simple: to adapt its multi-billion dollar business to shoppers’ new habits. That has become urgent as TV generally has lost its hold on viewers, particularly in cable and broadcast television. Between 2018 and 2024, QVC’s and HSN’s main channels each lost almost half (44% and 47%, respectively) of the U.S. homes they reached. The company is heavily indebted and several media outlets reported last month that it was looking into ways to restructure its debt. Its CEO, David Rawlinson said in November that “returning our company to growth continues to be difficult.”

“What we realized is that our form of getting close to the customer was going to have to shift because where the consumer was spending their time was shifting pretty dramatically,” QVC Group chief business development officer Brian Beitler told Fortune at a panel at the eTail conference last month in Palm Springs, Calif.

Social commerce is behind about $150 billion in U.S. consumer spending right now and QVC wants in. Beitler sees scrolling on TikTok as analogous to surfing TV channels. When QVC started in the 1980’s, it succeeded by grabbing people’s attention as they channel-surfed past QVC or HSN and then clicked right back when they saw a product or moment that grabbed them.

“We could interrupt you with really entertaining and interesting live content about products with really unique and interesting personalities,” Beitler said. It’s a proposition that sounds strikingly similar to that of social media today—and to his mind, TikTok, with its 170 million U.S. users, allows for that in an up-to-date, tantalizing way. It was a more interesting partner than YouTube and Instagram, which are largely advertising-driven and don’t offer the direct “shoppability” consumers find on TikTok.

Last year, a few months after launching the TikTok partnership, QVC, a publicly traded company controlled by longtime media mogul John Malone, said some 74,000 TikTok creators had featured QVC products on their shoppable videos and livestreams, but Beitler declined to provide an updated number, saying it was better to focus on partners looking to build a sustainable sales channel.

QVC has clear parameters for the ideal partners to showcase its products on TikTok. “They should come across as having a level of expertise and a level of knowledge,” Beitler said, adding that authenticity in the storytelling is key.

But to be successful, he said, brands might need an attitude shift on how they work with collaborators. “The most difficult thing for brands and retailers, for those of us in this room, is you have to relinquish a bit of control,” said Beitler. “You’ll give them information on the product and trust them then to use that in an authentic and high-trust way with their audiences.”

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Origin, a London-based startup building an AI-powered platform to help multinational companies manage their employee benefits, has raised $30 million in new venture capital funding.

The funding, which the company is calling an extended Series A+ round, brings the total amount of money Origin has raised in the past 12 months to more than $50 million.

The latest investment is being led by Notion Capital, which also participated in Origin’s initial Series A. Felix Capital, which led the earlier round, Acadian Ventures, and all other existing investors are also participating, the company said. It also said that it had secured “additional growth funding” from HSBC Innovation Banking U.K. alongside the new venture round.

Origin’s angel investors include Paul Daugherty, the former chief technology and innovation officer of Accenture; Jacqui Canney, the chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow; and Tudor Havriliuc, the former vice president of human resources at Meta, who held the role from 2010 to 2022.

The company declined to provide its valuation following the latest funding, but said it was higher valuation than its valuation following the initial Series A.

Origin was founded by Chris Bruce and Pete Craghill, the leadership team behind Darwin, a benefits technology software company, originally called Thomsons Online Benefits, that was acquired by Mercer in 2016. At the time of its acquisition, Darwin held an 80% market share of the non-U.S. global benefits administration market, according to Bruce.

Bruce told Fortune that the idea for Origin came out of a discussion he had with Craghill in the summer of 2023 in which they both observed how advances in AI and large language models could now address a problem they had tried and failed to fully solve 15 years earlier: giving big companies a clear picture of what they spend on employee benefits globally.

“It simply was not possible without AI,” Bruce said.

For most organizations, benefits are their second-largest cost, but they lack visibility into what they are spending. Bruce said one client’s chief financial officer told him the company believed it was spending roughly $750 million on benefits but had no way to verify that figure. “I’ve got visibility on every budget line in the organization, with the exception of benefits,” Bruce recalled the CFO saying. 

The root of the problem, Craghill said, is that benefits data in multinational organizations is scattered across PDFs, insurance policies, vendor platforms, and local documents in dozens of languages. “You had all this unstructured data around the world, and there was no solution to it,” Craghill said. “It was always a human problem.” He said Origin spent its first 18 months focused on cracking the data ingestion challenge, learning how to assess the quality and completeness of wildly inconsistent source materials.

Origin’s platform, powered by an AI engine the company calls Cuido, ingests and structures that fragmented data—from policies, contracts, renewals, broker reports, and vendor platforms—into a single, queryable system of record. Using the platform, HR executives can track benefit spending and usage, as well as handling renewals, policy reviews, and governance workflows.

Employees can also query Origin’s platform to ask questions about what benefits they have available to them. In multinational companies with complex benefits offerings in different geographies, getting an answer to this seemingly simple question can often take days. Now, it takes just minutes.

While that is good for employees, the real payoff for using Origin’s platform is that it helps companies rationalize their benefits spending, reducing duplication, or helping them consolidate providers, according to Bruce. The company whose CFO estimated he was spending $750 million annually on benefits, now expects to save around $75 million by using Origin’s platform, Bruce said. Another of Origin’s clients consolidated 13 local insurance policies into a single regional plan, achieving a 20% cost saving, according to the company.

Origin’s Cuido platform was co-created in partnership with several large multinational employers who serve as Origin’s anchor customers, including Pfizer, Comcast, and BP. Bruce said the company went out to 11 major multinationals two years ago, shared its vision, and asked them to sign on as paying co-creators. Seven of those 11 agreed. A large technology company that initially declined in order to build a similar system internally ended up joining Origin 10 months later after abandoning its own effort, Bruce said.

Origin currently has about 75 employees and go-to-market teams in both the United States and the United Kingdom and Europe. The company uses what Bruce calls “a value-based pricing model” that is tied to the complexity of a client’s organization, including the number of countries in which it operates.

Origin’s new funding will be used to deepen integrations into existing human capital management platforms, such as those from Workday and Oracle’s Peoplesoft, so benefits information is accessible where employees already work, and to expand Origin’s partner capabilities for brokers, consultants, and insurers.

Andy Leaver, operating partner at Notion Capital, said in a statement that his firm was doubling down on Origin because of the team’s speed and execution. “Benefits are one of the last major enterprise functions still left behind by the digitisation wave of the last 25 years,” Leaver said. “AI now makes it possible to build a true system of record and intelligence for benefits.”

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Lawyers for the Department of War and Anthropic sparred in a California federal court on Tuesday over Anthropic’s challenge to the Pentagon labeling it a “supply-chain risk” to national security and banning all government contractors from using the company’s sweeping AI tools. Anthropic is seeking an injunction barring enforcement of that order.

The case—which involves a historic first in that the Department of Defense, informally renamed the Department of War (DOW) by the Trump administration, labeled a U.S.-led  business as a supply-chain risk to national security—is rooted in a contract negotiation that escalated quickly. The DOW wanted to add a blanket “all lawful use” clause to its contracts with the AI firm so the military could use Anthropic’s Claude tool for any legal purpose.

The presiding judge in the case expressed doubts about the sweeping authority the Pentagon had wielded in the case. Federal District Judge Rita Lin said she would issue a ruling on Anthropic’s legal challenge “in the next few days,” and spent Tuesday’s hearing asking the parties questions about their disagreement.

A heated dispute over how to use AI

During contract negotiations with the Pentagon in February, Anthropic balked at the possibility of the military using Claude for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, and attempted to insist on provisions expressly forbidding such use. Anthropic, led by founder Dario Amodei, said it hasn’t thoroughly tested those uses and doesn’t believe they work safely. The DOW claimed those guardrails were unacceptable and that military commanders need latitude to make determinations on missions. 

On Feb. 27, President Trump posted on Truth Social directing “EVERY” federal agency to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE” all use of Anthropic’s tools. That same day in a post on X, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth labeled Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” and said “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” The risk label is usually reserved for nation states, foreign adversaries, and other threats. 

Anthropic followed by filing a lawsuit on March 9, alleging the government “retaliated against it” for expressing its views on safety guardrails and had violated the First Amendment in doing so. It also claimed the government violated the process laid out in the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process.

In briefs in the case and in court on Tuesday, the government said the administration’s actions were in response to Anthropic’s refusal to implement certain terms in its contract, and argued free speech wasn’t at issue in the case. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton said the government has unrestricted power to determine which companies it will contract with. Hamilton said Anthropic’s conduct had raised concerns that future software updates could be used as a “kill switch” to keep the AI from functioning in military operations.

District Judge Rita F. Lin was skeptical, and in her opening statements described the case as a “fascinating public policy debate” over Anthropic’s position versus the government’s military needs, but said her role wasn’t to “decide who is right in that debate.”

Rather, Lin said the real question to be decided by the court was whether the government “violated the law” when it went beyond just not using Anthropic’s AI services and finding a more permissible AI vendor to work with. 

“After Anthropic went public with this contracting dispute, defendants seemed to have a pretty big reaction to that,” Lin said. 

The reactions included banning Anthropic from ever having a government contract—excluding other entities like the National Endowment for the Arts from using it to design a website; Hegseth’s directive that anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military sever their commercial relationship with Anthropic; and designating Anthropic as a supply-chain risk. 

“What is troubling to me about these reactions is that they don’t really seem to be tailored to the stated national security concern,” said Lin. If the concern is about chain of command, DOW could just stop using Claude and go on its way, she said.  

“One of the amicus briefs used the term ‘attempted corporate murder,’” she added. “I don’t know if it’s murder, but it looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic. And specifically my concern is whether Anthropic is being punished for criticizing the government’s contracting position in the press.”

Parties rally behind Anthropic

The amicus, friend-of-the-court, briefs in the case have drawn a variety of voices including from Microsoft, retired military officers, and engineers and researchers from OpenAI and Google. Nearly all support Anthropic’s position seeking an injunction of the supply-chain risk designation.

The brief Lin referred to came from investors and the “Freedom Economy Business Association.” The brief referred to an X post written by Dean Ball, Trump’s former senior policy advisor for AI and emerging tech. 

“Nvidia, Amazon, Google will have to divest from Anthropic if Hegseth gets his way,” Ball wrote. “This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States.”

The American Federation of Government Employees, a union of 800,000 federal workers, said in its amicus brief that the Trump administration had a pattern of using national security concerns as a pretext for retaliation against free speech.

Microsoft wrote that a ban on Anthropic would hurt its own business, and could chill future defense-industry investment and engagement with AI. 

The Human Rights and Technology Justice Organization brief didn’t take a position who should win in court, but argued against militarized AI broadly, and stating that its use could lead to catastrophic human rights risks.  

Lin said she’ll issue an opinion this week. 

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Moldova’s Parliament voted on Tuesday to impose a state of emergency in the country’s energy sector after Russian strikes on neighboring Ukraine’s energy grid disconnected a key power line linking Moldova to Romania.

The overnight strikes triggered the disconnection of the high-voltage Isaccea-Vulcanesti power line, which links southern Moldova to EU member Romania, after which Moldovan authorities urged citizens to consume electricity “rationally” during peak hours while repairs were underway.

Seventy-two lawmakers in the 101-seat legislature approved the measure that will last for 60 days. No one voted against and 18 abstained.

“What is happening in the energy sector today is not an accident,” said Moldovan Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu. “Russia’s attacks on the civilian energy infrastructure in Ukraine represent a war crime, but also an attack on us, here in the Republic of Moldova … Russia is the only one responsible for this.”

The state of emergency will begin on Wednesday. It will allow authorities to “act faster: mobilize additional resources, protect critical infrastructure and, if necessary, take additional measures to limit the effects of the crisis,” Munteanu added. “We remain vigilant and act for the safety of every citizen … This is not a measure of panic, it’s a measure of responsibility.”

Moldova’s Soviet-era energy systems remain interconnected with Ukraine, and the country has suffered periodic outages since Russia fully invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moldova’s energy minister Dorin Junghietu said estimates to repair the damaged power line is around five to seven days.

Moscow has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, such as dams and river ports, throughout the full invasion. The impact of the war next door has reverberated across Moldova, a former Soviet republic with EU candidate status, since the full invasion began.

Last week, tens of thousands of Moldovans were left without water after another Russian strike on a hydroelectric plant in Ukraine resulted in oil polluting a major river that flows through both countries.

The Ukrainian plant is situated about 15 kilometers (9 miles) upstream from Moldova’s northern border with Ukraine and supplies water to about 80% of Moldova’s population of about 2.5 million. In January, Moldova experienced major power outages, including in the capital, Chisinau, after a disruption to a power line from Ukraine caused a drop in voltage.

Moldovan President Maia Sandu blamed Moscow directly on Tuesday, saying that “Russia continues to deliberately undermine the security of the Republic of Moldova and endanger the lives of our citizens.”

“After the bombing of the Ukrainian hydroelectric power plant … tonight, a new brutal attack led to the disconnection of the Isaccea-Vulcanesti line, which in certain periods provides 60-70% of our electricity consumption,” she wrote on Facebook. “All these are not accidents, but deliberate actions of Russia to weaken and leave Moldova in the dark.”

Russia has repeatedly denied it is trying to destabilize Moldova.

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The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled.

The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century.

The existence of this secret agreement wasn’t even publicly confirmed until 2016, when Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives. Other OPEC members had followed Riyadh’s lead in the years since, locking in the dollar as the indispensable currency of the modern world. The arrangement had a name only economists used: the “petrodollar” system. It was America’s greatest secret weapon—and today, in the churning waters of the Persian Gulf, it faces its most serious threat since its creation.

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The Chokepoint That Moves the World

The Strait of Hormuz is a sliver of water barely 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, separating Iran from Oman. It does not look like the axis of the global economy on a map. But in 2024, roughly 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products passed through it every day—about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption and approximately 25% of all seaborne oil trade on Earth.

Qatar and the UAE rely on the strait for virtually all of their LNG exports, representing about 20% of global LNG trade. The bulk of the crude leaving the strait heads to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian markets, which absorb the overwhelming majority of Hormuz volumes. When Iran slammed shut this door, it didn’t just disrupt shipping lanes. It placed maximum stress on the architecture of dollar dominance at its most physical chokepoint.

For weeks, President Trump has scrambled to respond. He issued a 48-hour ultimatum threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Tehran did not reopen the strait. Iran countered by threatening to mine the Persian Gulf and target American energy infrastructure in the region. Trump then postponed his deadline amid what the White House described as diplomatic progress—a face-saving maneuver that former Defense Secretary James Mattis warned could ultimately cede the strait to Tehran’s influence. “You’d see a tax for every ship that goes through,” Mattis said during the CERAweek by S&P Global conference, as reported by Politico.

The administration has cycled through a list of increasingly desperate options, from building a naval coalition—with Trump saying he’d approached “about seven” countries—to a reported proposal to wind down the conflict without resolving the Hormuz closure. As of Monday, Trump told CNBC: “We are very intent on making a deal.”

The $39 Trillion Liability No One Is Talking About

While the gunboat diplomacy dominates the headlines, the more existential danger may be unfolding in the bond market. The U.S. national debt crossed $39 trillion on March 18, 2026, a milestone reached just weeks into the war in Iran. The speed of accumulation is staggering, and the timing could not be worse: interest costs on the debt are projected to become the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget over coming decades, and the U.S. has already suffered credit downgrades from all three major ratings agencies — S&P in 2011, Fitch in 2023, and Moody’s in May 2025.

The reason this matters geopolitically—not just fiscally—goes back to that 1974 handshake. The petrodollar system created a perpetual buyer for U.S. Treasury bonds in the form of oil-exporting nations. The mechanism was elegant in its simplicity: oil exporters accumulated vast dollar surpluses and parked them in U.S. Treasuries, which Washington was only too happy to supply. Saudi Arabia alone held $149.5 billion in U.S. Treasury securities as recently as December 2025 — a figure that, notably, rose by $12 billion over the course of last year, even as Riyadh declined to formally renew the original petrodollar agreement. That recycling loop is what allowed Washington to borrow cheaply, run persistent deficits, and still maintain the world’s reserve currency.

In 1965, French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was widely credited with a memorable criticism of the Bretton Woods system that predated the petrodollar regime as an “exorbitant privilege” enjoyed by America, with the U.S. dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency. In the 1970s, once President Richard Nixon ended Bretton Woods by decoupling the dollar from gold, that privilege was revived in oil and debt, requiring every country on Earth to accumulate dollars simply to buy oil, and then reinvest those dollars back into American debt. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, a heterodox economist whose work sits outside mainstream consensus but who captures something real about the system’s coercive logic, calls this “the global minotaur,” likening the U.S. to the ancient king of Crete who held international trade captive to tribute that would feed the monster within his labyrinth.

The unfolding crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is exposing America’s privilege as a vulnerability. The speaker of Iran’s parliament delivered a warning this week that rattled bond traders: financial institutions backing the U.S. military budget were “legitimate targets,” and buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds were purchasing “an attack on your headquarters and assets.” It was theatrical. It was also a signal—that America’s $39 trillion debt load could become a pressure point in an escalating conflict.

Bernard CHARLON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

The De-Dollarization Accelerant

Even before Iran closed the strait, cracks in the petrodollar system were visible—though economists caution that “cracks” is very different from “collapse.” The U.S. dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen to roughly 56.9% as of Q3 2025, its lowest level since 1995 and down from a peak of 72% in 2001, according to IMF COFER data. That is a real, multi-decade structural decline. But here is the critical detail most alarming headlines omit: the IMF itself found that roughly 92% of the quarterly decline recorded in mid-2025 was driven by exchange-rate movements—the dollar weakening made non-dollar holdings appear larger—not by central banks actively dumping dollars. (The weakening of the dollar is a whole other story, but Trump’s tariff regime, the exploding national debt and inflation expectations rising are all widely seen as major factors, along with the “Sell America” trade.) There is a meaningful difference between erosion and exodus.

The Chinese yuan, despite years of BRICS advocacy and aggressive promotion of yuan-denominated oil contracts, represents just 2.1% of global reserves. The euro holds second place at roughly 20%, but no single currency has emerged as a credible heir apparent. The Federal Reserve’s own 2025 assessment found that dollar reserve share has been “basically unchanged since 2022,” and that U.S. sanctions on Russia following the Ukraine invasion did not trigger the feared mass reallocation out of dollars.

Saudi Arabia, in fact, chose not to formally renew the petrodollar agreement in June 2024, but the informal, secretive nature of the deal makes it hard to evaluate whether this was a policy change. What the data actually show is that the Saudis still price the overwhelming majority of their oil in dollars; global oil markets remain structurally dollar-denominated; and the network effects that sustain that arrangement—every buyer, every trader, every swap desk globally priced in dollars—do not unwind overnight. As the Hinrich Foundation noted as recently as last week, “talk of de-dollarization is prone to hyperbole,” even as the IMF data confirms a slow, real erosion, because of the weakening dollar.

What the Hormuz crisis means isn’t an end to the petrodollar—it is a threat to accelerate a shift that was previously moving at a glacial pace by raising the geopolitical temperature around a system that had long operated below the radar. Every week the strait stays closed, Asian economies are forced to test alternative supply chains — existing bypass routes like Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline to Fujairah absorb only a fraction of normal Hormuz volumes, meaning the pressure to find workarounds is real — and, at the margin, alternative payment mechanisms. If the crisis is resolved in weeks, those experiments are quickly abandoned. If it drags into months, habits begin to form. The dollar’s dominance is not a cliff—it is a long, slow slope—and the question the Hormuz standoff raises is not whether America falls off the edge today, but whether Trump’s handling of this crisis steepens the gradient.

There is a long slope down from this exorbitant privilege, as there remains no obvious successor to the dollar. And for all of Iran’s saber-rattling, its closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not a sophisticated financial weapon aimed at the dollar’s structural foundations. Rather, it is a desperate act of asymmetric warfare by a regime under unprecedented military pressure—a tactical move, not a strategic master plan.

Economic models analyzing the Hormuz closure project global GDP losses ranging from $330 billion in a short conflict to $2.2 trillion if it drags on. Those are serious numbers. But economic disruption is not the same as dollar displacement. If anything, crisis conditions historically drive a flight to dollars, not away from them, because the deep liquidity and institutional trust underpinning the dollar have no match.

Still, the U.S. should pay attention to its own abuses of that privilege. The consequences of sustained erosion are not abstract. The IMF has flagged that the U.S. is more fiscally imbalanced than its peers and that without reserve currency status, its credit position would be far worse. Foreign demand for U.S. Treasuries could weaken, forcing Washington to offer higher interest rates to attract buyers, which would feed directly into the cost of servicing the $39 trillion debt, creating a feedback loop of deficits and borrowing costs that could spiral well beyond the projections of today’s fiscal models. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget forecasts annual interest payments of $1 trillion and climbing. Add a prolonged oil shock and the ingredients for a genuine fiscal crisis in the medium term are present.

Trump has said he wants a deal. But his usual playbook, what Yale Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld calls his “ten commandments,” a framework of transactional pressure tactics that served him well against conventional partners, is not working with an adversary like Iran with little left to lose. And time is the one thing the architecture of American financial dominance may no longer have in abundance. The petrodollar system was built in secret in 1974 and sustained quietly for 50 years. The Strait of Hormuz has now made its fragility visible to the entire world, whether or not Trump understood that ordering strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure and military targets would expose the financial architecture those bombs were implicitly defending.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are now doing the jobs of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers, but one big difference is that they’re getting paid for it.

The partial government shutdown, entering its 44th day, has left more than 50,000 TSA officers without pay, leading to more than 450 workers quitting and thousands calling out of work, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data. President Donald Trump ordered ICE agents to U.S. airports to guard exits and check IDs to allow TSA agents to more quickly conduct security scans at checkpoints. Trump said ICE personnel can conduct immigration checks and arrests, though it’s not their primary purpose.

These ICE agents will continue to receive pay, even as TSA officers forgo earnings for five weeks, and the disparity has shined light on the pay differences between the two groups carrying out similar tasks. 

According to TSA Career, a nongovernment website, the starting salary for TSA agents is $34,454, with the average officer salary between $46,000 to $55,000. The highest-paid TSA employee earns around $163,000.

Meanwhile, deportation officers are paid between $51,632 and $84,277, according to a job posting on a government website. ICE agents are also eligible for a $50,000 signing bonus, often given in $10,000 per-year increments, putting total pay at nearly double that of a TSA officer.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees and the only one representing TSA workers, claimed ICE agents were unqualified to replace and work alongside TSA officers at airports as they lacked the appropriate training. 

Everett Kelley, president of the union, demanded TSA agents be paid, rather than replaced by other government employees.

“Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe,” Kelley said in a statement on Sunday. “They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.”

Why are ICE agents getting paid while TSA agents are not?

The reason behind why ICE agents continue to be paid while TSA agents work without paychecks comes down to where these two agencies receive their respective funding. 

Despite both being under the umbrella of the DHS, ICE received a share of its funding from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which pumped ICE with about $75 billion over five years. TSA is funded through DHS, which the government ceased funding in February as Democrats demanded reforms on ICE following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

On Tuesday, the Senate closed in on a proposal that would fund much of the DHS, including providing pay to TSA agents. The funding resumption would exclude ICE operations.

The libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, called funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “shutdown proof” in a February report, arguing Republicans “short-circuited the system of checks and balances” by shifting funding for immigration enforcement and defense spending outside of normal appropriations, wrestling in less oversight and greater partisanship in the budgeting process.

But the breakdown of who gets paid and who doesn’t during a government shutdown is a failure of a budget structure that goes beyond a particular administration, according to Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. 

The decision of who is deemed essential and nonessential, for example, depends on department personnel, while salary appropriations can be impacted by lapses in the congressional budget, which occur multiple times a year.

“There is this overarching dysfunction of the entire process,” Bilmes told Fortune during the government shutdown in October 2025. (During this shutdown, law enforcement officers including both ICE and TSA agents received “super checks” as well as overtime pay). “Every time you get into one of these situations—which has been on average four times a year for the last four to five years—there is an arbitrariness in who ends up being paid for their work, who ends up working, who ends up being furloughed.

“The arbitrariness is almost inherent in this dysfunction—a feature as well as being a bug,” she added.

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Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…AI’s reliability problem…Trump sends an AI legislation blueprint to Congress…OpenAI consolidates products into a super app and hires up…AI agents that can improve how they improve…and does your AI model experience emotional distress?

Like many of you, I’ve started playing around with AI agents. I often use them for research, where they work pretty well and save me substantial amounts of time. But so-called “deep research” agents have been available for over a year now, which makes them a relatively mature product in the AI world. I’ve also started trying the new crop of computer-using agents for other tasks. And here, my experience so far is that these agents are highly inconsistent.

For instance, Perplexity’s Computer, which is an agentic harness that works in a virtual machine with access to lots of tools, did a great job booking me a drop-off slot at my local recycling center. (It used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 as the underlying reasoning engine.) But when I asked it to investigate flight options for an upcoming business trip, it failed to complete the task—even though travel booking is one of those canonical use cases that the AI companies are always talking about. What the agent did do is eat up a lot of tokens over the course of 45 minutes of trying.

Last week, at an AI agent demo event Anthropic hosted for government and tech policy folks in London, I watched Claude Cowork initially struggle to run a fairly simple data-sorting exercise in an Excel spreadsheet, even as it later created a sophisticated budget forecasting model with seemingly no problems. I also watched Claude Code spin up a simple, text-based business strategy game I asked it to create that looked great on the surface, but whose underlying game logic didn’t make any sense.

Assessing AI agents’ reliability

Unreliability is a major drawback of current AI agents. It’s a point that Princeton University’s Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan, who cowrote the book AI Snakeoil and now cowrite the “AI As Normal Technology” blog, frequently make. And a few weeks ago they published a research paper, co-authored with four other computer scientists, that tries to think systematically about AI agent reliability and to benchmark leading AI models.

The paper, entitled “Towards a Science of AI Agent Reliability,” notes that most AI models are benchmarked on their average accuracy on tasks, a metric that allows for wildly unreliable performance. Instead, they look at reliability across four dimensions: consistency (if asked to perform the same task in the same way, do they always perform the same?); robustness (can they function even when conditions aren’t ideal?); calibration (do they give users an accurate sense of their certainty?); and safety (when they do mess up, how catastrophic are those mistakes likely to be?).

They further broke these four areas into 14 specific metrics and tested a number of models released in the 18 months prior to late November 2025 (so OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro were the most advanced models tested). They tested the models on two different benchmark tests, one of which is a general benchmark for agentic tasks while the other simulates customer-support queries and tasks. They found that while reliability improved with each successive model release, it did not improve nearly as much as average accuracy figures. In fact, on the general agentic benchmark the rate of improvement in reliability was half that of accuracy, while on the customer service benchmark it was one-seventh!

Reliability metrics depend on the task at hand

Across the four areas of reliability the paper examined, Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro scored the best, both with an overall reliability of 85%. But if you look at the 14 sub-metrics, there was still plenty of reason for concern. Gemini 3 Pro, for example, was poor judging when its answers were likely accurate, at just 52%, and terrible at avoiding potential catastrophic mistakes, at just 25%. Claude Opus 4.5 was the most consistent in its outcomes, but its score was still only 73% consistent. (I would urge you to check out and play around with the dashboard the researchers created to show the results across all the different metrics.) 

Kapoor, Narayanan, and their co-authors are also sophisticated enough to know that reliability is not one-size-fits all metric. They note that if AI is being used to augment humans, as opposed to fully automating tasks, it might be ok for the AI to be less consistent and robust, since the human can act as a backstop. But “for automation, reliability is a hard prerequisite for deployment: an agent that succeeds on 90% of tasks but fails unpredictably on the remaining 10% may be a useful assistant yet an unacceptable autonomous system,” they write. They also note that different kinds of consistency matter in different settings. “Trajectory consistency matters more in domains that demand auditability or process reproducibility, where stakeholders must verify not just what the agent concluded but how it got there,” they write. “It matters less in open-ended or creative tasks where diverse solution paths are desirable.”

Either way, Kapoor, Narayanan, and their co-authors are right to call for benchmarking of reliability and not just accuracy, and for AI model vendors to build their systems for reliability and not just capability. Another study that came out this week shows the potential real-world consequences when that doesn’t happen. AI researcher Kwansub Yun and health consultant Claire Hast looked at what happens when three different AI medical tools are chained together in a system, as might happen in a real health care setting. An AI imaging tool that analyzed mammograms had an accuracy of 90%, a transcription tool that turned an audio recording of a doctor’s examination of a patient into medical notes had an accuracy of 85%, and these were then fed to a diagnostic tool that had a reported accuracy of 97%. And yet when used together their reliability score was just 74%. That means one in four patients might be misdiagnosed!

A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said. But, honestly, I think I’d prefer that hobgoblin to the chaotic gremlins that currently plague our ostensibly big AI brains. 

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Before we get to the news, I want to encourage everyone to read my Fortune colleague Allie Garfinkle’s awesome feature story about Cursor. Cursor is the AI coding startup that as recently as four months ago was a Silicon Valley darling, but which many people now think may be facing an existential threat because of new coding agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, that seemingly obviate the need to use Cursor. Allie’s story lays bare all the contradictions around this company—how it has continued to see record revenue growth, even as many in Silicon Valley now harbor doubts about its survival; how it is racing to train its own coding agents, pivoting from the developer-centric coding interface that made it so popular with programmers in the first place; how its impossibly young CEO Michael Truell works under a portrait of Robert Caro, the biographer whose projects often lasted decades, while Cursor needs to operate in an industry in which a year can feel like a century. Allie’s story is definitely worth the time.

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Tax Day is April 15, three weeks away. If you’ve procrastinated doing your taxes so far, that’s probably for a good reason: After all, the fear of a potential jail sentence for accidentally miscounting something looms over you constantly, turning it into a repetitive, redundant, and reiterative, time-consuming process.

Now, there’s not only a price tag on your returns, but on the effort it takes you to complete them—and it’s costly.

How much does it cost to do your taxes in 2026?

A new analysis from Postal, a virtual mailbox and compliance service, found individual tax returns cost American taxpayers a combined $146 billion in time and out-of-pocket expenses this year—roughly $576 per person in labor hours alone, plus an average of $288 in additional expenses like accountants or software. Reviewing data from the OMB and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the company found Americans will collectively spend 2.1 billion hours on Form 1040 in 2026, or the equivalent of roughly 12 hours per filing—and the IRS expects to receive about 169 million of them.​

Businesses don’t get off any easier. Postal estimates business tax returns cost companies more than $126 billion annually in staffing and expenses, or an average of $9,090 per return. Stack on Form 941—the employer’s quarterly return—and that brings additional costs of $47 billion—with the W-2/W-3 series at $8.8 billion. Even organizations that owe nothing in taxes (those filing to not pay) still absorb more than $6.2 billion in staff and expense burden costs.

“These figures reflect what we see every day,” Max Clarke, cofounder of Postal, told Fortune. “Compliance isn’t difficult because people are careless—it’s difficult because it’s fragmented, deadline-driven, and overwhelmingly manual.”

The numbers are even worse when you consider the labor hours involved in being compliant. The OMB currently lists more than 10,000 forms and documents that individuals and organizations must complete each year. In 2026, federal agencies are projected to receive more than 210 billion responses to compliance forms, requiring an estimated 11.6 billion labor hours. The total federal compliance tab, including out-of-pocket expenses, is nearly $738 billion.

What does tax compliance cost small businesses?

Clarke knows this from the inside. A former M&A attorney and Palantir alum who later built and sold a specialty insurance startup, he started Postal after realizing physical mail—still the primary vehicle for IRS notices and federal agency correspondence—was a massive, unresolved problem for small businesses. His company uses AI to open, scan, and prioritize clients’ mail, flagging what’s urgent and when it’s due. Most small business owners aren’t compliance specialists: They’re people trying to run their companies who suddenly have a 126-page IRS instruction document and a weekend to figure it out.​

“Small businesses and individuals are expected to track dozens of forms and notices across multiple federal agencies, often with little clarity on what’s urgent or what happens if something is missed,” Clarke said. “When deadlines pass, the penalties and follow-on costs can add up fast.”

To quantify how much Americans spend in labor hours each year, the company pulled from an OMB database that legally requires federal agencies to estimate how long each compliance form takes to complete. For cost, Postal cross-referenced those hour estimates against BLS wage data: specifically, average hourly and weekly earnings for all private employees. Multiply the OMB’s estimated hours by those loaded labor costs, add the OMB’s own out-of-pocket expense projections for software, contractors, and external accountants, and you get the total compliance price tag. 

New in 2026: The mailing deadline just got riskier

The physical dimension of tax compliance is easy to overlook in an era when everything is digital. But Clarke points out critical IRS and federal agency notices are still sent by mail—and this year, there’s a new wrinkle. Starting in 2026, the USPS will no longer guarantee same-day postmarks on mailed returns, meaning taxpayers who wait until April 15 to drop their envelope in a mailbox risk having the IRS treat it as late.

“When those documents are delayed, overlooked, or misunderstood, people lose time and money trying to recover,” Clarke said.​ There’s an easy fix: entering the 21st century. 

“Our business shouldn’t have to exist. Everything should be fully digitized. Every business should have one single primary key between itself and the government—and all the information should just be read in there, done seamlessly, electronically, without having to worry about things like, did my Department of Labor form get to me.”

The complexity of the American tax system isn’t exactly accidental. Companies like Intuit and H&R Block—whose business models depend on that 126-page instruction document staying exactly as impenetrable as it is—spent millions lobbying against the IRS’s Direct File program, the agency’s effort to let taxpayers file directly for free. Since 2006, Intuit spent $25.6 million and H&R Block spent $9.6 million on lobbying efforts. Direct File was effectively wound down last year.

That’s not to say Clarke or Postal is against taxes (“taxes are good,” he said, adding people should pay for their use of public goods). Instead, he said this was a system designed around friction, where the friction is profitable for a select few and expensive for everyone else.

“The government already has all the information, because of the way payroll providers are reporting,” he said. “It should be telling me exactly what I owe. It should not be up to me to independently compute that number using a diversity of different sources, and risk fines if I’m wrong.”

But that’s not the system we have. Instead, 169 million Americans will spend an average of 12 hours this spring doing math the government could theoretically do for them—and paying, on average, $864 in time and expenses for the privilege.

“At scale, these 11.6 billion hours represent an enormous opportunity cost for the economy,” Clarke said. “That’s time taken away from building businesses, serving customers, or doing productive work. Until compliance requirements are simplified, the biggest gains will come from reducing friction—making it easier for people to see what they need to do, when they need to do it, and what actually matters.”

You’ll have to do your taxes regardless—the question is just how many hours and how much will it cost you.

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As Nevada regulators continue to investigate safety episodes that have occurred in the tunnels Boring Company is digging below Las Vegas, two Nevada legislators have written a letter to Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, demanding a “comprehensive plan” to address concerns of “structural failures” in the state’s oversight of Elon Musk’s tunneling startup.

The letter, which was shown to Fortune, described “significant concerns about record integrity, administrative accountability, and structural failures within Nevada’s workplace safety system,” and said that “these issues remain unresolved and require clear action from the Executive Branch.”  The letter was sent to the Governor’s Chief of Staff, Ryan Cherry, on Wednesday morning. Assemblymember Howard Watts and Senator Rochelle Nguyen, two Democrats who lead the state’s Assembly Committee on Growth and Infrastructure, signed and sent the letter.

The letter demanded that Gov.Lombardo and his administration conduct an independent review of an incident revealed by Fortune in which a public record had been altered that was part of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigation, and commit to making those findings publicly available. The legislators describe the act of altering or concealing public records in the letter as a “serious matter that may constitute a violation of Nevada law and potentially rise to the level of a Class C felony.” The letter also demanded a plan to address year-long backlogs in OSHA cases waiting to be heard by the OSHA Review Board, a Governor-appointed body that hears safety cases employers have contested with Nevada OSHA.

“Questions surrounding withdrawn citations, altered records, and delays in adjudication have created the perception that Nevada’s enforcement system is not operating independently or transparently,” the letter reads, pointing out that “there still remain a number of unanswered questions and outstanding issues regarding The Boring Company and the health and safety of Nevada workers.”

The demand letter follows a legislative hearing in early February, in which state officials testified before Nevada legislators about their oversight of the Boring Company. Representatives from Boring Company and the Governor’s Office declined to attend the hearing. Boring Company, which was founded and is owned by Elon Musk, has been digging an underground public transportation system of ride-hail Tesla vehicles that is intended to eventually go below the entire city of Las Vegas. While its tunneling to date has taken place in the broader County, the company recently received approvals to start digging below the City of Las Vegas proper.

Projects riddled with safety issues

Since construction began, the project has been riddled with safety issues, including employees getting burned by chemicals in the tunnels, employees digging too close to the Las Vegas monorail, a worker getting crushed and another getting shocked, and illegal wastewater dumping—much of which was first reported by Fortune. KTNV, an ABC affiliate television station in Las Vegas, recently reported that OSHA had completed its investigation regarding the employee who had been shocked, and found that the injured employee had been fired for allegedly demonstrating a “a serious lapse in judgement on more than one occasion,” according to the Boring Company.

There are at least three more pending investigations that are still outstanding, according to OSHA’s website, and Boring Company is currently contesting eight citations it was issued regarding chemical burns in 2024. The Review Board has repeatedly pushed back the hearing on those citations, including most recently in February because Boring Company’s lawyer had a conflict, OSHA officials have said.

The latest injury, the one involving the employee who was shocked, “just points to the fact that we need to ensure that our OSHA process is functioning properly—to hold this and other companies accountable, to provide a safe working environment for people in our community,” Assemblymember Watts said in an interview with Fortune. He pointed out that “these tremendous backlogs” are allowing companies to contest citations for over a year and delay addressing the underlying problems.

In November, a Fortune investigation found that OSHA had issued three citations against the Boring Company after firefighters were burned by chemicals in the tunnels, then withdrew them within 24 hours after Boring Company president Steve Davis reached out to a representative in the Governor’s Office. Federal OSHA, which oversees the state plan, later received a complaint about the matter and opened a federal investigation, which ultimately determined that the allegations were substantiated, and that case file documentation was altered, missing, “and/or removed” from the case file and that the citations had been withdrawn after issuance. Federal OSHA said in its findings that it believed Nevada OSHA “had reasonable justification to withdraw the issued willful citations” and that the legal elements needed to support the “willful” designation had not been met.

Governor Lombardo recently said in an interview with staff at the Nevada Independent that his office had tried to determine who had deleted a line item in the document in the OSHA file, but that the inquiry had apparently been thwarted by a cyberattack against the state that took place several months beforehand in August.

In that recent interview, Governor Lombardo said that “in the long run,” he believed Boring Company would be “very beneficial” to Las Vegas.

“Do I like them in their tactics and how they do business? No,” he said.

The legislators’ letter demanded that Governor Lombardo’s administration submit a written plan that would “detail concrete actions, responsible officials, and implementation timelines” to start the independent investigation and address safety case backlogs by April 17.

The Governor’s Office did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

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The war in Iran could hit a heavy blow to one of the country’s largest industries, one that supports millions of livelihoods.

Now in its fourth week, the conflict has sparked the largest oil supply shock in history and sent gasoline prices soaring worldwide. But fuel products are not the only item to normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway that has essentially been blockaded for almost a month.

How the Strait of Hormuz blockade is cutting fertilizer supply

Before the war, around one-third of the global fertilizer supply chain passed through the strait, including half of the world’s urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer vital to many modern farming operations, including in the U.S. The gaping hole in fertilizer supply is, in some ways, a more intractable challenge than the energy crunch, and comes at one of the worst possible times for American farmers.

The U.S. food and agriculture industry does a lot more than putting food on the table: It is a booming business that employs millions and accounts for a huge chunk of the country’s economic output. That value was recently quantified in a sweeping report authored by 35 industry groups and published Monday, shedding light on just how widespread an impact a sustained fertilizer shortage would have on the U.S. economy. 

The $10 trillion sector on the line

The sector generates $10.4 trillion in value, around 20% of the U.S. economy’s overall value, the report found. It also supports more than 48 million jobs, including positions in government, tourism, and retail. The jobs story is actually one of growth, as the report also found direct employment in the food and agriculture sector has risen 6.5% over the past decade.

Fertilizer plays an important role in the agricultural economy. In a statement, Corey Rosenbusch, CEO of the Fertilizer Institute, an industry group that participated in the report, called the impact of fertilizers “essential” to the economy.

“Each year, fertilizer delivers $37 billion in wages, supports half a million jobs, and has an economic impact of $140 billion,” he said.

But curtailed exports from the Middle East threaten to undermine that trade, with ripple effects likely to go far beyond the fertilizer industry alone. While the U.S. produces much of its fertilizer at home, it relies on imports for 25% of its stock, including 18% of its nitrogen use. Qatar and Saudi Arabia were important nitrogen suppliers to the U.S., but supply now remains stranded in the Persian Gulf. And much like oil, fertilizer is a globally traded product, so regional supply disruption can lead to price shifts in the U.S. 

Why spring planting season makes the timing especially painful

Those swings are already painfully evident for U.S. farmers, with benchmark nitrogen costs at U.S. ports rising nearly 30% since the war began. For many producers, fertilizer can be the single largest variable cost in growing major row crops, and the new spike comes at one of the worst possible times in the sector. This is around the time most farmers finalize their fertilizer purchases ahead of their spring planting season, for crops like corn in the Midwest and cotton in the South. 

The extent to which the war in Iran might deal long-term damage to U.S. agriculture remains unclear. There are few alternatives to Middle Eastern fertilizer exports. Unlike oil, which continues to trickle out of the region in small quantities through Saudi pipelines, the Gulf, and the currently blocked strait, is the only way for any significant fertilizer quantities to reach global markets. 

Alternative suppliers exist, including Morocco and several Latin American countries, but high prices for U.S. farmers will likely remain until the strait reopens, with the list of possible economic consequences growing longer by the day. Prices could go higher still if more countries follow the lead of China, which last week restricted its own fertilizer exports in a bid to stockpile its reserves. 

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Bank of America’s spending data tells a rare good-news story about Gen Z — until it doesn’t. After years of being squeezed by surging rents and sluggish wage growth, the youngest adult generation had just begun to really get out there and spend their fun money. Then gas prices jumped 26% year-over-year, and BofA economists are now warning that the recovery could be snuffed out before it fully takes hold.

For the first time in years, Gen Z was winning. Rents had finally stopped devouring their paychecks, wages were rising faster than their housing costs, and a generation that had long trailed older Americans in spending growth was starting to actually open its wallet — on restaurants, new clothes, electronics, even travel. Then came the oil shock, brought on by President Donald Trump’s widely expected and yet also still surprising decision to go to war on Iran.

A recent report from the Bank of America Institute shows that after nearly two years of trailing other generations in spending, Gen Z’s year-over-year spending growth surpassed Baby Boomers’ in mid-2025. Millennials followed suit in December 2025, outpacing older generations for the first time in roughly three years. The turnaround was real, data-driven, and — for a generation that came of age during pandemic shutdowns and an inflation crisis — long overdue.​

“Both Gen Z and Millennials may be even more prone to cutting back on ‘nice-to-have’ spending amid higher gasoline prices,” BofA Institute economists Joe Wadford and David Michael Tinsley wrote in the report.

Rent and tax relief offset by gas prices

The engine behind the surge? Rent relief. In Bank of America’s aggregated card and deposit data, median rent payment growth for Gen Z and Millennials slowed sharply in the 12 months through February 2026. And crucially, wages have been growing faster than rents for both generations — up roughly 9% year-over-year for Gen Z and 5% for Millennials. That gap between rent and wages is the financial breathing room younger Americans hadn’t had in years, and proprietary BofA card data shows they were spending it: on clothing, on dining out, and especially on electronics, which saw the sharpest discretionary jump of any category.​

Tax refunds added extra fuel early in the year. But economists at the BofA Institute stressed that most of the improvement reflects something more structural: younger renters, who make up a disproportionately large share of Gen Z and Millennial households, were finally catching a break after years of rent outpacing everything. Unlike Gen X and Baby Boomers, who are more likely to own their homes, younger generations live and die by the rental market — and for a stretch, that market was suffocating them.​

Now, rising gasoline prices threaten to claw back those gains. The average national gas price is up approximately 26% year-over-year as of March 23, driven by escalating conflict in Iran, according to American Automobile Association data cited in the report. And Gen Z, the analysis warns, is the generation most exposed.​

Even before this spike, Gen Z’s gasoline spending as a share of total card spending was running higher than any other generation’s — and had stayed stubbornly elevated while older generations’ shares fell from pre-pandemic levels. BofA economists attribute this to a straightforward reality: Gen Z is just entering the workforce, commuting for the first time, and doing so on relatively modest incomes. The ratio of gas spending to discretionary spending is highest for Gen Z of any cohort. In plain terms, for every dollar a Gen Zer spends on things they want, a larger share of it now goes to the pump than for a Boomer or a Gen Xer.​

The next wild card

The labor market adds another layer of risk. Young workers aged 22-27 — including recent college graduates — are already experiencing unemployment rates markedly above the national average, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Many work in retail and leisure, the very sectors most likely to feel the pinch from a pullback in discretionary consumer spending, which would, in turn, eliminate the jobs those same young people hold. It’s a feedback loop that could hit Gen Z from both ends of the ledger: higher costs at the pump and fewer hours at work.​

The wild card, BofA says, is whether rent growth continues to cool. If it does, younger consumers may have enough cushion to absorb some of the pain from gas prices. If rents start climbing again alongside fuel costs, the brief, hard-won spending revival that defined the past several months could stall just as it was getting started.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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In a sit-down interview with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell, billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla had a dire message: by 2030, 80% of jobs will be AI-capable, and open to potential displacement. Now, he’s warning that’s what’s going to sway politics from now on.

“There will be massive job dislocation” with AI, Khosla said during a panel at the Hill & Valley Forum, a conference bringing together Washington policymakers and Silicon Valley executives on Tuesday. Despite that, people need to see the benefits of the technology before any disruption occurs, he said. “Will there be new kinds of jobs? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. There’s very few things AI won’t be able to do today in next few years. So I do think we ought to structurally solve this problem by increasing the minimum level of services.”

But instead of looking at AI’s potential benefits, Khosla—who founded Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures and has a net worth of $11.5 billion,—said Americans have AI-caused uncertainty on their minds.

“The single biggest issue I believe in the 2028 presidential election will be fear of AI,” Khosla said.

Khosla has been a leading advocate for AI adoption while tempering the economic impacts on everyday Americans. His comments at the forum, during a panel entitled “Mind and Machine: The Forces Shaping the AI Era” about the role of the government in AI adoption, are not new for the billionaire, who has warned AI will now take over as the country’s most divisive issue from now on.

“I think the single biggest danger to AI is not AI capability or lack thereof. The single biggest danger to AI adoption is politics,” Khosla said. And it’s already playing out at the state level, he said, giving the example of a bill advancing in the New York State legislature that would ban AI from giving medical or legal advice. 

Florida recently passed a bill that would force data center companies to pay for their own utilities, and New York lawmakers are considering a bill that would put a moratorium on new data center permits. This comes as Americans are feeling a growing affordability crisis, especially from rising energy costs, which is expected to be a losing issue for Republicans ahead of the midterms. 

Instead, Khosla argued, Americans shouldn’t fear AI, but think of the endless possibilities it’s capable of accomplishing.   

“The US could develop a free doctor and offer it to everybody on the planet,” he said. “That’s a project doable in the next two, three years, and have more expertise than any doctor.” He pointed to a recent Nature Medicine study that found that AI outperforms human therapists when blindly judged by human therapists. 

He even thinks voters should look at the tax benefits AI can bring to their pockets. Khosla repeated his idea to restructure the tax code and end income tax for anyone who makes less than $100,000 a year, starting in 2030. 

“AI will favor capital over labor in the historical capital versus labor battle, and so there’s no reason in the AI age to have a capital gains tax that’s different than ordinary income tax,” he said. “If we equalize those two, we can be tax neutral and eliminate 125 million people off the tax roll, just anybody making $100,000 or less doesn’t pay any taxes.” That’s a pretty good balance, especially since 40% of capital gains tax is paid by people making more than 10 million a year.

Khosla’s co-panelist, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, demurred at the idea of restructuring the tax code, saying that Congress is “a little better at the near term.” The senator gave the example of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which committed nearly $53 billion to revitalize domestic semiconductor production. She agreed with Khosla about the need to deploy AI to everyday Americans now. 

“Why aren’t we just giving tools that use sophisticated health information and empowering the public with that health information?” she asked. “I think that would go a long way to making people understand the power of what we need to push towards, she said, adding that there should be privacy protections. 

When asked by moderator and CEO of Varda Space Industries Delian Asparouhov about how the U.S. can lead and control AI adoption, Cantwell said she supports the idea of starting a “tech NATO.”

“The United States should get the biggest democracies and the biggest technology countries to standardize on principles that we believe in for technology adoption,” Cantwell said. “We should basically say, countries who have back doors and do these other things you shouldn’t buy technology from them because you know you’re going to get.”

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Senators raced Tuesday to clinch an emerging proposal to end the Homeland Security shutdown by funding much of the department, including the unpaid Transportation Security Administration airport workers, but excluding ICE operations that have been core to the dispute.

The sudden sense of urgency comes as U.S. airports are snarled by long security lines, with travelers being told to arrive hours before their flights in Houston, Atlanta and Baltimore Washington International. Routine Homeland Security funding was halted in mid-February ahead of the busy spring travel season. Nearly 11% of TSA workers — more than 3,200 — missed work Monday, and at least 458 have have quit altogether since the shutdown began, according to DHS.

Democrats are refusing to fund the department without restraints on Trump’s immigration and deportation agenda after agents killed two citizens in Minneapolis.

A potential breakthrough came late Monday, after a group of Republican senators met at the White House with President Donald Trump after he upended talks and deployed federal immigration officers at some airport security checkpoints — a move some lawmakers warned could lead to heightened tensions.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., called the discussions “positive and productive” and said most of DHS would be funded without big changes.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that after Trump’s “temper tantrum” eased, it appears “things are getting back on track.”

But airport conditions have become increasingly unpredictable with swelling crowds seen in major hubs. Travelers headed to LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports in New York — as well as Newark Liberty International in neighboring New Jersey — still couldn’t check online TSA wait times Tuesday morning.

At Philadelphia International Airport, several ICE agents were in the terminals. A protester was also at one of the checkpoints holding a sign criticizing ICE.

Airport wait times listed in the MyTSA mobile app and other public sources may be outdated because the agency isn’t actively updating its websites during the shutdown.

Hopes high for a quick deal

Next steps in Congress could move quickly, if lawmakers can reach agreement, or sputter out just as fast.

The contours of the deal under consideration would fund most of Homeland Security, but not one main part of ICE — the enforcement and removal operations that are core to Trump’s deportation agenda.

Under the proposal being floated, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations would be funded as well as Customs and Border Protection. But that would come with guardrails — keeping officers from those divisions in their traditional roles, rather than deploying them in urban immigration roundups.

The plan would also include a number of changes in immigration operations that Democrats have demanded, including mandating that officers wear body cameras and identification. While the ICE officers manning airports are going without face-covering masks, the Democratic demand that they go unmasked during immigration operations does not appear to be part of the deal.

Since so much of ICE is already funded through Trump’s big tax breaks bill, and immigration officers are still receiving paychecks despite the shutdown, both sides are claiming political wins — the Democrats are able to say they stopped the flow of additional ICE funds while achieving already agreed upon changes, while Republicans can claim they prevented more significant restraints on immigration operations.

Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, a chief negotiator, returned from the White House meeting hopeful they had a solution to “land this plane.”

Both chambers of Congress are controlled by the Republican president’s party, and any deal reached in the Senate would also have to be approved by the House.

On Tuesday, Delta Air Lines confirmed it was suspending its specialty services for members of Congress amid the shutdown, meaning those who fly with the carrier will be treated like other passengers based on their SkyMiles status. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the suspension. Delta’s Capital Desk reservations line still remains open.

Political standoff, long airport lines

Key to the standoff appears to have been the senators’ ability to shift the president’s attention off his plan to link any department funding to his push to pass the so-called SAVE America Act, a strict proof-of-citizenship and voter ID bill that has stalled in the Senate ahead of the midterm elections.

Over the weekend Trump injected his demand for the voting bill as a condition for ending the funding standoff. Some GOP senators have pitched the idea of tackling it in the months ahead as part of a broader legislative package the party could pass on its own, similar to last year’s big tax cuts bill.

The White House on Tuesday stressed that conversations were ongoing. But it also said an agreement to split off immigration enforcement funding, while addressing Trump’s elections bill separately, “seems to be acceptable.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who was not part of the group at the White House, said his understanding was that there was a “sense of urgency” coming from the talks as the airport disruptions worsen.

Senators are expected to discuss the proposals during their private caucus lunches Tuesday afternoon.

“First step is to get the proposal in writing,” said Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine. “I want to see exactly what that means.”

Changes at Homeland Security

The deal could provide a political exit from the standoff over the embattled Homeland Security department, which was stood up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks but has come to symbolize Trump’s aggressive mass deportation agenda, with its goal of removing 1 million immigrants this year.

Under mounting political pressure, Trump ousted Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem amid the public outcry over the immigration operations, and senators late Monday confirmed one of their own, Markwayne Mullin, as the president’s handpicked replacement.

Mullin, an Oklahoma senator who aligns with Trump’s agenda, provides a potentially new face for the department. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin touched on another key demand of Democrats — ensuring a judge has signed off on warrants that immigration officers use to search people’s homes, rather than simply relying on administrative warrants issued by the department.

“This is significant,” Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said about the progress toward changes. “Noem is gone. That’s a big deal.”

ICE’s budget grew under last year’s bill by $75 billion, which has been untouched by the shutdown. Rather its routine annual funding, some $10 billion, would be cut almost in half under the proposal.

After weeks of missed paychecks, many TSA agents have called in sick or even quit their jobs as financial strains pile up. Union leaders representing the workers have pushed Congress to reach a deal.

___

Associated Press writers Rio Yamat, Wyatte Grantham-Philips, Kevin Freking and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

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Roughly $580 million worth of oil futures changed hands in a single minute early Monday morning, only about 15 minutes before President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had been engaged in “productive conversations” with Iran to end the war.

Now Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is calling what he sees: treason.

“We have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit,” Krugman wrote in a Substack post Tuesday. “That word is treason.”

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, denied that any negotiations with Washington had taken place, calling the claim “fakenews” used to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.” Stocks pulled back slightly and energy prices stymied their free-fall on his statement, but ultimately traders seemed to trust that Trump was telling the truth about winding down the war. 

Rory Johnston, an oil market analyst, said the pattern has been hard to ignore even without a smoking gun.

 “Everyone—every analyst, every oil trader—has been questioning downward pressure on prices,” he told Fortune. He added that whether or not there’s been direct market manipulation by Washington, the administration’s jawboning has spooked participants out of trading where physical fundamentals would otherwise push prices. “I think that probably goes a long way towards it.”

The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. 

The suspicious trading activity

The trades involved roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts that were sold between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m. New York time. Trading volumes for S&P 500 futures also spiked moments later, meaning that any potential insider got upside on both ends. After Trump announced the pause of his ultimatum at 7:04 a.m., there was a sharp selloff in oil markets and a jump in equities; precisely the outcome someone holding those positions would have wanted. It is not known whether one entity or several were behind the trades.

Krugman argued that insider trading on national security decisions is illegal for reasons besides unfairness: it presents a strategic vulnerability. Trading on classified information effectively broadcasts government plans to foreign adversaries, he wrote, adding that “who needs to bribe agents within the government” when you can infer the same intelligence from futures markets.

He also raised an unsettling question: whether the possibility of insider profits may be influencing the policy decisions themselves. 

“Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest?” he wrote. “If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.”

Krugman joins a chorus of Trump critics and investors who called foul on the move Monday. Trump had spent the weekend threatening to bomb Iranian power plants unless Tehran reopened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. His Monday morning reversal, which he attributed to ongoing talks, blindsided markets—and, apparently, Iran.

As for whether insiders are profiting from advance knowledge of policy announcements, Johnston said it “would not surprise me,” but but stressed he didn’t have direct evidence.

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Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin company, announced on Tuesday that it has signed a Big Four accounting firm to complete its first full audit. The move stands to give the company, which has long faced criticism over its lack of transparency, a stamp of legitimacy. 

In a statement, Tether announced that the audit will review Tether’s assets, liabilities, and reserves and be conducted by one of the Big Four—a term that describes Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC—but did not specify which one. Five years ago, Tether was fined $41 million for falsely claiming that its stablecoins were fully backed by fiat currencies. 

The announcement comes two months after the company launched USAT, a stablecoin designed to be compliant with U.S. regulations. Tether’s return to the U.S. further cemented its dominance in the stablecoin industry, where it currently owns about 60% of market share. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a stable asset like the U.S. dollar. 

“The Big Four Firm was selected through a competitive process because the organization is already operating at Big Four audit standard; the audit will be delivered,” said Simon McWilliams, chief financial officer of Tether, in the statement.

Prior to President Donald Trump’s second term, Tether had several run-ins with regulators. In 2021, the company reached a settlement with the New York attorney general’s office after it allegedly covered up roughly $850 million in losses. Three years later, in 2024, the Department of Justice reportedly investigated the company for violations of anti-money-laundering and sanctions rules. That same year, blockchain analytics company TRM Labs found that Tether’s network had been used to finance terrorism.

Since Trump took office last January, the stablecoin giant, along with other major crypto companies, has benefited from more lenient regulation out of Washington. The connections between the president and Tether are not hard to find. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, is the former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is the company that manages the reserves of USAT.  And the president’s former top crypto official, Bo Hines, is now the CEO of Tether’s U.S. operations

“Tether’s mission has always been to build trust through action, not promises,” said Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, about the audit in the statement. “Trust is built when institutions are willing to open themselves fully to scrutiny.” 

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Tech executives have offered foreboding visions of the future of work due to AI, with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott predicting unemployment will exceed 30% in a matter of years.

But Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says that’s nothing to be afraid of.

People should embrace the future of AI job displacement, Srinivas said in an episode of the All-In podcast released on Monday and recorded at Nvidia GTC last week. While AI may lead to unemployment, that job displacement subsequently frees people from careers they may not have enjoyed, he suggested. This, instead, gives them opportunities to pursue entrepreneurship.

“The reality is most people don’t enjoy their jobs,” Srinivas said. “There’s suddenly a new possibility, a new opportunity, to go use these tools, learn them, and start your own mini business…Even if there is temporary job displacement to deal with, that sort of glorious future is what we should look forward to.”

AI-related layoffs are already on the horizon. Last month Block CEO Jack Dorsey reduced 40% of his staff, saying “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” The 4,000 laid-off Block employees are part of a total of more than 101,000 AI-linked job losses in the U.S. since February 2025, according to data compiled by the nonprofit the Alliance for Secure AI.

However, some economists argue potential job displacement as a result of AI has been drastically overstated. Oxford Economics wrote in a recent note to clients companies “don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and are insteading “AI washing” by blaming workforce reductions on the technology.

Venture capitalist and Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley said the AI boom is no different from other eras of rapidly evolving technology, in which layoffs happen, but the labor market ultimately adapts and stabilizes.

“I’m not that big of a doomer, Gurley told CNBC earlier this month. “I think these waves come, and especially with AI, there have been a lot of people pumping kind of miracles into it … .They get this kind of apocalyptic view. We’ve had technology disruption before.”

How AI is building small businesses with few employees

The future of work in an AI-powered future is a departure from the rote and repetitive jobs that emerged at the turn of the 20th century, according to Srinivas.

“America has always been about entrepreneurship. We’ve been about trying to build new things, discover new things, go explore,” he said. “Henry Ford came and built factories and brought jobs and things like that, and put people into a box.”

AI instead makes people more nimble, eliminating startups’ and small businesses’ need to raise as much money because they no longer need to hire as many employees to jumpstart operations, Srinivas suggested.

“What we are going to try to do is help businesses run as autonomously as possible,” he said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long predicted AI would create the first billion-dollar business run by one person, but Srinivas claimed the feat has not yet been achieved because an AI-powered venture has not increased in U.S. GDP by $1 billion, and therefore not yet “truly creating new value.” He said the best way for this one-person unicorn to emerge is from a small business that has been optimized with AI.

A new era of AI-powered startups

This new era of startups is already emerging. A Bank of America report published this week found the number of business applications with clear plans to hire employees fell by 4.4% year-over-year in January. Meanwhile, The number of “high propensity businesses,” those likely to hire employees, jumped more than 15% in the same period. The discrepancy suggested the potential emergence of several new companies, but without plans to onboard staff to run those businesses.

In 2024, Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan created an AI-powered flashcard and quiz tool called TurboAI with an initial investment of less than $300 while the pair were still in college. The pair has since growth the company to 8.5 billion users and are generating $1 million a month in revenue with just 13 employees, the pair told Fortune’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez. Without AI, their workforce would have swelled into the triple digits.

“If we were a company two-and-a-half years ago, it would take over 100 employees,” Arora said. “The only reason we’re able to do it with 13 employees right now is because of AI.”

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A specter is haunting the world of white-collar work: the specter of white-collar job loss. But one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe,” asset management billionaire Larry Fink sees another ghost in the machine.

Writing in his annual letter to BlackRock shareholders, the CEO identified a much greater threat from technological progress to the Fortune 500. Fittingly, for the man who played a major role in the index-fund revolution, his mind was on assets and who owns them—or doesn’t. Inequality and overall wealth is the real threat. 

With asset values soaring in recent decades as salaries largely stagnate, wealth inequality will only get worse, warned Fink, who has been beating this drum often of late. AI threatens to concentrate wealth not only with those who have assets, he explained, but those who use this technology.

“The vast majority of wealth has flowed to people who owned assets, not to people who earned most of their money by working,” Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders on Monday.

“Now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale—concentrating wealth among the companies and investors positioned to capture it.”

Research from the Federal Reserve has found America’s haves and have-nots have rarely been this far apart. In the third quarter of last year, the gap was the widest it’s been since 1989, when the Fed began tracking household wealth divergence. The top 1% held 31.7% of U.S. wealth, comparable to all wealth owned by the bottom 90%. With most high-income wealth held in assets from stocks to real estate, it’s become increasingly inaccessible to a growing segment of Americans. And with the speeding growth and corporate adoption of artificial intelligence, that trend risks accelerating, according to Fink.

Uneven returns

AI-driven productivity might potentially raise wages across the board, but most evidence so far suggests AI adoption has raised wages in a relatively small pool of jobs, while excitement surrounding the technology has boosted stock markets. Fink wrote that since 1989, median wages in the U.S. have lagged stock market returns by a factor of 15.

Now, AI looks most likely to lengthen that trend rather than reverse it—at least in the short term. For people not directly exposed to its benefits, the wealth gap might soon look a lot wider.

“When market capitalization rises but ownership remains narrow, prosperity can feel increasingly distant to those on the outside,” Fink wrote. “This is where much of today’s economic anxiety comes from: a deeper feeling that capitalism is working—just not for enough people.”

In his letter, Fink described AI as the most significant technology since at least the computer, but nonetheless risks putting inequality on steroids. He warned that AI could concentrate massive wealth primarily among a handful of companies and investors best positioned to capture its value. It could accelerate “K-shaped outcomes” for the economy, he added, where firms and investors with greater access to capital benefit from faster growth, while those less exposed to rising asset valuations stagnate, driving inequality even further.

“Transformative technologies create enormous value—and much of that value accrues to the companies that build and deploy them, and to the investors who own them,” he wrote. “The companies with the data, infrastructure, and capital to deploy AI at scale are positioned to benefit disproportionately.”

The data so far seems to support Fink’s argument. The U.S. is increasingly mired in an economy supported by wealthy consumers, according to Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi. Spending from high-earners has surged in recent years, while low and middle-income households have seen their discretionary spending slow or even plateau. 

The trend grows more worrisome with the use of this new tech, as AI-driven gains in the stock market are a big part of high-income confidence, Oxford Economics CEO Innes McFee recently told Fortune. While the technology has led to a 7% rise in U.S. wealth, that benefit is almost entirely contained to high-earning households, he said. While AI could “absolutely” even out wealth inequality eventually, it is more likely to maintain the U.S. economy’s K-shape until at least 2035, McFee said.

The same trend is visible in jobs. So far, AI-related productivity boosts are mostly reserved for workers whose jobs demand AI-related skills, roles that can expect a wage premium as high as 43%. But for most jobs, AI has yet to translate to significant productivity or wage gains, and might actually be leading to larger workloads for employees tasked with managing AI.

A long run equalizer?

Over the long term, AI-driven efficiency could lead to higher wages and job growth among low-income professions in sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing, potentially reducing inequality in countries heavily reliant on those sectors, according to modeling last year by PwC. And some experts, including analysts at the Urban Institute, have argued for a universal basic income program drawing royalties from AI companies as a measure to lessen inequality.

But for the moment, benefiting from AI requires working in a role requiring AI skills or being financially invested in its growth story. With nearly 40% of Americans not exposed to the stock market at all, a sizable portion of the population could be caught on the outside looking in.

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The most powerful voices in artificial intelligence (AI) really want you to worry about your job—if you’re a white-collar worker. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman predicts AI will cause office jobs to crumble in 18 months. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks entry-level jobs in the space will be cut in half in a similar timeline. Even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has warned that AI is quietly impacting the labor market as job creation hovers close to zero.

But behind closed doors, business leaders controlling company headcounts are actually telling a more subtle story. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, out of a survey of 750 chief financial officers from U.S. firms, less than half (44%) say they plan on some AI-related job cuts. When the co-authors calculated what that amounts to across the broader economy, they found just 0.4%, or about 502,000 roles out of about 125 million roles, are expected to be lost this year. Just about half of those job losses will come from the white-collar world.

That 9x increase from last year’s 55,000 AI-attributed layoffs is striking — but still a rounding error against the overall workforce.

“It’s not the doomsday job scenario that you might sometimes see in the headlines,” John Graham, co-author of the study and the director of the Duke CFO survey, conducted in partnership with the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond, told Fortune.

Moreover, the study finds a wide gap between the perceived and actual productivity gains from AI, finding that perceptions of AI’s gains are larger than the reality. The researchers say this likely reflects a delay in realized revenue. This reported lag matches what economists have been saying about AI’s productivity gains.

Goldman Sachs senior economist Ronnie Walker noted earlier this month that amid AI investment zeal, “we still do not find a meaningful relationship between productivity and AI adoption at the economy-wide level.” It’s not just economists; workers have reported that AI is actually making them less, not more productive, placing greater strain on their workflows, with time spent across some job responsibilities increasing by up to 346%.

Lagging productivity gains and Solow’s paradox

Economists have a name for this gap — and it dates back to the dawn of the personal computer era.

In a comparison to the lagging technological innovation associated with the dawn of the internet era, the researchers invoke Solow’s paradox, also known as the productivity paradox, to contextualize the current divide between perceived and actual productivity from AI. Coined by Nobel Laureate Robert Solow in 1987, the paradox speaks to the observation that transformative technology—like computers, or in this instance, AI—can appear ubiquitous while remaining absent from economic data. 

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” Solow said.

Graham said what executives are seeing with productivity today is actually more of a wish than a realized fact. Companies see the potential of AI without the financial results to match. “Companies have invested and they’re realizing all these kind of cool things that they’re either starting to do or they hope to do in the near future,” he said. “But it’s not really showing up yet in revenue”

The current state of AI-related layoffs

However, the study still represents a step in the direction of heightened job losses thanks to the technology, adding some credibility to what tech execs have painted publicly. Employers reported about 55,000 layoffs attributed to AI in 2025, according to research firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s just 4.5% of all job losses from last year. Still, if the study’s numbers are right, that would mean a 9x increase in AI-related layoffs this year.

There have already been several sizable AI-related layoffs reported by firms this year. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut about 40% of its workforce, or more than 4,000 employees, because of the technology. Australian-American financial services firm Atlassian cut 10%. And Meta is reportedly planning on cutting 20% of jobs, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly creates an AI agent clone of himself. On top of that, the job market is in a lull. U.S. employers posted 92,000 jobs losses last month, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%.

But the report also finds that AI adoption could actually lead to an increase in hiring among smaller firms, further contradicting the public claims from AI’s biggest leaders. Many smaller firms, or those with fewer than 500 employees, have only just begun to invest in AI as most incur the brunt of AI-related operating expenses, slowing down adoption rates. But as adoption increases, small firms noted they plan to increase hiring in technical roles. On top of that, larger firms are planning on holding technical roles constant.

“If anything, small companies are hiring a bit on the technical side which will offset [losses] a little bit,” Graham said.

Still, the study only paints a picture for the short-term, so it’s difficult to entirely rule out the dire predictions some tech leaders have made of the technology’s ability to soak up white-collar jobs.

“Who knows what’s going to happen in 2028?” Graham said. ”I’m not making a prediction that there will never be any jobs lost two, three and five years from now to AI.”

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On Monday morning, it looked like President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “Master of the Deal,” had done it again.

After roiling oil markets over the weekend with an ultimatum on Iran, he declared victory before the opening bell, posting about 15 points of agreement and pausing his threat to bomb the country’s power plants. Nearly $2 trillion was moved within minutes as Wall Street clamored to do what it has learned to do with this president: put some TACO dip on its proverbial chip.

TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out—became the defining trade of last year’s tariff wars after the shock dip on “Liberation Day” last April. The term was coined by FT journalist Robert Armstrong to describe the pattern Trump exhibited: Escalate, terrify, then reverse course and claim victory. When traders realized that Trump, at his heart a businessman, would never let markets dip back to their levels on April 2, 2025, they began to price in the bluster and bought the dip. It worked in 2025 because tariffs are a toggle: flip them on with a Truth Social post, flip them off with another one. Through this strategy, Trump secured diplomatic and economic concessions in Brazil, India, Japan and across Southeast Asia,  all while never suffering from severe backlash by traders. 

War, however, doesn’t so easily toggle back and forth. TACO has a hidden assumption baked in: that your counterparty wants off the roller coaster as much as you do. Especially with a wounded Iranian regime that has nothing to lose and made its survival synonymous with holding the global economy hostage. 

Within hours of Trump’s announcement, Iranian state media denied any talks had occurred. The speaker of Iran’s parliament, taking a page out of Trump’s 2016 campaign playbook, wrote on X that it was “fakenews” designed to “manipulate financial and oil markets.” And as of Tuesday, it doesn’t seem like the primary objective —getting tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz—has changed at all. 

“There is no change in the status in the Strait of Hormuz, and every day that waterway remains closed to traffic, the world is losing over 15 million barrels of oil from inventories and stocks,” Rory Johnston, an oil market analyst, told Fortune. “The longer this goes on, the worse that situation is going to get.”

The Oil Air Pocket: Why Prices Are Holding — For Now

The White House has been effective, so far, at jawboning oil prices lower than the $120-$150 levels bearish commodities analysts have warned about. Every time Brent drifted much above $110, Trump or another official comes out and declares victory over Iran, or promises to start pulling back the war. Johnston says that works, for now, because the physical shortage hasn’t actually reached most of the world yet, leading to a gaping spread between the price of Dubai crude, which has been in the $120s and $130s, and Texas futures, which have hovered below $100. 

“A lot of the physical shortage still hasn’t reached land,” Johnston said. “The tankers stopped flowing and you’re building this air pocket on the water of what normal trades look like. But eventually that air pocket hits land.”

He expects that to start happening within the next week or two. 

“Eventually the paper barrels run against the physical barrels, and you have to reconcile,” Johnston said. “And you’re going to reconcile toward physical.”

Iran Is Not Playing by Trump’s Rules

It also takes two to TACO, as other analysts have written. The tariff TACOs worked because Trump’s counterparties, China, the EU or Canada, were rational economic actors who needed stability and were fine to take a face-saving deal to get it. 

Iran is not so predictable. Its supreme leader is dead, its military infrastructure is decimated and four weeks in it’s still not behaving like a counterparty looking for an off-ramp. If anything, it’s behaving like one that thinks it’s winning. 

Despite losing senior leadership and absorbing enormous punishment from US and Israeli strikes, Iran has effectively held the global economy hostage through the Strait of Hormuz. They’re exporting more oil now than before the war; its rate of missile and drone fire has picked up; and they’re now collecting a $2 million “toll” for ships to pass through. And its strikes have inflicted serious damage on energy infrastructure across Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE—the very US allies Trump promised to protect.

Tehran has been escalating its demands. Iranian officials have called for massive reparations, the expulsion of US forces from the region, and to make the Strait’s toll booth status more permanent, with every passing ship required to pay Tehran for transit. One adviser to the supreme leader told Iranian state media that Iran would turn itself  “from a sanctioned country to an enhanced power in the region and the world.”

Johnston thinks the administration badly misread the situation from the start.

“I think Trump thought he could do in Iran what he did in Venezuela,” Johnston said. In Caracas, the US captured and arrested former President Nicolas Maduro, and a US-friendly pragmatist from within the government emerged to cut a deal. The expectation was that after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, someone similar would step forward in Tehran.

“The Iranian regime is just deeply, deeply different in about every single way, politically, from the Chavista regime in Venezuela,” Johnston said. “I think he thought that once he killed the supreme leader and a bunch of the leadership, someone would come forward and beg for a deal. And that just isn’t what has happened.”

What happened instead is that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appears to have consolidated control, and the IRGC has a long history of being more maximalist and hardline than the regime it is replacing. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran liberated its territory by 1982 but didn’t agree to a ceasefire until 1988, after hundreds of thousands of additional casualties and an international hostage crisis. 

Two Options, Both Historically Anathema to Trump

That leaves Trump staring at two options, both of which are historically anathema to him.

Option one: escalate to a ground war. US Marine Expeditionary Units are assembling and will arrive in the Middle East on the same day the truce is scheduled to run out, Friday. The administration might soon have the capability to invade Kharg Island or occupy coastal positions around the Strait. Trump has called this “a simple military maneuver” with “so little risk,” which military experts disagree with. 

Option two: accept a deal that falls short of the war’s stated objectives and walk away, leaving Europe to manage the Strait. But walking away would leave US Gulf allies exposed to an angry, emboldened Iran that has just demonstrated its ability to destroy their energy infrastructure at will. It would leave Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium largely unsecured, and it would also give Tehran the kind of mythologized martyr narrative—we withstood America and Israel—that the Islamic Republic used after the Iran-Iraq war to entrench itself for decades.

“My bias remains that he’s going to pull back, because I think he needs to pull back,” Johnston said. “But I thought that for most of the war thus far, and I’ve been wrong.”

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When the bombs started raining down on Iran on February 28, many business leaders hoped the conflict would be short and the economic effects would be transient. Neither has turned out to be the case. 

In the latest sign that “war effects” are becoming embedded, the World Economic Forum is the latest global organization to announce the postponement of its key Gulf conference in Saudi Arabia, citing “current regional developments”. 

The technology conference, Leap, private equity group, Partners Group Holding AG, and JP Morgan have each announced postponements or changes in venue since the war started. The risk index for the Gulf economies is rising.  

“In light of the current regional developments, and in close consultation with the Ministry of Economy and Planning of Saudi Arabia, the World Economic Forum will be rescheduling the Global Collaboration and Growth Meeting, which had been planned for April 2026 in Jeddah,” WEF said in a statement. 

“This reflects a commitment to convening the meeting under conditions that ensure its full strategic impact. We remain committed to facilitating a forward-looking agenda for the region and beyond and will provide updates about the rescheduled meeting in due course.” 

We will be back, WEF is saying. This will be a relief to in-region business leaders concerned that confidence is, at present, only travelling in one direction. 

Initial analysis at the beginning of March suggested that the positive economic momentum of the Gulf—a center for innovation as well as liquidity—would outweigh drone attacks and retaliation strikes. As the conflict drags on, the data is becoming more negative. 

“Our analysis suggests that oil output this year could fall by around 12% in Saudi Arabia and by 16% in the UAE,” Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients as the conflict entered its second week. “In Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain, we think oil output could fall by over 25% this year in the event of a prolonged war.” 

Read more: An AI jobs apocalypse? The CEO of Tech Mahindra is not so sure

Second-order effects are also starting to bite. The closure of airports and the negative impact on tourism and real estate sales are obvious.  

“We estimate that the total potential contraction in real GDP this year ranges from 1% in Oman to 14% in Kuwait and Qatar,” Goldman Sachs said. “Saudi Arabia is moderately exposed, with a potential contraction in GDP of just over 3%, while the UAE could see a contraction of around 5%.” 

The region has built much of its economic forward momentum on its convening power. “Get me to the Gulf,” was the regular request of chief executives hoping to find new markets and ways of thinking. And in an age of increased regionalization, it was events like WEF Gulf that signaled intent. 

I spoke to Mirek Dusek, Head of Global Programming for WEF, before the decision was taken on the Gulf. He said that, with geopolitical instability increasing, the Forum was becoming more significant, not less—evidenced by the attendance at the WEF’s annual summit at Davos. 

“We did have overall record participation among the political leaders, the business leaders, innovators and civil society leaders. What was notable was that we really tried to put dialogue first,” Dusek said. 

“We were playing on the spirit of Davos, which is really the fact that the town of Davos has always had this spirit of really coming together for a conversation. 

“Obviously, we are operating in a more contested geo-political and geo-economic environment, and so we were not naive about this. We just wanted to make sure that we put front and center the need to have that conversation, even if people disagree. 

“We’ve always been an organization that has global reach, multi-regional reach, and so we’ll continue, in addition to Davos, that important role of connecting people, leaders, stakeholders. We have a long-standing tradition of convening our second-largest gathering in China every year, and we will be gathered in Dalian at the end of June. We call it the Annual Meeting of the New Champions.” 

WEF is committed to returning to the Gulf, which is welcome. Business and political leaders there know that the need for conversation and the hunt for solutions is now paramount. 

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Back in high school, Yaxel Lendeborg wasn’t even on the basketball team (and had even been cut from the middle-school team) and played video games 12-14 hours each day. 

Now, the Michigan Wolverines Forward is the Big Ten Player of the Year—referred to as “The Dominican LeBron”—and is set to take on the Alabama Crimson Tide in the Sweet 16 on Friday.

His journey from the couch to the court is the kind of story coaches tell recruits to illustrate the success that can come from a single decision. Ahead of his senior year of high school, Lendeborg’s mother, Yissel Raposo, learned her son wasn’t on track to graduate, so she had a heart-to-heart conversation with him that served as a “wake-up call,” she told Hoops HQ in a December 2025 profile of the player. 

It was a decision that largely paid off: Lendeborg’s grades dramatically improved when he enrolled in Camden County College, so much so that he was able to join the varsity basketball team for the final 11 games of his senior season. These were the only 11 high school basketball games Lendeborg ever played.

Right after high school, Lendeborg started working with his mother at a cell-phone accessory warehouse, but felt guilty about not doing more. 

“It kind of hurt being in that space with my mom, seeing how much she’s been doing for us,” the 6-foot, 9-inch, 240-pound player told Hoops HQ. “So it was like, damn, I really messed my life up. And I’m not helping my mom out.”

That’s when everything changed. 

Yaxel Lendeborg’s career timeline

Through the grapevine, coaches at Arizona Western College learned of Lendeborg. Although he wasn’t thrilled to be going, according to Hoops HQ, Lendeborg shipped himself off to Arizona, where he played 78 games in three seasons from 2020 to 2023. There, he was a two-time NJCAA All-American and won the ACCAC Player of the Year award twice. 

In April 2023, Lendeborg transferred to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he helped the school earn the 2024 American Conference Tournament Title. He also earned AAC Tournament MVP honors, was named AAC Defensive Player of the Year twice, and helped the school reach the NCAA Tournament, among several other accolades.

Then in April 2025, Lendeborg committed to the University of Michigan, joining what would become the top team in the country under head coach Dusty May. His debut was somewhat injury-limited, but he quickly became Michigan’s star player. He averages 14.7 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 3.2 assists per game, according to ESPN, and led Michigan to a 19-1 Big 10 record (and 33-3 overall), the program’s first regular-season title since 2020-2021. 

This March, he was named Big Ten Player of the Year and helped Michigan earn the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Regional for this year’s March Madness tournament. Now, he’s projected as a first-round NBA draft pick.

A late bloomer who caught fire

Lendeborg’s success story defies the typical blue-chip narrative in basketball recruiting. Typically, recruiters are after a 4- or 5-star player who has been heavily scouted since middle or early high school, appears on national rankings lists, and gets dozens of scholarship offers from top programs before their senior year. 

Instead, Lendeborg, now 23, developed much later than his peers. This meant he had to outwork players with years of structured training—and now he’s competing in what’s widely considered the most physically demanding conference in college basketball. But Michigan basketball coach Dusty May says Lendeborg deserves every ounce of recognition he’s getting.

“I think it’s pretty obvious why he’s player of the year,” May told CBS reporter Tracy Wolfson in early March. “He does everything on the basketball court, and he’s incredibly unselfish while doing it. And he’s just scratching the surface of how good he can be.”

The business of breaking through

Lendeborg’s unlikely rise can serve as a compelling lesson for the business world, too. Talent without focus is just potential. For years, Lendeborg had the innate talent to perform at a high level, but lacked the motivation.

A 2007 study by American academic and psychologist Angela L. Duckworth shows that grit can be just as important in determining success as talent. 

“The achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent, but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time,” she and her co-authors wrote in the study.

So, it wasn’t until Lendeborg committed to “sustained and focused” training that he met his big break, and it’s all paying off. 

Not only has Lendeborg earned numerous accolades in recent years, but his hard work is also paying off. His name, image, and likeness (NIL) valuation is estimated at $2 million, according to On3, ranking him among the top 25 in college sports overall and No. 7 in basketball. 

But Lendeborg also said in a March interview with the Associated Press he had turned down an NIL deal from Kentucky worth $7 million to $9 million dollars to stay with May and the Wolverines. That’s because he was prioritizing his long-term goals over money.

“I was raised without it, and I went my whole life without it,” Lendeborg told the AP. “Anything was going to make me super, super happy at the time.”

“I was thinking long term. What if I mess up my career because I chased the money instead of a future? Another big reason why I went with Dusty was he didn’t talk about money at all,” he continued. “It was all about making me better and helping me achieve my goals.”

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From Gen Z to baby boomers, workers across industries are on the hunt for ways to future-proof their careers as artificial intelligence threatens to upend the labor market. Palantir CEO Alex Karp is offering a starkly simple view of who will come out ahead.

“There are basically two ways to know you have a future,” the 58-year-old billionaire said on TBPN earlier this month. “One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you’re neurodivergent.”

Karp’s first category reflects a growing consensus: skilled trades professionals—from electricians to plumbers—are difficult to automate and are increasingly in demand as Big Tech companies build out massive data centers and the U.S. faces existing labor shortages.

The second category is more personal. Karp has long spoken about living with dyslexia, the learning disability that can affect reading, writing, and information processing. More broadly, neurodivergence can include conditions such as ADHD and autism. 

For Karp, that cognitive difference can be an advantage in an AI-driven world—less because of the diagnosis itself and more because of the mindset it can foster. Success, he argued, will favor people who think differently and take risks, or in his words, be “more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique.”

One-fifth of sales organizations within Fortune 500 companies are expected to actively recruit neurodivergent talent to improve business performance by 2027, according to a Gartner study.

As Alex Karp warns AI will wipe out jobs, Palantir is betting on neurodivergent talent and high school grads

While being neurodivergent is not a requirement to land a job at Palantir, the company has made it clear it sees such candidates as a strategic advantage. 

It offers a dedicated “Neurodivergent Fellowship,” aimed at recruiting talent that may think differently from traditional hires.

“Neurodivergent individuals will play a disproportionate role in shaping the future of America and the West,” the job posting stated. “They see past performative ideologies and perceive beauty in the world that still exists—which technology and art can expose.”

The emphasis reflects Karp’s broader skepticism of traditional career pathways. Despite holding three degrees to his name—including a JD from Stanford and a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany—Karp has been blunt about the limits of higher education in an AI-driven economy. 

“[AI] will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year. “You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy—I’ll use myself as an example—hopefully, you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.”

Palantir similarly launched a separate program—the Meritocracy Fellowship—designed specifically for high school graduates not enrolled in college. The program’s first cohort required Ivy League-level test scores to qualify, and attracted over 500 applicants. The 22 admitted students were a mix of those who felt attending college wasn’t compelling, or didn’t get into their dream schools, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The next round, currently recruiting for fall 2026, offers participants $5,400 a month as a stipend and pitches itself with a clear message: “Skip the debt. Reclaim years of your life. Earn the Palantir degree”—and top performers can even receive full-time offers at the company.

Entry-level roles for Gen Z are drying—but not everyone has given up on college

As traditional entry-level roles dry up for Gen Z graduates, many young people are coming to a similar conclusion as Karp: a college degree alone is no longer a guaranteed path to success.

Still, some tech leaders argue that higher education is far from obsolete—and that liberal arts in particular may become more valuable in the age of AI. Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, believes the next generation will benefit from studying disciplines that emphasize how to think, not just what to do.

“Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “For that, a traditional liberal-arts education is really important.”

In direct contrast to Karp, Daniela Amodei, cofounder of AI firm Anthropic, said studying the humanities will be “more important than ever.”

“The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important,” she told ABC News last month. “And what I mean by that is when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people.”

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Workplaces have long surveilled their employees, from tracking badge swipes to keyboard strokes. Now, JPMorgan Chase is rolling out a program to monitor the hours of its junior investment bankers—and the $782 billion bank says it’s for their own well-being. 

As part of JPMorgan’s new pilot plan, it will assess whether the hours claimed by junior bankers on their time sheets match up with the activity electronically recorded by its IT systems, according to recent reporting from the Financial Times. Each week, these employees will be issued reports showing the comparison between their self-reported time and a figure based on their computer footprint, including video calls, desktop keystrokes, and scheduled meetings. The tools will not be used for evaluation purposes. 

“Much like the weekly screen time summaries on a smartphone, this tool is about awareness—not enforcement,” JPMorgan said in a statement to the Financial Times. “It’s designed to support transparency, wellbeing, and encourage open conversations about workload.”

While many workers would be anxious at the idea of their employers tracking their days online, the pilot plan is actually an effort to counteract overwork among its junior staffers, according to the reporting. And it’s part of a larger movement among Wall Street titans to try and safeguard employees against potentially dangerous workloads. 

Fortune reached out to JPMorgan for comment.

Junior investment bankers were working 100+ hours a week—and one banker even died

Wall Street’s famous “always on” culture of intense, sleepless workdays has started to show cracks as of late. 

Much of the issue came to a head just two years ago, when Leo Lukenas III, a Green Beret who joined Bank of America as an investment banker, died of a blood clot after working extremely long days at the business. 

While the coroner’s report did not establish a connection between the banker’s death and his intense Wall Street workload, his death spurred attention to the long hours and health declines of overworked investment bankers. 

That same year, junior bankers were logging 100-hour workweeks—more than double the 40-hour load of many professionals. 

Banks are stepping up and helping their junior bankers avoid burnout

JPMorgan’s most recent monitoring tool is only a continuation of the banking industry’s clampdown on the concerning “rite of passage.” 

The Wall Street bank started implementing guardrails around the issue a couple of years ago; in 2024, the JPMorgan capped its junior bankers’ working hours to 80 hours a week. This policy was added on top of its “pencils down” period between 6 p.m. Friday to noon on Saturday, and the guarantee that staffers would have one full weekend off every three months. Some cases, like live deals, were exempt from the policy. 

Other banks have taken notice of widespread intense burnout. 

A 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation found that many junior investment bankers at Bank of America were routinely told by their superiors to lie about how many hours they worked in order to skirt limitations. After the reporting, the bank started encouraging its young staffers to accurately log their hours—and wave the red flag if any bosses told them to do otherwise. 

In turn, Bank of America rolled out a new monitoring tool in the fall of 2024, which required U.S.-based junior investment bankers to log their hours daily rather than weekly, the WSJ reported. The young employees were also instructed to input information on the deals they were working on, the senior bankers supervising them, and their ability to shoulder more work on a scale of 1 to 4.

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Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Tuesday declared a state of national energy emergency to respond to the impact of the Middle East war, which his administration said posed “an imminent danger of a critically low energy supply.”

Under the declaration, which will initially last for a year, Marcos will lead a contingency committee that will ensure the availability and orderly distribution of fuel, food, medicines, agricultural products and other basic goods.

Authorities were ordered to take action against the hoarding, profiteering and manipulation of the supply of petroleum products. The Department of Migrant Workers, meanwhile, was asked to brace for the possible rescue and evacuation of Filipinos in the Middle East.

The government has started to provide 5,000 pesos ($83) each to large numbers of motorcycle taxi drivers and other public transport workers nationwide to help them cope with soaring gasoline and diesel prices. Free bus rides have also been provided to students and workers in selected cities.

About 2.4 million Filipinos live and work in the Middle East, including about 31,000 in Israel and 800 in Iran. Most have opted, however, to stay and work in the region, with only several hundreds being flown home so far with government help since the Middle East hostilities began.

A Filipina caregiver, Mary Ann de Vera, was killed in Tel Aviv, Israel, in an Iranian missile strike on Feb. 28 while helping bring her elderly charge to a bomb shelter, Philippine officials said.

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As states that already ban abortion look to further restrict access this year, much of the focus is on pills sent by out-of-state providers.

A survey released Tuesday helps explain the emphasis. It suggests that more women in states with bans obtained abortions last year using the pills prescribed via telehealth than by traveling to places where it’s legal.

Most of the states with the political will to impose broad bans have already done so in the nearly four years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to enforcing them. So far this year, just one state has a new one.

Here’s a look at where things stand as many state legislatures are wrapping up or have completed their 2026 sessions.

States are taking steps to make abortion pills harder to get

South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden, a Republican, signed a bill last week that makes it a felony to advertise, distribute or sell abortion pills.

Similar measures have cleared both legislative chambers this year in Mississippi, where the House and Senate need to iron out differences before sending a bill to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.

A survey of state abortion policies from the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, finds that at least three states — Florida, Oklahoma and Texas — already have laws that specifically ban providers from mailing the pills to patients. Louisiana has classified mifepristone as a controlled dangerous substance.

Bills intended to keep out the pills have cleared one chamber in Arizona, Indiana and South Carolina this year. Republicans control the legislatures in all three states and the governor’s office in two of them. In Arizona, any restrictions that pass could be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

Survey suggests more women using abortion pills in states with bans

A Guttmacher survey released Tuesday sheds light on why abortion opponents may be focusing on pills.

The report suggests that in 2025, for the first time, more women in the 13 states that ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy obtained pills through telehealth than traveled to other states for abortion.

The prescriptions come from providers in states with laws adopted since the fall of Roe that are intended to protect those who prescribe abortion pills to patients in states with bans. Most often, women using pills for abortion are prescribed a regimen of two drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol. They’re approved for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.

The estimated increase in the mailing pills comes as Guttmacher’s estimates also suggest fewer women are traveling to obtain abortions in states like Colorado, Illinois, Kansas and New Mexico.

Guttmacher’s estimates are based on data from a monthly survey conducted among a random sample of U.S. abortion providers, combined with historical data from every provider in the U.S. They reflect a trend documented in other surveys of abortion providers.

Court battles are also centered on pills

Multiple states are challenging the federal rules that allow mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth. Requiring in-person prescriptions instead would at least dent the ability of out-of-state providers to get pills into states with bans.

Louisiana has such a lawsuit in federal court there; the attorneys general of Florida and Texas have one in Texas; those two states, along with Idaho, Kansas and Missouri, are making the same case in a Missouri court.

Meanwhile, Texas has filed civil cases and Louisiana criminal ones against providers accused of sending pills into their states.

The Food and Drug Administration last year approved a generic version of mifepristone, which frustrated abortion opponents.

One state imposed a ban, but its fate is uncertain

Wyoming is the only state this year that has imposed a new abortion ban.

Under a law signed in March by Republican Gov. Mark Gordon, it became the fifth state with a ban on abortion at about six weeks’ gestational age — before many women realize they’re pregnant. Like most of the others, Wyoming’s bans abortions once cardiac activity can be detected.

But courts have rejected previous Wyoming efforts to limit abortion, and the Wyoming Supreme Court in January struck down a ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.

The idea of punishing women is not gaining ground

No state has adopted a measure intended to allow criminal prosecutions against women who have abortions.

Proposals to do so keep getting made but sputter early in the legislative process.

The farthest such a bill has advanced was a hearing last year before a Senate subcommittee in South Carolina. One was scheduled for a subcommittee hearing in Tennessee this month, but didn’t get one.

Pregnancy Justice, which advocates for the rights of pregnant people, says it’s tracked new “abortion-as-homicide” measures introduced in six states in 2026 — down from 13 states last year.

The major established anti-abortion groups oppose the approach. “Women require compassion and support,” said Ingrid Duran, the state legislative director for National Right to Life. “Not prosecution.”

Melissa Murray, a professor at New York University School of Law, says that by introducing bills with penalties against women, the movement’s less compromising abolitionists can break down the idea that such policies are off-limits.

“You keep pushing the boundary, pushing the envelope, eventually you will get what you’re seeking,” Murray said. “It will no longer feel fanciful or shocking.”

She also noted that women are already sometimes charged with crimes related to their pregnancies. This month, police in Georgia charged a woman with murder after allegedly using an abortion pill and the opioid painkiller oxycodone.

Abortion will be on ballots in November

Abortion questions will be before voters in at least three states in November.

Missouri lawmakers are asking voters to repeal the right to reproductive freedom that they put into the state constitution in 2024.

Elsewhere, voters are being asked to add constitutional amendments that largely mirror current state abortion laws.

In Nevada, a state constitutional amendment to allow abortion until fetal viability — generally considered to be sometime after 21 weeks of pregnancy — passed in 2024, and needs voter approval a second time to take effect.

A Virginia ballot measure would guarantee the right to reproductive freedom, including access to contraception and making decisions on abortion care during the first two trimesters of pregnancy.

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Associated Press reporter Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this article.

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Kalshi and Polymarket, the two biggest prediction market platforms, rushed to institute new industry guardrails and add new surveillance tools on Monday after two key senators announced legislation that could severely curtail the industry’s prospects.

Kalshi said it would ban political candidates from trading on their own campaigns, and it would preemptively block anyone involved in college or professional sports from trading contracts related to the sports they play or are employed by.

In a statement, a Kalshi spokesperson said the company’s new features “further demonstrate our commitment to safe markets.”

Polymarket also instituted its own set of bans and rules. The company rewrote its rules to say clearly that users cannot trade on contracts where they might possess confidential information or could influence the outcome of an event. This would include athletes but could also include company officials, policymakers or anyone who would have enough influence to affect the outcome of an event or know the information in advance.

“These rule enhancements make our expectations abundantly clear for every participant across both platforms,” said Neal Kumar, Polymarket’s chief legal officer, in a statement.

Polymarket, in particular, has faced intense criticism after some of its users made substantial bets ahead of the war in Iran and the military action in Venezuela, earlier this year. Those users appeared to have profited handsomely from knowing in advance that President Donald Trump was going to take military action in those regions.

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, introduced broad legislation called the “Prediction Markets are Gambling Act,” on Monday that would ban prediction markets from creating contracts related to sports. While prediction markets allow users to bet on everything from the weather to political events, much of their recent growth has been in sporting events. The bill, if enacted, would substantially destroy much of Kalshi and Polymarket’s future business prospects. Both companies have signed business deals with several sports teams and leagues in order to bolster their credibility with sports fans.

Sen Curtis’ home state of Utah has been particularly aggressive in trying to keep Kalshi and Polymarket out of its state. Gov. Spencer Cox recently signed legislation that would expand the state’s definition of gambling to include what are known as “prop bets.”

Shares of the parent company of FanDuel and DraftKings rose sharply on Monday after the senators’ announcement.

While Sen. Schiff and Sen. Curtis are not the first politicians to propose a broad ban on the activities of prediction markets, the fact that both political parties are becoming skeptical of them is a cause of alarm for the industry. Several states have preemptively banned Kalshi and Polymarket, saying that the platforms effectively are a sports betting industry with a technological twist. While Kalshi has tried to sue to get its platform allowed in certain states, like Nevada and Utah, it has found little success so far.

Kalshi and Polymarket have found backing from the Trump-controlled Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal regulator of derivatives and other prediction markets activities. The CFTC’s chairman, Michael Selig, has said he would back Kalshi in any of its legal battles at the state level, arguing that federal law preempts any state law on this issue.

Any friendly decision the CFTC makes on this industry could end up financially benefiting the president’s family as well. President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has invested in Polymarket through his venture capital firm and is a strategic adviser for Kalshi.

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President Donald Trump took a surprise tour of Elvis Presley’s Graceland on Monday while in Memphis, a diversion from the war in Iran and efforts to address long lines at U.S. airports during which he marveled at just how famous the King of Rock and Roll was and wondered aloud if he could have beaten him in a fight.

Trump for years has played Presley’s music at his campaign rallies across the country and often compared himself to Presley. He was in Memphis for a roundtable on efforts to address crime in the city.

“I’m going to see Graceland after this, I think. Is that right?” Trump said during the meeting. “I love Elvis.”

Trump’s side trip to a top tourist attraction — which has at times ranked as the second most-visited private home in the U.S. after the White House — came as thousands of Americans across the country are wading through long lines at security checkpoints at airports, where Trump sent federal immigration officers to assist the Transportation Security Administration during an ongoing Homeland Security shutdown.

Also, though Trump was in Tennessee on Monday after ordering a “temporary” halt to planned strikes on Iranian power plants, American forces are still embroiled in the sprawling regional conflict.

The late singer’s stately home, with its stone facade and white columned entrance, is just a few miles from the site of the roundtable meeting, which was also attended by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Graceland opened as a museum and tourist attraction in 1982 as a tribute to Presley, the singer and actor who died in August 1977 at age 42.

Graceland temporarily closed down so Trump could take a brief private tour, including examining an Army helmet Presley scrawled his “EP” initials in after reporting to basic training in 1958. He also scoped out a bread warmer in the kitchen and traipsed through the den known as “the Jungle Room” because of its green shag carpet, Polynesian-style furniture and indoor rock waterfall.

Trump also marveled at Presley’s gold-plated Social Security card, suggesting that the style of card might be something authorities might want to bring back. Later, peering at Presley’s gold phone, the president offered, “I would like to hear some of those conversations.”

Tours of the home never include the bathroom where Presley died. But the president was handed a guitar to sign by a Graceland guide who pulled on gloves to handle special objects. The instrument was a replica of one used by Presley during his famous “Aloha From Hawaii” concert in 1973, the president was told.

After being told that Elvis had not actually played the guitar he’d signed, Trump grew reflective. “Could I have taken him in a fight?” he asked of Elvis, whom he lamented having never met.

“Who else would be more famous than Elvis?” he offered with a grin, when it was suggested that visitors could one day come to glimpse his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Trump’s campaign rally pre-show set list often includes some of Presley’s music, such as “Suspicious Minds,” “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” and a medley of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” At times, massive digital screens at his rallies would play videos of Presley’s concerts.

Trump has often compared himself to Elvis, once posting a composite photograph on social media with half Presley’s face on one side and his own on the other.

“For so many years people have been saying that Elvis and I look alike. Now this pic has been going all over the place,” Trump wrote. “What do you think?”

Later that year, he shared on social media a black-and-white image that depicted Trump standing alongside the singer as he played guitar.

Trump has also shouted out the late musician from the stage, opening a 2018 rally in Tupelo, Mississippi — Presley’s birthplace — by joking that people used to say that at one time he resembled him.

“We love Elvis. I shouldn’t say this, you’ll say I’m very conceited because I’m not, but other than the blonde hair when I was growing up they said I looked like Elvis, do you see that, can you believe it?”

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AP writer Will Weissert contributed from Washington. Kinnard reported from Chapin, S.C., and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP

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Moments after an Air Canada jet collided at high speed with a fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing the pilots and hurling a flight attendant from the aircraft, the passengers took their escape into their own hands.

With the smell of fuel in the air and debris dangling from the obliterated cockpit, passengers tore open emergency exit doors, jumped off the plane’s wings and then turned around to catch others coming up behind them, some bleeding or with head wounds.

“Strangely enough, I wasn’t scared or panicked. On the contrary, I think most of us were pretty aware of what happened,” said passenger Clément Lelièvre. “So we all went outside; we got other people out.”

About 40 passengers and crew members on the regional jet from Montreal, and two people from the fire truck, were taken to hospitals. Some suffered serious injuries, but by Monday morning, most had been released, and others walked away without needing treatment.

As investigators continued delving Tuesday into what caused the catastrophic wreck, stories of survival also emerged — including that of the flight attendant, found injured but alive outside the aircraft.

Lelièvre credited the pilots’ “incredible reflexes” with saving lives. The pilots braked extremely hard just as the plane touched down, he said.

The collision late Sunday came after the fire truck was given permission to check on another plane that had aborted its takeoff after reporting an odor on board and started crossing the tarmac. An air traffic controller can be heard on airport communications frantically telling the fire truck to stop.

Roughly 20 minutes later, the controller appears to blame himself. “We were dealing with an emergency earlier,” the controller said. “I messed up.”

A key for investigators will be examining coordination of the airport’s air traffic and ground traffic at the time of the crash, said Mary Schiavo, a former Department of Transportation Inspector General.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said LaGuardia is “well-staffed” but faces a shortage of controllers.

The runway where the crash happened is likely to be closed for “days” during the investigation, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, said at a news conference Monday. Investigators need to sift through a lot of debris, she said.

Authorities recovered the plane’s cockpit and flight data recorders by cutting a hole in the aircraft’s roof and then drove them to the NTSB lab in Washington for analysis, Homendy said.

It was too early in the investigation to answer many questions about the accident, but more information was expected to be released Tuesday, she said.

The crash shut down LaGuardia — the New York region’s third busiest hub — during what was already a messy time at U.S. airports because of a partial government shutdown.

Flights resumed Monday afternoon on one runway and with lengthy delays. The shutdown caused some disruptions at other airports, too, especially for Delta, which has a major presence at LaGuardia.

There were 72 passengers and four crew members aboard the Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada, according to the airline. The flight originated at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Canada has also sent a team of investigators.

The pilot and copilot who died in the first fatal crash at LaGuardia in 34 years were both based out of Canada, said Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport.

Jeannette Gagnier, the great aunt of one of the pilots, identified him as Antoine Forest, and said he always wanted to be a pilot.

Air traffic controllers are not impacted by the partial government shutdown that has caused long delays at airport security checkpoints in recent days. They have been affected by past shutdowns.

The FAA has been chronically short on air traffic controllers for years.

LaGuardia is one of 35 major U.S. airports with an advanced surface surveillance system designed to help keep track of planes and vehicles crossing the airport.

An alarm heard in the background of the air traffic control audio was likely from the system and would have alerted the tower to the potential collision, Former FAA air traffic control chief Mike McCormick said.

FAA statistics show there were 1,636 runway incursions last year.

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Associated Press reporters Michael R. Sisak, Anthony Izaguirre and Mae Anderson in New York; Rob Gillies in Toronto; Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed.

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Americans’ outlook on the job market has turned increasingly pessimistic, a surprisingly negative shift given the low unemployment rate but one that likely reflects an ongoing hiring drought.

Just 28% of workers in a quarterly Gallup survey conducted late last year said now is a “good time” to find a quality job, with 72% saying it is a bad time. Those figures are a sharp reversal from just a few years ago, in mid-2022, when 70% said it was a good time.

Americans have quickly gotten more pessimistic: As recently as late 2024, just under half of workers still said it was a good time to search for a job. The current survey was conducted during the final three months of 2025, long before the Iran war that has sent oil and gas prices soaring and threatens to slow the economy as Americans redirect more of their dollars to filling gas tanks and away from other spending.

The figures help explain other surveys that show Americans have a largely bleak view of the economy, even as many headline measures suggest it has been growing and job losses are low.

College graduates are especially gloomy

Job pessimism is especially pronounced among college graduates. The shift is likely because hiring in many white-collar professions has been unusually weak for the past two years, in areas such as software, customer service and advertising.

The survey found a split based on education levels, with just 19% of workers with a college degree thinking that now is a good time to find a quality job, while 35% of workers without a college degree are optimistic.

A separate Gallup survey of U.S. adults overall found that college graduates’ optimism about the job market is the lowest it’s been since 2013. Meanwhile, the gap in job market sentiment between Americans with and without a college degree was at its widest in that survey since Gallup started asking the question in 2001.

Signs of broad discontent among young workers

Just about 2 in 10 workers ages 18-34 think now is a good time to find a job, compared to about 4 in 10 workers ages 65 and older who say the same.

Gallup’s survey is consistent with what economists call the “low-hire, low-fire” job market: Businesses are largely holding onto their workers and measures of layoffs remain quite low. As a result, older workers are largely secure in their jobs. But hiring is also quite sluggish, making it harder for younger workers to break in and find permanent work.

It also found that younger workers are much likelier than older workers to say they’re actively looking for a new job or watching for opportunities. Most Gen Z and Millennial workers say they’re at least watching for opportunities, while about three-quarters of baby boomers say they’re not looking at all.

Other surveys signal negative economic views

The Gallup results come as government data shows that overall hiring is at its weakest level in more than a decade. The Labor Department tracks a “hiring rate,” or the proportion of people who are hired each month as a percent of those with jobs. The hiring rate dropped to 3.2% last November, around when Gallup conducted its survey, the lowest since March 2013. It was 3.9% before the pandemic.

A hiring rate at that 3.2% is quite low: When it was last reached in March 2013, the unemployment rate was 7.5%, as millions of Americans were still struggling to find work after the 2008-2009 Great Recession. It suggests it is much harder to find a job now than the unemployment rate would indicate.

Government data also shows that there are more unemployed people — 7.4 million — than available jobs, at 6.9 million. That is a reversal from the first few years after the pandemic, when vacancies outnumbered those out of work.

Gallup’s survey also found that workers have a dimmer view of their current life and future prospects than at any point since 2009, when the firm began measuring the workforce’s life evaluations.

Other surveys echo Americans’ generally dark view of the economy. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence survey was just 91.2 in February, not far from its pandemic-era lows and down from nearly 130 before the pandemic.

More people believe jobs are “easy to get” than “hard to find,” the Conference Board’s survey finds, but the gap has narrowed steadily in recent years.

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The Gallup poll of 22,368 U.S. adults who are working full-time and part-time for organizations in the U.S. was conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 13, 2025, using a sample drawn from Gallup’s probability-based panel. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 1.0 percentage points.

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President Donald Trump has cast another mail ballot in Florida as he continues to publicly bash the voting method as a source of fraud and push Congress to curtail the practice.

Palm Beach County voter records show the president voted by mail in a Tuesday special election for state legislative seats and that his ballot has been counted. Early in-person voting in the contest ran through Sunday, when Trump was still at his south Florida estate.

The White House did not immediately return an Associated Press request for comment. Aides have said Trump’s ire is directed at states using universal mail-in voting, not individual voters who may not be able to get to a polling place.

Nonetheless, Trump has in the last week called mail-in voting “cheating” and “corrupt as hell.” He is urging Congress to pass the SAVE Act, a sweeping bill that would bar universal mail ballots and limit the options to a select few voters — such as those with disabilities, military commitments or who are traveling on Election Day. The measure faces steep odds in the closely divided Senate even with the president’s pressure.

Trump has fixated on mail ballots since he began falsely claiming that his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden was the result of fraud. Multiple U.S. courts and Trump’s own attorney general have found no evidence of fraud that affected the outcome, despite the COVID-19 pandemic increasing the share of the electorate that cast mail ballots that year.

“We’re the only country in the world that does it that way. Corrupt as hell,” Trump said last week at the White House when hosting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin.

Dozens of countries, including European democracies that are traditional U.S. allies, use some form of mail-in voting.

Trump said last week that the SAVE Act was the “biggest thing” pending in Washington, even as Congress and administration grapple with the Iran war and a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.

Last August, Trump used a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to blast mail voting.

“We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt,” Trump said. “And it’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it. It’s the only way they can get elected.”

The president, who changed his official personal residence and voter registration from New York to Florida during his first term, does not have a standing vote-by-mail request for all elections, according to the county records. That means he has to request a mail ballot for any individual election.

The ballot today includes Florida state House District 87 and Senate District 14.

Trump offered an endorsement late Monday in the House contest via his Truth Social platform.

“There is a very important Special Election tomorrow, Tuesday, March 24th, for Florida State House District 87 in beautiful Palm Beach County. … TO ALL GREAT PATRIOTS IN FLORIDA STATE HOUSE DISTRICT 87: GET OUT AND VOTE FOR JON MAPLES! Polls are open from 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M.” Trump wrote, without mentioning that he had voted by mail or at all.

The Florida election comes one day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a Mississippi case questioning whether states can count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but not received until later. Trump has criticized those allowances in 14 states and the District of Columbia.

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As of 8:15 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil is trading at $102.47 per barrel, based on the Brent benchmark we’ll explain in a bit. That’s $1.03 above yesterday morning’s level and $29.44 higher than where it stood a year ago.

Will oil prices go up?

No one can say for sure where oil prices will go next. Many forces shape the market—but at the core, it’s still about supply and demand. When risks like a potential recession or war ramp up, oil prices can change direction quickly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

When you buy gas at the pump, you’re covering more than the cost of crude oil. You’re also paying for every step in the process, including refineries, wholesalers, taxes, and the markup your local gas station adds.

Even so, crude oil has the biggest influence on what you pay, often making up more than half the cost per gallon. When oil prices jump, gas prices usually climb right along with them. But when oil falls, gas prices often slip much more slowly—a pattern sometimes called “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

If an emergency hits, the U.S. keeps a backup supply of crude oil called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s mainly there to protect energy security during crises, such as sanctions, catastrophic storm damage, even war. It can also help cushion the blow when supply shocks send prices soaring.

It’s not meant to solve long-term problems. Instead, it provides quick relief for consumers and helps keep vital parts of the economy moving, like essential industries, emergency services, and public transit.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are two of the world’s primary energy sources. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, which which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

When looking at how oil performs, two main benchmarks stand out:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Of the two, Brent gives a better picture of global oil performance because it prices a large share of the world’s traded crude. It’s also the go-to for tracking oil’s historical trends. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now relies on Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

If you look at the Brent benchmark over several decades, oil has been far from stable. It has experienced sharp rises tied to wars and supply cuts, along with steep drops linked to global recessions and oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s delivered the first major oil shock when the Middle East slashed exports and placed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices fell in the mid-1980s due to lower demand and an influx of non-OPEC oil producers joining the market.
• Prices surged again in 2008 as global demand grew, but then crashed alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand plummeted like never before—pushing prices below $20 per barrel.

To sum up, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s heavily influenced by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, shifting energy policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Trump despises wind farms so much he’s paying a French energy giant $1 billion to stop building them
• Chevron’s CEO says oil prices are still too low
• The Iran oil crisis is the worst energy shock ever recorded

Frequently asked questions

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Good morning. The single-point forecast is no longer fit for purpose.

Scenario planning has become boardroom shorthand for preparation to deal with the unknowable, my colleague Geoff Colvin writes in a Fortune feature titled “For CEOs, it’s time for a wartime mindset.”

Colvin argues that it’s a practice that is never more vital than in wartime — when a cyberattack, or even a sanction, can reroute supply chains overnight and send energy prices soaring.

He writes: “Instead of betting on one forecast about how events will unfold, the most resilient CEOs are now rehearsing several plausible futures at once and deciding — before the missiles start dropping, the virus becomes a pandemic, or the markets seize up — what they will do in each.

“It’s an approach that was pioneered by Shell precursor Royal Dutch Shell. In the 1970s, the energy company began developing a set of vivid alternative futures involving potential oil-supply disruptions. Shell did not invent the idea of developing such scenarios, which had earlier roots in military and Cold War strategy, but it was the first major company to embed systematic scenario planning at the center of corporate decision-making, largely through the work of economist and planner Pierre Wack.” You can read more of Colvin’s article here.

CFOs are strategic partners to CEOs, and financial scenario planning isn’t just about reducing risk—it can also uncover new opportunities, according to Gartner research. For each scenario, CFOs should define actions that enable rapid response, while prioritizing moves that apply across multiple outcomes, such as locking in supplier contracts or accelerating product launches, Gartner advises. This kind of proactive planning helps to ensure companies can act quickly. The firm also points to AI scenario planning models to track key metrics in real time, and autogenerate scenarios based on real data, not just guesses.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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If yesterday’s five-minute relief rally taught analysts one thing, it’s that traders are keen to jump on the optimistic bandwagon when it comes to Iran. After weeks of volatile trade, yesterday Wall Street celebrated after President Trump indicated he was working toward a “complete and total” resolution of hostilities with Iran.

There’s one small issue: While Trump said there was “productive” conversations with Iranian leaders, Tehran reportedly maintained that “no dialogue” has occurred between the two nations. There are talks between intermediaries in Riyadh, but it’s not clear how far along they are, or how willing either side is to compromise.

Wall Street, however, has adopted a new behavioural trait since Trump returned to office: Investors are reacting (justifiably or not) to social media posts from the Oval Office without much verifiable evidence to go on.

Wall Street’s early optimism that the war in Iran would resolve relatively quickly means they are more inclined to act on positive updates from the commander in chief, according to UBS’s chief economist Paul Donovan.

He noted to clients this morning: “Markets are not reacting to information, they are generally reacting to social media posts and headlines—even if those posts or headlines are fake news or contradictory. The absence of verifiable facts is already complicating economic assessments, for instance, it is difficult to assess how much Dubai might have to spend repairing war damage, when there is little verifiable information about the extent of war damage.”

Wall Street has come to expect (indeed, sometimes bank on) rapid updates and changes in foreign policy under President Trump, often shared on social media rather than through more traditional channels. Trump’s social media posts have covered everything from tariff threats on trading partners and calling out specific businesses, through to criticism of the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.

The rapidity of these updates, and often the ensuing reverse ferret, has earned a nickname: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). The updates from the president on Monday, some have speculated, may the latest example of a TACO.

While it could be argued that Trump’s social media posts, above all others, should be monitored by investors, Donovan highlights that this should not obscure factual information. He added: “There is now a risk that investors will start looking for leading indicators of social media posts, rather than leading indicators of actual indications.”

Confirmation bias

There’s a further issue: Traders want the war in Iran to be over. When the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, Trump said the action would only last for a matter of weeks, and this is the baseline many economists and analysts have stuck with.

Donovan argues that for this reason, markets are “bewitched” by good news, and so are more inclined (such as yesterday) to act: In a matter of moments yesterday, oil sunk below the $100 threshold and was down 15% while equities added $1.7 trillion in value (much of this promptly unwound when Iran denied the talks).

“Investors are also perhaps influenced by loss aversion and confirmation bias,” added Donovan. “Investors want the war to end, there’s an irrational bias in favor of rising markets. If there is a story that seems to confirm that desire, investors are more likely to react to it. This does not mean that negative stories will be ignored … for now, markets do seem to be content to trade strongly on stories but to provoke an equal negative reaction would probably need more hard evidence of adverse developments.”

Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid echoed that markets will now be looking for follow-through from Trump 2.0, writing this morning: “Obviously, much now depends on the progress of any talks, and whether the more optimistic rhetoric is followed up by concrete action.”

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The giant asset manager Invesco revealed on Tuesday that it will run a crypto investment vehicle known as the Superstate Short Duration US Government Securities Fund (USTB), which holds over $900 million in assets under management. Like BlackRock with its flagship BUIDL fund, Invesco is betting on an emerging category of assets known as “real world assets” or RWAs, which consist of traditional investments packaged in blockchain wrappers.

While BlackRock’s BUIDL, the biggest of the RWA funds, is technically a money market fund that holds both Treasury Bills and repos, Invesco’s USTB, which is the fourth largest RWA fund, holds only T-bills. Another big player in the space is Paxos, which offers a fund backed primarily by physical gold.

While the RWA offerings are still niche products, they are growing fast. Their appeal derives from the blockchain packaging, which lets holders settle trades instantly, freeing up collateral. And unlike stablecoins, they provide easy access to yield. While tokenized funds have so far been marketed primarily to institutional investors, this could change in coming years as players like Invesco and BlackRock, which have large retail customer bases, expand their offerings.

“Invesco has been strategically building the capabilities required to support institutional-grade digital asset products since 2019, and this partnership reflects that long-term commitment,” said Kathleen Wrynn, Global Head of Digital Assets at Invesco, in a statement.

In an interview with Fortune, Superstate founder Robert Leshner explained that his company built USTB and another tokenized fund in part as a prototype to show Wall Street that the RWA concept worked in practice. Founded in 2022, Superstate also operates as a transfer agent and is positioning itself to offer its tokenization technology as a white label service across Wall Street. Superstate’s prime rival in this is Securitize, which provides the technology powering BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.

Leshner declined to provide the financial aspects of the new tie-up between between Invesco and Superstate, which in January raised an $82 million Series B funding round. He did, though, confirm that his firm would serve as an ongoing technology partner to Invesco, and that the financial giant would take over the branding and operations of the T-bill fund.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink underscored the growing importance of RWAs in his annual shareholder letter that was published on Monday. The letter contains six references to “tokenization,” including in a passage where Fink notes, “Tokenization could help accelerate [the] future by updating the plumbing of the financial system—making investments easier to issue, easier to trade, and easier to access.”

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When everyone agrees, that might be the biggest warning sign of all. Unanimous decisions often reveal as much about group dynamics as genuine agreement.

There is an unlikely field that studies this problem with unusual clarity: avalanche safety.

In avalanche safety training, there is one rule that overrides all others: if a single person in the group says “no,” everyone turns around. Corporate boards could learn something from that.

Corporate boards make some of the most consequential decisions in business — acquisitions, strategic pivots, leadership transitions, major capital allocations. Yet when those decisions appear in board minutes, they are almost always recorded as unanimous. Research suggests dissent occurs in only about 1% of board decisions. That unanimity often reveals as much about group dynamics as it does about genuine agreement.

The rule exists because of a pattern instructors see again and again. Someone senses something is wrong — unstable snow, deteriorating conditions, a risky route — but speaking up means challenging the plan and slowing everyone down. In larger groups especially, that voice often stays quiet.

The most dangerous variable, instructors often say, is not the snowpack. It is the group.

Corporate boardrooms operate under strikingly similar conditions. Directors must make consequential decisions with incomplete information: often within the compressed time frame of a board meeting. The question isn’t whether boards face pressure to align. It’s whether that pressure is silencing the most important voices in the room.

Consensus has obvious virtues. Boards function best when directors ultimately align behind a course of action. A unified board gives management clarity and confidence in execution.

But consensus can be a signal. It can also be a warning.

Anyone who has spent time in boardrooms recognizes how quickly the momentum of a conversation can tilt toward agreement. Management presents a proposal. A director offers a supportive observation. Another suggests refinement. Gradually, the discussion shifts from whether the proposal is sound to how it should be implemented.

Eventually the chair looks around the table and asks a familiar question: “Is everyone comfortable moving forward?”

Directors sometimes recognize the dynamic only after the meeting ends. Following a unanimous decision on a major initiative, someone may quietly remark in the hallway, “I had some reservations about that.” Another director admits they did as well. In the room itself, however, those doubts never surfaced.

Seasoned investors understand the value of dissent. Warren Buffett has long argued that the best boards are those where directors are willing to challenge assumptions rather than simply ratify them. But even strong boards can find that once a discussion begins to converge, raising a late objection becomes psychologically difficult.

Psychologists call this dynamic groupthink: the tendency of cohesive groups to suppress disagreement in pursuit of harmony. Boardrooms are particularly susceptible: — directors meet periodically, relationships are collegial, and open disagreement can feel unnecessarily disruptive.

Avalanche educators warn about the same pattern. As groups become larger, responsibility diffuses and individuals become less likely to challenge the emerging consensus. The very structure of the discussion can begin to suppress caution.

If that dynamic shows up in boardrooms — and the evidence suggests it does — improving board decisions isn’t only about who sits at the table. It’s about how decisions are made once everyone is there. Boards have spent decades focused on composition: independence, diversity, expertise. The next frontier is deliberation.

Some boards already experiment with structured disagreement. In evaluating major transactions, directors may organize “red team/blue team” exercises, assigning one group to argue for a deal while another is tasked with challenging it. The objective is to stress-test assumptions before committing capital.

Yet most board deliberation still takes place in a single conversation around a table. That format encourages the emergence of a dominant narrative before competing analyses have had time to develop.

Boards might consider what could be called parallel deliberation: briefly breaking into smaller groups before reconvening to compare conclusions.

After management presents a proposal, the chair divides directors into small groups and asks each to answer the same three questions: What assumptions must be true for this plan to succeed? What could cause it to fail? Under what circumstances would we say no? Fifteen minutes later, the board reconvenes and compares conclusions before continuing the discussion.

Such a structure introduces several useful dynamics. Smaller groups lower the social cost of dissent. Independent discussions generate multiple lines of analysis rather than a single conversational path. And by interrupting the momentum of a room-wide consensus, the structure helps surface concerns that might otherwise remain unspoken.

The goal is not to manufacture disagreement. Boards ultimately need alignment. But alignment reached through rigorous debate is far stronger than consensus that emerges quietly around the table.

In avalanche training, the group turns around when one person says no.

In boardrooms, that same voice is the one most likely to stay quiet — and the one most worth hearing.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Stock traders rejoiced at the news that President Trump may be searching for a way out of Iran. Oil is still above $100 a barrel, and both Tehran and Wall Street expect American voters to punish Republicans at the midterm elections if this goes on much longer. There is an off-ramp, but it risks making Iran look like the winners, experts say. Suspiciously, a massive set of highly profitable trades in oil and stock futures were placed in New York minutes before Trump announced he wanted Iran to come to the table. 
• Exclusive: Some people are so addicted to their phones that they end up in a $1,000-a-day rehab clinic outside Seattle.
• In Asia there are shortages of jet fuel, toilet paper, and fertilizer.
• Morgan Stanley warns of a “chaotic melt toward stagflation.”
• Private credit funds have shut the gates on some investors.

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Cambridge Mobile Telematics has quietly become one of the most important companies you’ve never heard of in the race to make driving safer—and now some of the world’s biggest insurers are doubling down on it. The Cambridge, Mass.–based company has secured a $350 million strategic investment led by TPG’s Rise Funds and Allianz X, Fortune exclusively learned, with existing backer State Farm also participating in the all-secondary deal.

CMT builds AI-powered telematics software that turns everyday devices—smartphones, car sensors, dashcams, and other connected hardware—into real-time risk detectors on the road. Its DriveWell Fusion platform ingests sensor data from millions of devices and fuses it with contextual information, creating a unified view of how people actually drive, from hard braking and speeding to phone distraction. Insurers, automakers, and public agencies then use those insights to price risk, detect crashes, and nudge drivers toward safer habits. 

To date, CMT-powered programs have helped prevent more than 100,000 crashes and 54,000 serious injuries, and support over 140 safe driving initiatives touching more than 55 million drivers in 25 countries, according to Frost & Sullivan and the company. According to TPG, the company already serves nearly all of the 25 top U.S. auto insurers.

The business behind that impact is not small. Third-party estimates peg CMT’s private valuation above the billion‑dollar mark. The new deal follows a $500 million investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in 2018, one of the largest tech financings in Massachusetts at the time.

Powers, CMT’s cofounder and CEO, has a simple way of explaining what all that capital is funding. “If you think of the world of mobility, we are an artificial intelligence mobile sensing company,” he told Fortune. “Most vehicles have a signal coming from them. Now it might be the driver’s phone, it might be the vehicle itself, but we measure the signal. We do not track things. We measure signal.” Beyond insurance, CMT’s public sector division works with cities and transportation agencies to understand how people move, redesign dangerous roads, and prepare aging infrastructure for more automated driving.​​

The strategic investment into CMT is notable not just for its size, but for what it is not. Powers says, “none of this is primary capital. This is all secondary transactions, meaning there’s no dilution with this transaction—zero.” The new money instead is meant to push the business further in its innovation by buying out older investors and providing liquidity to long‑time employees and shareholders. “We’ve been at this for 16 years,” he told Fortune. “We continue to generate cash and continue to deliver liquidity to folks along the way.”​ 

Akash Pradhan, partner at TPG’s Rise Fund, told Fortune, the firm’s investment in CMT comes from his belief that the telematics company is slated to become the “mission critical” infrastructure of road safety turning more than 30 petabytes of data into foundational AI that can help both save lives and lower premiums.

For Allianz X, the deal is as much about strategy as returns. The unit is the strategic investment arm of Allianz, rather than a conventional GP/LP fund, and sits inside a group that wrote about $217.1 billion in total premiums and generated $20.2 billion in operating profit in 2025, serving roughly 97 million customers worldwide. “At Allianz X, we’re not a fund, so we don’t have a GP structure,” CEO Dr. Nazim Cetin told Fortune. “We are a strategic investment unit of Allianz.”

Allianz has been building a digital claims stack in recent years, acquiring firms like ControlExpert, Innovation Group, and GT Motive to automate everything from photo-based damage estimates to routing cars to the right repair shops. CMT’s telematics is meant to sit upstream of that system, helping prevent accidents in the first place and feeding richer data into claims workflows when they do happen. 

Cetin stresses that Allianz X still underwrites the deal like a classic venture investor. “We do not invest if the company on a standalone basis would not give us the risk-return profile that we expect,” he says. “In this case, what we would expect is what every VC investor would expect from such an investment on a standalone basis.” But unlike a traditional fund, Allianz’s capital “doesn’t have an expiration date,” giving it more patience to realize both financial returns and operational gains like lower claims frequency and more tailored pricing for policyholders.​​

The check also comes from serious financial firepower. TPG manages more than $120 billion across strategies and has built its Rise impact platform into what it calls the world’s largest dedicated impact-investing franchise, with roughly $19 billion in assets under management. Allianz X sits inside one of the largest auto insurers in Europe and globally, while State Farm—an early CMT backer—runs one of the most widely used telematics programs in the U.S., Drive Safe & Save, across more than 90 million policies and accounts.For Powers, that network is as much about distribution as dollars. “Because we’ve been profitable for so long, and because we really control our destiny, we really get to be selective of who we choose to work with,” he told Fortune. But ultimately, Powers says, his vision for CMT is simply to help leave the world better than he found it.

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• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady reports on energy CEOs’ reactions to the war in Iran.
• The big story: The knock-on effect of Mark Zuckerberg’s AI sidekick.
• The markets: Mixed globally as uncertainty hangs over the Iran war
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Energy leaders from around the world are in Houston right now for the annual CERAWeek gathering, organized by S&P Global. A major theme, of course, is the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has cut off 20% of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas, creating the greatest global energy supply shock ever.

As Fortune’s Energy Editor Jordan Blum reports from Houston, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth believes oil prices may be too low. As Wirth told attendees: “There are very real physical manifestations of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that are working their way around the world through the system that I don’t think are fully priced in.”

Indeed, hard-hit Asian countries are trying to stockpile and conserve energy through work-from-home efforts, school closures, and more. The war is also crippling supplies of helium and fertilizer, hurting chipmakers and farmers alike. (Stocks and even Bitcoin rallied Monday on news of possible peace talks.)

A number of Middle Eastern leaders are not in Houston this week because of the conflict: Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser withdrew while others are participating virtually. Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, CEO of state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), is scheduled to participate virtually today. Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE’s minister of energy and advanced technology and head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (Adnoc), gave a virtual address yesterday in which he said  “weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz is not an act of aggression against one nation. It’s economic terrorism against every nation.”

While U.S. CEOs may not face as direct a hit in terms of energy supplies, they have other consequences to contend with. I spoke about that with CEOs at our New York dinner last week, as well as some executives en route to CERAWeek. Some quietly echoed the sentiment of political leaders who say stopping Iran is necessary for regional prosperity; others conveyed anger at the costs being inflicted on their companies by a war they didn’t start. All are managing the consequences, recognizing the fallout could continue long after any peace deal is reached. As one person put it: “This war has caused lasting damage to friends and foes alike.” 

Be sure to follow Jordan’s coverage of the news coming out of CERAWeek and the Middle East.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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The U.S. housing market is a far cry from what it was in the post-war era. Back then, the median home price sat at about $7,300, or about $101,000 adjusted for inflation. Gen Z and Millennials are especially struggling to score the purchase that’s considered the heart of the American dream. The median first-time homebuyer bought their home at age 40 last year, up from the early 30s from just a decade ago. And now, prospective homebuyers are being walloped by a competing reality: an encroaching AI-driven “jobpocalypse,” which could push homeownership even further out of reach—or erase the prospect altogether.

“I think that AI and the potential for AI layoffs is a major part of that economic anxiety that’s holding people back from making a commitment to buying a home—even though it got more affordable to buy one,” Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, told Fortune.

A new survey of 4,000 U.S. residents conducted by Ipsos and commissioned by real-estate brokerage Redfin found that nearly 3 in 5 Americans (59%) think AI will eliminate jobs and make it even harder to afford homes. Not only do Americans have to contend with rising home costs, but they now have to fear the loss of their jobs due to AI—moving the goalposts even further from achieving the American dream.

The situation has grown dire for Gen Zers—so dire in fact that many parents of young adults have stepped in to help out with a down payment. With older generations holding the overwhelming majority of wealth in the U.S. today, one way we’re seeing the Great Wealth Transfer play out is with parents helping with housing costs and even prioritizing homeownership over college tuition, seeing it as the more transferable and tangible component of generational wealth.

AI’s impact on the housing market

Fairweather said negative attitudes around AI could actually be contributing to cold feet in the housing market. While mortgage rates have been elevated over the last few years, she said a recent dip in rates should’ve led to an increase in home purchases. But that was not the case, something she attributes to economic anxiety driven by AI fears.

“People are very concerned that they’re going to get the short end of the stick with [AI],” she said. “I think it goes back to just how other technological advancements have been handled and how jobs that used to be good-paying middle class jobs have been automated away.”

The sentiment is the same across political ideology. About 63% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans agree that advances in AI will eliminate jobs and make it harder to afford homes.

Still, many Americans believe AI will have the exact opposite effect. Thirty percent of those surveyed said advances in AI will help boost the U.S. economy and will, therefore, help more people afford homes. 

While a growing chorus of business leaders sing to the praises of AI’s productivity potential, the reality on the ground hasn’t yet reflected predictions of sweeping layoffs. Tech companies like Jack Dorsey’s Block and Australian-American firm Atlassian have attributed wide-spanning layoffs to AI so far this year. But a study published last month revealed that thousands of company executives have yet to see real employment or productivity impact from AI.

“Part of these fears could be overblown because of all of the rhetoric about how transformative AI will be,” Fairweather said. “But that could just be hype.”

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One of the greatest scientific achievements in human history became a political liability almost overnight. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, scientists identified the virus, deciphered its secrets, concocted a vaccine, put it into production, and endered the disease manageable – all within a year. No civilization had ever moved that fast. 

The response? The Trump administration jeered individual scientists, cut funds, fired specialists, and shuttered bureaus. It’s almost like we opened fire on the triumphant GIs returning from World War II. How did triumph turn into a culture war? And what can be done about it?

Where Science Failed First

Start with what the scientific establishment got wrong: first, the CDC’s testing debacle. The agency lacked the capacity to oversee the mass testing that a pandemic requires. Worse, its test technology cratered (thanks to a manufacturing glitch) and the agency — in classic bureaucratic mode — did not seek help from private industry. The FDA made things worse by refusing to approve alternatives to the test that didn’t work. Without tests, policy makers could not track the disease; they were flying blind. Here’s the first lesson: The fix: The CDC should get out of the pandemic test production business and work more closely with the nation’s biopharma companies to develop diagnostics as new infections emerge.

Second, scientists never managed to explain why their guidance kept shifting — and this bred suspicion. Simple answer: They were learning about the virus. The shifting advice on masking stirred anger because few people — in government, the media, or the public — understood where it came from. Tony Fauci was not just jerking the country around.

Early on, researchers assumed COVID behaved like influenza. Then they discovered it spreads via asymptomatic carriers — a crucial difference that demanded new guidance seemingly out of nowhere. Fauci wasn’t being evasive; science was evolving in real time. The lesson: Scientists must bring the public along as understanding changes, not just announce new conclusions.

The Untold White House Story

The attack on science has a political history that’s rarely told in full. It started with lack of White House preparation for a pandemic. The National Security Council had disbanded its unit devoted to biological threats, and the intelligence community took more than a month to get Covid on the President’s daily intelligence briefing. Even then they brushed it aside.

Everything changed in the first week of March. New York City became a death zone. President Trump was reportedly shaken by footage of refrigerator trucks backed up to the mortuary at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, not far from where he grew up. The Stock Market tanked. The NCAA cancelled March Madness. Businesses shuttered. Schools closed. Dr. Deborah Birx took over as the White House Covid coordinator and built a model (accurately) projecting unimaginable deaths: 100,000 to 240,000 over the next two months.

Against that backdrop, Donald Trump, after denial and equivocation, responded sensibly. Off camera and off Twitter, he made tough decisions. He listened to his health advisors, weighed their advice against challenges from the economists, closed borders, endorsed shutdowns, and—most dramatically—tossed aside normal procedures and merged science, logistics, and great piles of cash to develop a vaccination at, well, warp speed.

How Politics Poisoned the Well

But by April, the shutdowns were taking a toll, the presidential election was heating up, and Trump was getting earfuls from his business associates. The economic team, led by Kevin Hassett, then former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, whipped up new, friendlier projections of only 26,000 Covid deaths by Memorial Day — more people than that had already died when the model was unveiled. The new estimates made Trump deeply suspicious of his health care team. 

Suspicion turned to anger when scientific leaders kept contradicting his embrace of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and convalescent plasma. He turned on them publicly — casting the FDA, CDC, and NIH as deep state conspirators dedicated to defeating him.

In mid-April, anger turned to rebellion. Trump cheered small bands who were brandishing firearms, waving Trump flags, and denouncing the shutdowns. His tweets amplified the struggle to “liberate”  America from both Covid restrictions and his enemies: the overweening elites — scientists, bureaucrats, Democrats — who had dreamt them up as expert overreach.

Trump went one tweet too far, however, when he blasted the FDA’s Covid vaccine trials for moving too slowly (“just another political hit job”). That moved nine pharmaceutical companies to buy newspaper ads pledging not to release any vaccines before they were proved safe and effective. To prove vaccines’ safety, FDA extended clinical trials by several weeks so that FDA approval  came after election day – permanently entangling the FDA in the MAGA epic of a rigged election.

The Anti-Vax Vanguard

The turn against science got its final push when Trump mentioned his own COVID vaccination at a post-election rally — and heard boos. He pivoted immediately, joining the anti-vax movement he had inadvertently helped create. No surprise that a second term Trump should tap Robert F Kennedy, Jr. — and DOGE — to “go wild” on health and science. A rebellion against vaccinations and public health raced through conservative precincts. Twenty-six states enacted new and stringent limits on long-standing public health authorities that were already hollowed out from years of budget austerity.

But scientific facts are stubborn things. As historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, the anti-expert tradition rises and falls in waves across American history. Rising measles infection rates — and the political liability of owning a public health crisis heading into midterms — appear to be shifting the tide. Kennedy and his allies are already softening their vaccine skepticism.

What Comes Next

The path forward requires more than policy fixes, though those matter. Scientists need to communicate evolving knowledge in real time. Politicians need to resist weaponizing uncertainty. Agencies need the funding and flexibility to respond at scale.

But ultimately, protecting society demands something deeper: a nation of people who pull together, who care for one another, who reach across their divisions and mind the health and safety of their neighbors. We’ll never do well against pandemics until we learn to channel what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We won’t beat the next infectious threat without them.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Sarah London operates on the front lines of the toughest terrain in U.S. health care. She’s the CEO of Centene, an insurance giant providing government-sponsored plans at a time when funding is tight, costs are rising, and policy shifts create intense uncertainty.

While the St. Louis–based managed care insurer saw revenue grow almost 20% last year, to $194.8 billion, it posted a net loss of $6.7 billion. That was largely driven by a write-down that reflected the new reality for health care companies under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by President Trump. Along with cutting federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years, the law raises costs and reduces eligibility for people enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace plans.

Those changes are shaking up Centene’s core businesses. More than half of Centene’s revenue comes from Medicaid—it’s the country’s biggest Medicaid insurer—with the rest roughly divided between Medicare and Marketplace plans. While analysts don’t expect federal cuts to have a massive impact on Centene’s top line, they’re a sign of the challenges London faces.

Faced with new data that showed its ACA plans were enrolling both fewer and sicker people, London decided to withdraw earnings guidance last July, causing Centene’s share price to fall 40% in a single day, to an eight-year low.

“It’s hard not to feel like pulling guidance and cutting the stock in half is a failure,” London told Fortune in a recent interview. “We’ve watched a new normal unfold in terms of how many different pressures there are on the system and the magnitude of the change we’re facing.”

London is pushing to get ahead of that change. She’s been transforming Centene’s portfolio, technology, and culture since becoming CEO four years ago, at the age of 41, making her the youngest woman to lead a Fortune 500 company (a distinction she still holds).

Under London, Centene is using data and technology to better manage a business that cares for a higher proportion of sicker patients than many other insurers do. She has also launched a One-CenTeam initiative to make Centene a catalyst in creating healthier communities. In May 2024, at the Fortune Brainstorm Health conference, for example, London announced plans to partner in building $900 million of affordable housing in eight states to help boost health outcomes.

Other Centene initiatives spotlight preventive health measures that could help members avoid expensive medical problems—and leave Centene with a healthier bottom line

Mission-driven

After graduating with a history and literature degree from Harvard, London spent two years in the film industry before deciding she wanted to make a bigger social impact. She did stints at Harvard, supporting health, education, and equity initiatives, and at nonprofit Health Leads, building out its model of community-based care, before earning an MBA at the University of Chicago. Her goal: to move from storytelling to systems thinking, using data to drive change.

That mission drew her to Humedica, a pioneer in leveraging big data in public health. “Sarah sort of cold-called me in 2011,” recalls former CEO Michael Weintraub. “It wasn’t, ‘Hi, hello.’ It was, ‘I researched your company; this is what I work on. I’ve heard about your team; this is who I want to work with.’ We made a decision to hire her that day.”

London rose through the ranks at Humedica, which became part of UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, before joining Centene in 2020. She got the top job there in 2022 after longtime CEO Michael Neidorff stepped down shortly before his death.

Neidorff had built Centene from a regional Medicaid plan in St. Louis with about $40 million in annual revenues to the nation’s largest Medicaid managed care organization. With that growth came a lot of acquisitions and bloat. “The mission orientation was there from the get-go—that’s our superpower—but there hadn’t been as much focus on operating discipline,” says London, who subsequently sold off several noncore operations.

What distinguishes London’s leadership is an ability to connect the dots, says Karen Salfity, whom London brought in from Optum to create a more consistent strategy and member experience. “Sarah can look at a very complex situation, understand the various factors, and then create an assessment … with just enough heart that you know she cares deeply,” says Salfity, who has known London for 15 years. “The only thing that’s really changed is the scale at which she is able to do it.”

A new normal

London knows all too well that a lot of factors in health care are outside her control, not least of which is the Trump administration’s push to radically modernize and streamline federal programs. In February, the administration announced new steps to crack down on alleged fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, on top of the funding cuts and expired ACA tax credits that have already taken effect.

London is not as disheartened as one might think. “You could take a step back and come away with the conclusion that these [programs] are under attack,” she says. But she notes that there was “quite a bit of bipartisan support” for making the sector more efficient.

“I have yet to meet a politician who does not believe that affordable, high-quality health care is something very important to be able to provide for their citizens and voters.”

She sees the current reforms as underscoring the need to take a holistic, high-tech approach to caring for vulnerable populations. Indeed, some of Centene’s systems anticipated the changes that the administration has enacted. “We have work programs in more than 17 states; we partner with nonprofits and provide job training to Medicaid members,” London says. “We run every single claim through 75 algorithms every day to look for fraud, waste, and abuse.”

“Health care is wildly overdue for a digital revolution,” she argues, pointing to an array of tech initiatives that Centene has implemented. Those range from designing supplemental food benefits where there are food deserts—”because we know that if you don’t have access to food, medication adherence goes down”—to predictive algorithms identifying members likely to have high-risk births and mobilizing resources to support them. As London notes, “41% of all babies born in the U.S. are born onto Medicaid”; it’s crucial that the program keeps those children healthy so they can “go and get jobs and contribute to economic mobility and all the things we want as part of the American Dream.”

London knows how tough it is to deliver on that dream. “The country is getting poorer and sicker,” she says. “The dollars are not infinite. At the finite boundaries, you have to make decisions about what you are going to fund and what you are not.”

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Grab will acquire Foodpanda’s Taiwan business for $600 million, in the superapp’s first foray outside Southeast Asia. The Singapore-based company signed a deal with Foodpanda parent Delivery Hero just one year after Uber abandoned its bid to buy the Taiwanese platform, citing regulatory pushback.

The acquisition is set to complete by the second half of 2026, and Grab plans to fully migrate all users, merchants and drivers to its platform by early 2027. 

“This is a natural next step for Grab, as our experience in Southeast Asia is a direct fit for this market,” said Grab CEO Anthony Tan, in a press statement on Monday. “Our longstanding expertise in managing complex delivery logistics for dense and high-traffic cities is well-suited for Taiwan.”

Analysts call the deal a timely move for Grab, with Maybank Securities analyst Hussaini Saifee describing it as “a compelling new growth leg” for the Southeast Asian company given Taiwan’s robust economy.

The expansion also vindicates Grab’s business model, which has dominated Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing and food-delivery market for close to a decade. The company is now “exporting its playbook,” says Tan Joo Seng, an associate professor of business at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Tan calls Grab’s move a faster way to get access to Taiwan’s market, rather than building something from scratch, like “taking a high-speed train instead of laying the tracks.”

Foodpanda Taiwan generated $1.8 billion in gross merchandise value last year, despite having only 10% user penetration amongst Taiwan’s population, according to a Maybank Securities research note.

If the deal goes through, Grab will have a presence across 21 cities in Taiwan, with Uber Eats being the platform’s only major competitor. 

Uber made a bid for Delivery Hero’s Taiwan business in May 2024. Yet Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission raised antitrust concerns around a merger between the two platforms, which together account for roughly three-quarters of the market. Uber, which also operates a ride-hailing business in Taiwan, eventually dropped its bid early last year. 

Delivery Hero is under pressure from investors to divest some of its overseas businesses, if not an outright sale of the whole company. Aspex, a Hong Kong fund that’s Delivery Hero’s second-largest shareholder, threatened to replace CEO Niklas Östberg if he didn’t do more to sell parts of the company, Bloomberg reported in mid-March.

Grab isn’t the only company expanding to Taiwan. Both Singapore-based Sea, as well as South Korea’s Coupang see Taiwan as an increasingly important business for their e-commerce platforms.

In a LinkedIn post, Grab CFO Peter Oey described Taiwan as a “structurally compelling market” with high urban density, strong consumer spending power and a digital economy driven by the AI and semiconductor boom. (Taiwan’s economy grew by 9% last year, the highest level since 2010).

Tan, from NTU, calls Taiwan the “perfect bridge” to the rest of North Asia, citing its high density and digital-friendly consumers.

Grab’s regional expansion

Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling founded Grab in 2012 as a mobile app to provide safe taxi-hailing services in Malaysia. Since then, it’s expanded across eight Southeast Asian markets, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines. It holds a 55% share of the market, and outcompeted both domestic players like Indonesia’s GoTo and global giants like Uber. 

After starting with ride-hailing, Grab has expanded its suite of offerings to include food and grocery deliveries and cashless payments, making it one of Southeast Asia’s leading superapps. 

Grab, No. 128 on the Southeast Asia 500, reported record annual profits of $268 million last year, on top of $3.4 billion of revenue. 

Grab shares, which trade on the NASDAQ, rose 2.3% on Monday, after the company announced its acquisition of Foodpanda Taiwan. Shares are down by over 20% for the past 12 months.

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When Palantir CEO Alex Karp predicted that AI would erode the economic power of “humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters” in favor of “working class, often male voters,” he wasn’t making a forecast. He was making a choice — and calling it destiny.

That distinction matters more than whether he’s right.

AI has advanced faster than almost anyone expected. Recent geopolitical shocks have compounded the uncertainty. But the real question isn’t who wins or loses in Karp’s vision — it’s whether that vision is the one we want to build.

Disruption Isn’t the Same as Progress

The AI era has generated extraordinary wealth. Nvidia and Microsoft are each worth trillions. ChatGPT now reaches 900 million weekly users. By conventional measures, the revolution is working.

But U.S. unemployment hit a four-year high last November. The wealth gap between the top 1% and bottom 50% has widened since ChatGPT launched. Rapid advancement and record market performance are not measures of success — they’re measures of speed.

A technology capable of unprecedented scientific discovery and work automation should do more than reshuffle economic winners. It hasn’t, largely because industry and government have failed to define what outcomes they actually want AI to deliver — or who it should serve.

Trust Is the Missing Ingredient

People adopted the smartphone because they could see how it would improve their lives. Nobody adopts a technology framed as replacing them.

Yet that’s exactly how some of AI’s loudest advocates describe it. The result is predictable: wariness, skepticism, and a widening gap between immense capability and actual value.

For AI to endure — commercially and socially — people need to trust it. That requires them to feel its benefits directly.

Where AI Should Actually Go to Work

If AI is eliminating manual labor, the economically and socially prudent move is to direct that capacity toward the sectors most starved of it: healthcare, human services, and infrastructure.

These industries face acute labor shortages and stretched staff. They’re also where automating manual tasks would be most transformative without displacing workers:

• Doctors spending more time diagnosing and treating patients instead of documenting visits
• Caseworkers staying in their roles because their jobs no longer consume their weekends
• Transit systems running more reliably as maintenance and reporting become automated

That’s not disruption. That’s progress.

Build With Workers, Not For Them

The US leads in AI talent, research, and infrastructure. The challenge isn’t building the technology — it’s pointing it at the right problems.

One meaningful shift since ChatGPT’s launch: the skills threshold to harness AI has dropped dramatically. LLMs, vibe-coding, and accessible tools mean that building and tailoring technology is no longer reserved for elite college graduates. Frontline workers — the ones who actually understand what’s broken in healthcare or social services — are no longer locked out.

A software engineer knows nothing about being a doctor or a caseworker. If AI is going to serve our most critical workers, industry must build it with them, not for them. Government procurement must do the same. That’s how you get both value and trust.

Stop Predicting. Start Deciding.

Karp is right that AI will reshape economic power. Where he’s wrong is treating that reshaping as inevitable rather than engineered.

The problems most in need of solving aren’t hidden. We know where inequality lives. We know which services are buckling. If the leaders building this technology want it to last, they should stop predicting who gets left behind — and start deciding who gets lifted up.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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The days of grinding at your desk from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. are officially numbered. Imagine clocking off an hour earlier every single day and still taking home the same salary. Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban says artificial intelligence is about to make it happen.

“Smart, bigger companies will enable their employees to create and use agents (within security guardrails), improve their productivity,” Cuban just wrote on X. “But most importantly, they will reduce their workday by an hour to start. Same pay.”  

He added that working from home already “dilutes” people’s start and finish time, but that forward-thinking companies will put an official policy in place that cuts the workweek down by at least 5 hours. “It’s a step that sets the tone in a company,” he added.

“Reward people doing the daily with more time.”  

It’s a bold call—but Cuban, who built and sold Broadcast.com (“the YouTube” of his era) for $5.7 billion and has backed hundreds of companies on Shark Tank, has a track record of spotting workplace shifts before the mainstream catches up.

He even taught fellow self-made multimillionaire Emma Grede—the founder behind Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Khloé Kardashian’s Good American—how to make the most of AI early on. He had over 60 AI apps on his phone at the time. So he knows more than most how many hours these tools can claw back.

And his argument is that the smartest companies will give that time back to their workers.

The 40-hour workweek launched 100 years ago—and it’s no longer fit for purpose

The standard 9-to-5 schedule hasn’t had an overhaul since Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Henry Ford brought the 40-hour workweek to the Western world a century ago, in 1926—eight hours of labor, for eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. At the time, it was a 19th-century worker’s dream.

However, between commutes, school runs, and last-minute holdbacks in the office, it took the world shutting down to realize that 8-8-8 had slowly morphed back to something more like 12-6-6. Working from home briefly allowed workers to claw back some of that time. Families ate breakfast together again. Parents walked their children to school. That mismatch between productivity and presenteeism became impossible to ignore, and post-pandemic workers simply refused to go back “to normal”.

Already, office staff is crafting informal “dead zones”—hours or even days when they’ve unofficially checked out.

Studies show productivity plummets between 4 and 6 p.m. as employees slip into COVID-era habits of gym runs and school pickups. Many have also quietly dropped Fridays, echoing America’s Got Talent judge Simon Cowell, who recently said he stopped working them altogether because they were “pointless.” Emails get left unanswered, and the few still at their desks can’t get a meeting in the diary.

Now, with governments around the world once again pushing remote work and even four-day workweeks in the wake of the war in Iran, the pressure on the traditional workweek is building from every direction. And for workers already stretched thin by stagnating wages, “peanut butter” raises and a cost of living that keeps climbing, an hour back every single day—with no dent to their paycheck—isn’t just a perk. It’d be the first real raise many will have seen in years.

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Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not a true believer. Again and again, the Meta CEO and Facebook founder has thrown himself headfirst into his company’s top initiatives. A few years ago, he made himself the face of the company’s since-sidelined metaverse push, and remained steadfast even as the internet mocked how his virtual reality avatar fenced, hydrofoiled, and, at times, looked awkwardly flat. He even ran internal and media meetings inside Meta’s own VR offices, which he argued was a better way to connect than regular video conference calls. He also regularly wears Meta’s bulky AI smart glasses in public, aesthetics be damned. 

The chief executive is now walking the walk on another Meta imperative: AI adoption. According to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg is building an AI agent to help him as CEO. Details are scarce on the still-in-development tool, but the WSJ reports that it’s getting Zuckerberg information faster, expediting processes that normally require him to query multiple people. Meta did not immediately return a request for comment on the tool. 

As Meta spends tens of billions of dollars developing “superintelligent” AI models and building data centers to power them, it’s become borderline obsessed with staff-wide AI adoption. The company has encouraged employees to employ the technology in multiple ways, and incorporated “AI-driven impact” into its performance reviews. It is also reportedly among the tech giants that have established leaderboards that rank employees based on their consumption of tokens—a measure of AI use. But of all the methods of inducing AI adoption, Zuckerberg’s leading by example might be the most effective. 

Data shows an emerging credibility gap in which leaders are mandating and hyping AI but are often only casual users of the technology themselves—sometimes using it less than their rank-and-file employees. Nearly 70% of CEOs, CFOs, and senior executives use AI at work less than an hour a week, including 28% who don’t use it at all, according to a survey of more than 6,000 senior leaders in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia co‑authored by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom. The disconnect may be blinding leaders to the first-hand experience of using AI, which is causing workload creep and cognitive overload, at least in current use cases.

Separate research from Gallup finds that manager support of AI—including modeling its application—is a strong driver of whether employees use and value AI tools. In organizations investing in AI, employees who strongly agree their manager actively supports their team’s use of AI are more than twice as likely to use AI a few times a week or more, 6.5 times as likely to strongly agree the tools are useful, and 8.8 times as likely to say AI helps them do what they do best every day, Gallup says.

By all accounts, Meta’s AI organization-wide AI push seems to be working. It’s breeding an experimental culture reminiscent of Facebook’s heady early years, the WSJ reports, with employees participating in AI hackathons and deploying personal AI agents that do work on their behalf.

Does every CEO need a Zuckerberg-style AI sidekick? That remains to be seen. What is clear is that leaders who expect AI to be woven into daily workflows can’t stay light users of the tools; if they want credibility—and real adoption—they’ll have to log in and experiment. They’ll need to feel the pain and reap the gains, along with everyone else.

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At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”

At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”

Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction. Clients are required to abstain from the internet, smartphones, gaming, and other technologies—often for months at a time. On her first day there screen-free, Hill lay down on her bed and cried.

Hill and reSTART’s other clients are at the center of an intense debate about how harmfully addictive modern tech can be. Once waged mostly in academic white papers and over dinner tables, it has escalated to the courts, thanks to a slew of landmark legal cases against Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. (The last two reached settlements earlier this year. TikTok declined to comment for this article, and Snap did not respond to requests for comment.) These initial “bellwether” cases are being closely watched because their outcomes could provide precedent for the thousands of other lawsuits filed making similar claims—and even force tech companies to change their products and business models. Some have anticipated a “Big Tobacco moment”—a reference to the 1990s lawsuits against tobacco companies that proved they were aware of the addictive nature of nicotine and the health dangers of smoking, and led to massive damages paid.

On March 25, California jurors delivered a blow to Meta and YouTube, and validated the concept of “tech addiction” by ruling that the companies were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms. They awarded the plaintiff, known as KGM, a combined $6 million in damages. The now 20-year-old plaintiff had testified in February that the “addictive design” of these platforms, including infinite scroll, filters, and autoplay, led her to spend up to 16 hours a day on them, causing depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm.

“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a Meta spokesperson said when reached for comment after the ruling. A spokesperson for YouTube parent company Google said the company also disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” the spokesperson said.

The Big Tech companies have long denied claims about “addictive design,” saying they did their best to protect free expression while keeping users safe. They also question the whole concept of “tech addiction,” pointing out that there’s no scientific evidence that their products were the cause of KGM’s and others’ issues. The head of Meta’s Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in court that social media was not “clinically addictive.” And in a written statement prior to the verdict, a Meta spokesperson pointed to other factors in KGM’s life as the cause of her troubles, adding: “The evidence simply doesn’t support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality.”

Reached for comment about YouTube during the trial, a spokesperson for owner Google, José Castaneda, said allegations about the platform were “simply not true.” “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” he said. He pointed to the company’s “services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls.”

Chona Kasinger for Fortune

But concerned parents—along with researchers, health organizations, and even some former tech industry leaders—are sounding the alarm, saying that the systems we rely on for modern life are designed in ways that may be fundamentally incompatible with human well-being. They cite a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience arguing that social media use delivers dopamine jolts similar to those associated with addictive drugs like meth or heroin. And with the rapid acceleration of AI, many are calling for the U.S. government to get serious about regulation and pleading with Big Tech to provide stronger safety features that constrain the algorithms, push notifications, and endless swiping that make it so hard to put your phone down.

“Unfortunately, [tech] is taking mostly young people away from the most important thing in their lives and key to their mental health, and that is relationships with other people,” says New York University professor and podcaster Scott Galloway. For tech companies, he says, it’s all about keeping users’ attention locked in: “I don’t think [Big Tech] set out in their business plans to depress global youth. I think their algorithms discovered that rage, self-esteem, and funny cat videos just keep people online.”

There is, of course, a difference between the kind of low-level “addiction” to our phones that most of us jokingly will cop to—checking email before we’re out of bed, scrolling TikTok in the grocery line—and the rarer, all-consuming dependency that leads people to places like reSTART or into courtrooms as plaintiffs. At the same time, the line between a bad habit of using tech several hours a day and a behavioral addiction can be blurry, especially for teens and young adults whose social lives, homework, and entertainment all run through the same devices.

And that’s the whole point, argues Roger McNamee, a former tech investor and author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. “These companies are in the business of attention,” he says. “Once they had attention, they were in the business of controlling the choices available to people in order to influence their behavior in ways that were profitable for the platform. That culture and that business model were guaranteed to produce lots of harm.”

With its constitutional and cultural emphasis on the importance of free speech, the U.S., unlike many other countries, has largely declined to tell tech companies how they should interact with users. That has had dire effects, McNamee says: “We went from a culture where we used tech as an empowering tool to viewing tech as a tool for controlling people and extracting value. That’s the culture of the Valley, and the underlying behaviors that that causes are wrecking our democracy, wrecking public health, and wrecking our economy.”

The reluctance to place limits on how tech products engage users, especially in the age of AI, “should disturb everybody,” he says.

The $1,000‑a‑day residential program helping gamers and social media addicts reclaim their lives

Some 25 miles northeast of Seattle, past towering Douglas firs, sits the gray-paneled, split-level reSTART clinic. Motivational posters and pillows with phrases like “Healing is not linear” adorn its common areas. The center can house up to 16 clients, who share rooms and are responsible for household chores. They also are required to participate in 24 to 30 hours of structured group and individual therapy each week. reSTART teaches clients multiple evidence-based coping and recovery strategies, ranging from box breathing to physical grounding exercises. The treatment isn’t cheap. As an out-of-network provider, reSTART’s rate averages about $1,000 per day, though the clinic encourages clients to check with their insurers to see what can be covered. The average length of stay is 12 to 16 weeks, and many continue on via outpatient services for weeks after.

reSTART cofounder Cosette Rae opened the center with therapist Hilarie Cash almost two decades ago. Rae had previously worked as a tech developer and, upon realizing she was overusing technology in unhealthy ways, decided to change careers and pursue social worker training.

She vividly recalls a case in 2009, when she was called to assist a young adult who refused to leave their house or go to school. (Rae uses the pronoun “they” here to protect the individual’s identity.) They were not healthy, and had moved their bedroom mattress into the middle of the living room to play World of Warcraft nonstop. Doctors had diagnosed the person with agoraphobia, but Rae suspected that tech addiction was the real problem. She reached out to Cash for advice, and the two realized there was no place to treat people with these types of issues. They decided to open a center themselves.

Rae remembers being both “revered and rejected” in the early days of the center. Much like today, many didn’t think tech addiction was real. But there was no shortage of clients: She has treated around a thousand in the nearly two decades since the center opened, and spoken to many thousands more, she says.

What her clients struggle with is more difficult than breaking free from substance abuse, Rae says, partly because there’s no getting away from tech; it’s everywhere. “When I go out in the community right now, I do not have a lot of friends that are telling me about meth or heroin,” she says. “I don’t usually go into the store and see people dealing. I don’t go to the restaurant and people are doing a line. But when it comes to technology, it’s everywhere. So you’re constantly being in front of it and having to say no.”

It’s more akin to an eating disorder, Rae says, where a person still has to eat but has a problematic relationship with food. In this day and age, clients aren’t able to drop technology from their lives completely.

It’s not just teenagers who are struggling. Rae mainly works with young and middle-age adults (reSTART takes clients who are 15 and older), but she has seen clients in their late forties or fifties. The most common addictions Rae sees, besides video games, involve virtual reality, pornography, and more recently, AI chatbots.

One client, a 23-year-old Seattle-area college student who asks to withhold their name and gender, describes their own overuse of video games, YouTube, and communication platform Discord. The student says they wished schools today would teach kids how to use technology mindfully and warn against addictive behaviors: “Technology is best used when it’s a tool to enhance your life. But what I got trapped in is technology being my life.”

The dopamine debate: What brain science says about “tech addiction”

Some scientists, such as Stanford psychiatrist and Dopamine Nation author Anna Lembke, say compulsive tech use taps into the brain’s reward circuitry in strikingly similar ways to substance addiction. When someone scrolls social media or wins a round of a video game, their brain releases dopamine, which trains them to seek that “hit” again and again. Repeated bursts of stimulation can desensitize the pathways and weaken the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and self-control, making it harder to resist urges even when the habits are causing problems or affecting school, work, or relationships.

Brain imaging studies of people with internet gaming or social media disorders have found structural and functional changes in these regions that mirror what doctors see in other behavioral addictions such as gambling.

Tech addiction is not listed as a condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the guide published by the American Psychiatric Association for diagnosing mental health conditions. However, in its most recent edition, the DSM does list “internet gaming disorder” as a condition warranting more clinical study.

Its absence doesn’t faze Rae. “It took 40 years for gambling [disorder] to get into DSM,” she says. “So I don’t give any credence to the fact that it’s not in there yet.”

The science is far from settled, and some studies suggest that tech doesn’t cause users’ unhappiness. A 2023 University of Oxford study of 2 million people from around the globe found that links between internet adoption and psychological well-being were “small and inconsistent.”

And in March, California Institute of Technology researcher Ian Anderson and Wendy Wood, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote a Washington Post op-ed arguing that calling habitual tech use “addiction” was misleading and harmful. In surveys, they found that when people described their Instagram use as an addiction, “They felt stuck, less confident that they had the ability to change.” Yes, they wrote, companies should “amend their platforms to help users regain control over their habits.” But they concluded, “The truth is: Heavy use is not necessarily an addiction.”

Nir Eyal, a tech investor and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, says it’s not the tech that’s solely to blame for people’s addictions. “Every generation has a moral panic about whatever new technology, but you don’t fix things by stopping their use,” he says. “You fix things by making them better, by making them safer.”

Eyal argues that there is nothing unethical about making a product that some people get addicted to, and asking social media companies to make their products less sticky is not the answer. Why? “Because any product that’s good, somebody is going to get addicted to,” he says. “Stop making the product interesting? That’s dumb. That’s why we use the product. That’s called ‘entertaining and engaging.’”

The debate is only likely to grow more urgent given the rapid adoption, and daunting potency, of AI. Rae fears AI could create new ways for people to get hooked on tech, or treat AI as a “substitute attachment figure” for real relationships. “I think everybody’s been focused on all the talk around the existential threats like, ‘Can it take our jobs?’” Rae says. “But what about taking our humanity? That’s what’s happening.” As a practitioner working with tech addicts, she says, “I’m standing here looking down at a tsunami coming to people who have no idea what their kids are going to be facing. How this is going to change them; how it’s going to change their relationships with each other; and how it’s going to change their futures.”

Can laws, product changes, and rehab clinics actually protect kids from addictive tech?

If tech addiction is accepted as real, it raises another thorny and divisive question: What can—and should—be done about it? Some states, including New York and California, have enacted laws requiring warning labels on social media apps that highlight the risks for young people. In September, the New York attorney general proposed a rule requiring social media companies to restrict algorithmically personalized feeds and nighttime notifications for users under 18 unless parental consent is granted. California put legislation into place last year creating safety restrictions on the development of AI.

Federal oversight has been slow or nonexistent, though many legislators have tried. In 2019, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill that would have banned social media features that exploited human psychology. Hawley’s Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act went nowhere, attracting little bipartisan support and never making it out of committee.

In December, Australia became the first country to ban social media for people under 16, and Greece and Britain are considering similar laws.

Social media platforms have themselves put up some guardrails, mainly via opt-in or parental controls. Meta launched Teen Accounts on Instagram and Facebook, with more restrictive features and nighttime nudges to close the app. Snap has expanded in-app warnings, “friending” safeguards, and location-sharing controls. Google and YouTube announced a $20 million initiative to address teen digital well-being. TikTok launched a daily screen-time limit, with users under 18 automatically cut off after an hour. And in February, Meta, TikTok, and Snap agreed to be independently rated on how well they protect teens’ mental health by a group of advocacy organizations.

reSTART’s Rae doesn’t want to get stuck in semantics. Instead of arguing about whether their products are addictive, she says that Big Tech companies should devote some of their profits to resources that can help those “struggling as a result of loving their product,” she says. Many people can’t afford treatment like reSTART, as most health insurers won’t cover problematic tech use—though sometimes clients can get coverage for associated disorders such as depression or anxiety.

Companies could also consider shutting off access to their technology for certain time frames, Rae suggests. Eyal recommends something similar. In addition to implementing a legal minimum age to use social media, he recommends that tech companies adopt a “use and abuse” policy. After a certain number of hours, he says, tech companies should reach out to the user with a message offering resources to prevent or cure addiction.

Sarah Hill recently transitioned out of the center to an apartment owned by reSTART, half an hour away. She still visits the center most days for treatment, but is eyeing a job at a grocery store on her off days—and even got a cell phone. It’s a basic “dumb” Gabb phone, with no apps or games. Even so, Hill recently found herself mindlessly scrolling through new screen backgrounds. “I felt myself losing control again, and it scared me,” she says, tucking the phone underneath her legs on one of reSTART’s oversize chairs.

But Hill says she does have high hopes about managing her addiction in the future and says her phone usage has improved. “After making so many mistakes, I’m finally putting a foot down and saying, ‘I want to get out of this endless cycle,’” she says. “I need to do something to better myself and my life.”

Six questions to ask yourself about your tech use

Washington’s reSTART Clinic developed these screening questions to help potential clients consider whether their tech use has become problematic. Here’s an abbreviated version:

• How often do you think about your current, previous, or next online activity?
• Have you become restless, irritable, angry, or anxious when you are unable to engage in online activities?
• Have you tried to reduce participation in online activities but found it too difficult?
• Have you lost interest in non-online activities such as sports, hobbies, or family time?
• Have you deceived a family member, significant other, employer, or therapist regarding the amount of time you spend online?
• Have you jeopardized or lost a significant relationship or an academic or employment opportunity because of your engagement with online activities?

This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “What is tech addiction? It may well be Big Tech’s next problem.” It was updated on March 26, 2026 following the verdict in the case against Meta and YouTube.

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United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is preparing for the worst: a future where oil prices reach as high as $175 per barrel and stay above $100 until the end of 2027. 

With the U.S.-Israel war on Iran now in its fourth week, the airline industry is staring down its biggest disruption since the pandemic as the global oil market suffers a supply shock.

This is the first major crisis the industry is facing since widely ending the practice of fuel hedging in 2024 and 2025, an insurance that can protect airlines from spikes in fuel costs. 

Jet fuel—which accounts for more than 40% of airlines’ operating costs—have nearly doubled in the last three weeks, according to Argus Media. Kirby predicted in a letter to employees that if fuel prices remain high, they would add $11 billion to United’s annual costs.

It may spell doomsday for an industry that took four years to recover from the pandemic, but airline executives are remaining optimistic. The reason? This time, they’re prepared to pass on the costs to you. 

The average price of a transcontinental flight has risen from $167 in late February to $414 in mid-March, according to a Deutsche Bank analysis. The strain is also being felt strongly on less-distant routes. A flight from New York to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on budget airline JetBlue went from $166 to $566 in three weeks and is more than four times as expensive as it was a year earlier. 

But demand remains strong as consumers have already swallowed a post-pandemic spike in airfares. The last 10 weeks have been the highest booked revenue weeks in United’s history, according to Kirby’s letter.

Similarly, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that sales in the week before March 17 rose about 25% from a year prior. Five of Delta’s top 10 ticket sales days ever have happened since the war began. And he’s not too worried about fuel prices because Delta is in a “position of strength” to raise airfare, Business Insider reported. Delta also has its own oil refinery, which provides a “meaningful hedge,” he said.

To be sure, cancellations are coming, and routes will be slowed or ended like they were during the pandemic, said Martin Dresner, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Maryland. 

Delta has halted certain routes, including flights from New York to Tel Aviv until May 31 and from Tel Aviv to New York until June 1. The restart of its Atlanta to ​Tel Aviv service has been delayed, with flights to Tel Aviv paused until August 4 and from Tel Aviv until August 5.

United is planning to trim some off-peak flights, such as redeyes as well as Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday trips during the second and third quarters. The airline is also halting service to Tel Aviv and Dubai due to the war. 

“To be clear, nothing changes about our longer-term plans for aircraft deliveries or total capacity for 2027 and beyond, but there’s no point in burning cash in the near term on flying that just can’t absorb these fuel costs,” Kirby said in the letter to staff. 

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Big Oil giant TotalEnergies will eliminate nearly $1 billion in offshore wind projects planned along the U.S. East Coast under the threat of cancelation from the Trump administration in exchange for redirecting the reimbursed funds to U.S. natural gas projects, primarily in Texas.

In the so-called “landmark agreement” announced March 23 between TotalEnergies and the U.S. Interior Department, the federal government will reimburse the French energy giant about $928 million for its investments in the Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay projects offshore of New York and North Carolina, respectively, which were put on hold by the company after President Donald Trump was elected.

Speaking at the CERAWeek by S&P Global event in Houston, TotalEnergies chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanné said he is opting “not to litigate, but to make pragmatic solutions.”

While TotalEnergies will continue to pursue onshore wind, solar, and battery storage projects in the U.S., he said, the company will abandon offshore wind that is now deemed too big and expensive without federal subsidies in the U.S.

“It’s good to be innovative from time to time and pragmatic,” Pouyanné said. “We can recycle this money … into smarter investments.”

President Trump has pushed back against the expansion of both wind and solar energy in the U.S.—in favor of fossil fuels instead—but he has particular disdain for the massive offshore wind turbines that he deems unsightly.

TotalEnergies also is a major player in natural gas in the U.S., especially in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The agreement with the Interior Department, while scant on details, specifically cites the companies increased investments in Houston-based NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG project in southern Texas, as well as in natural gas production investments in the Gulf of Mexico and in U.S. shale drilling.

TotalEnergies is both a 17% shareholder of NextDecade and a major customer of the gas exports from the Rio Grande LNG project. TotalEnergies also is an owner of Sempra Energy’s Cameron LNG in Louisiana and an investor in Glenfarne’s planned Alaska LNG.

Speaking alongside Pouyanné, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said TotalEnergies will investment in more reliable natural gas projects and not “intermittent” wind farms. “We are not driven by a climate fantasy,” Burgum said.

“They (TotalEnergies) thought there were going to be a bunch of subsidies,” Burgum said, citing the ending of subsidies for wind and solar projects in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” approved last year.

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When Brian Niccol took over as CEO of Starbucks 18 months ago with the intention to return the company to its glory days of the 1990s and early aughts, he was surprised to see the coffee chain felt more like a factory floor than a warm hangout spot.

In an recent episode of Semafor’s “The CEO Signal” podcast, Niccol said when he first took the helm of the company in late 2024, he visited several stores and noticed the coffee chain had put so much emphasis on fulfilling large volumes of orders it had strayed from its reputation as a cozy coffee house. Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” plan introduced in his first days as CEO was meant to restore Starbucks to its roots as a “third place” for customers to linger in.

“We got really focused on trying to be efficient and run it like a manufacturing facility, as opposed to recognizing, no, this is actually a customer service experience, where we do great craft and create great drinks for people on time,” Niccol said.

Although Starbucks stock is virtually unchanged since Niccol took over a year-and-a-half ago, the former Chipotle CEO has been working hard to restore that certain charm that once belonged to “the third space.” He found that Starbucks had too much of a good thing.

A to-go culture gone too far

Niccol came into a company that was in some ways battered by the success of its popular online ordering, still responsible for most of the chain’s orders, including 40% drive-thru and 30% mobile. In early 2024, then-CEO Laxman Narasimhan said customers were abandoning their online orders after placing them online, having to wait in long lines for their orders to be fulfilled during busy commuting hours. The Starbucks menu was large, and patrons’ ability to customize their orders overwhelmed baristas and slowed down order fulfillment.

Early in his tenure, Niccol spoke with customers who lamented the lack of comfortable seating Starbucks locations once had, as well as baristas recognizing and chatting with them. Baristas told Niccol Starbucks should bring back condiment bars to let customers add their own cream and sugar, relieving pressure from workers fulfilling more complicated orders.

“The feedback I heard was, we’ve made the job more complicated than necessary,” Niccol said. “It was one of those things where it’s like, we got to get back to focusing decisions that actually show up in the store, and then you got to understand how those decisions actually are executed in the store.”

The company took those suggestions, among others, returning seats to thousands of store locations and returning condiment bars after their pandemic-era discontinuation. 

So far, the “Back to Starbucks” plan appears to be working. The company reported a 4% increase in year-over-year same-store sales, and a 5% uptick in revenue for the quarter. Profits took a hit as the company navigated tariffs and brought on more workers to staff its stores.

“We’re pleased with our progress, and we believe we remain ahead of schedule, and we’re confident on our path forward,” Niccol told investors in January. “But we also recognize that we’re still in our turnaround.”

The road back to Starbucks

At the core of the raft of changes to the Starbucks experience was making the chain as much about customer service as about coffee, Niccol noted.

“f you aren’t working on initiatives that ultimately make the store experience better for our customer and our partner, probably working on the wrong things,” he said.

Niccol rolled out the “Back to Starbucks” plan through a series of immediate shifts followed by more structural changes. Locations activated more wall outlets and began giving ceramic cups to customers who wanted to sit in the store for a while. Baristas were told to write personalized messages on paper to-go cups. Workers were also required to begin wearing black shirts under green aprons as part of a brand refresh.

Behind the counter, Starbucks slashed menu items by 30% to lighten the load of baristas. It rolled out an AI-powered assistant designed to troubleshoot equipment issues, teach baristas how to make drinks, and prioritize orders to increase efficiency.

To be sure, not all baristas are on board with the changes. More than 1,000 union baristas went on strike in November 2025, demanding Starbucks increase staffing to improve long customer wait time, as well as let existing baristas work more hours to meet the threshold for benefits. Last May, more than 2,000 baristas protested the company’s dress code and argued workers should have a say in what they wear.

Starbucks did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Niccol said the “Back to Starbucks changes have already shifted the company’s reputation. In an interview at the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute in December 2025, Niccol said he was reading through a Reddit thread of Starbucks job candidates interviewing at the company, with some users asking what interview questions they should prepare to be asked. Other users, presumably Starbucks employees, said candidates should be prepared to talk about customer service.

“If you don’t like customer service, you’re probably not going to like working at Starbucks. We’re in that transition of getting people to understand that,” Niccol said. “When I saw that in the Reddit thread, I was like, ‘OK, we’re making progress on what the standard of services that we want [are].’”

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The war in Iran is spiking global oil prices, and Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be happier.

The war has bottled up one-fifth of the world’s oil, putting a premium on the remaining supply, including Russian barrels.

Earlier this month, the U.S. issued a 30-day waiver that allows countries to buy Russian oil already at sea without the fear of sanctions, which the U.S. has steadily imposed on the country and those that buy oil from its largest producers since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the “deliberately short-term measure will not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government.” But after years of big discounts and covert tactics to sell their oil abroad, the easing of Russian sanctions has already given Putin and other Russian officials new confidence, as well as hope that this U.S. leniency will last longer than its April 11 expiration date.

Prior to the Iran conflict, the Urals oil benchmark, on which most Russian crude is priced, stood at about $57 a barrel, a significant discount to Brent crude at $71 prior to the conflict. By Monday, Urals was trading at near parity to Brent at around $100, despite retreating by midday.  

To be sure, Brent crude fell sharply on Monday, after President Donald Trump said he would postpone attacks on energy infrastructure  as his officials negotiate with Iran on a way to end the war. Tehran denied it was in talks.

Still, Russia has earned an estimated $7 billion in the first two weeks of March from selling fossil fuels since the start of the war, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). 

The increase in oil has made Russia “the single biggest winners in the near term” from the Iran conflict, Wichita State University international business professor Usha Haley told Fortune. 

Despite Bessent saying the 30-day waiver is “narrowly tailored” to oil already at sea, she said this caveat is hard to enforce in reality, especially given the large demand at the moment.

“It has actually rescued Russia’s oil revenues from decline and a decline over a very long period,” Haley said. 

Four years after Russia invaded Ukraine, its fossil fuel exports, including coal, crude oil, liquified natural gas, pipeline gas, and oil products are 27% below pre-invasion levels, according to the CREA. As of February, the country’s fossil fuel exports had fallen 19% year on year, although the recent increase in demand due to the Iran war is likely to change that calculus, said Haley.  

Putin intends to take advantage of the sudden opportunity while he can. The Russian president said during a Kremlin meeting with policymakers and Russian business leaders earlier this month it’s “important for Russian energy companies to make use of the current moment.” 

He also appeared to troll his adversaries, saying Russia was ready to work with European countries as long as they are committed to “long-term cooperation” and are willing to drop “political overtones.” 

Moscow’s special economic envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, went even further in a Telegram message earlier this month, saying “The U.S. has practically admitted the obvious,” with its 30-day waiver, the Washington Post reported. “The global energy market cannot remain stable without Russian oil.”

In more recent days, Dmitriev has continued to gloat on social media, lambasting the EU for distancing itself from Russia since its 2022 Ukraine invasion and predicting more pain for Western countries as a result of increased oil prices.

“Europe can finally enjoy the success of both its Green and Russophobic agendas—no oil, no gas,” he wrote in a post on X Sunday.

The Iran conflict, which is now in its fourth week, has led to a destabilization in the global oil supply due to Iran’s attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. As a result, the U.S. has taken steps to backstop supply including releasing 172 million barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve—the second largest drawdown ever. 

The U.S. last week also issued a 30-day waiver running through April 19 that would allow countries to purchase Iranian oil already loaded onto vessels. Bessent said in a post on X the move would bring 140 million barrels of oil to global markets. 

However, the U.S’s easing of sanctions to try to bring stability to oil markets has been criticized by some as being ineffective for solving the global oil crisis.

Analysts at financial services firm Siebert Williams Shank, wrote in a report earlier this month that easing sanctions would not increase the supply of oil worldwide because much of this sanctioned supply already finds its way to the market by clandestine means. 

“Sanctions have not materially impacted Russian production, only the price and markets they sell to, so they possess little incremental supply,” wrote the analysts.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country has been locked in a full-scale war with Russia since 2022, has also said the move will embolden Putin.

“It spends the money from energy sales on weapons, and all of this is then used against us,” he said in a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this month. 

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Bitcoin rose alongside equities while oil prices fell after U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. had begun talks with Iran, raising hopes for a deal to ease the conflict.

The original cryptocurrency advanced more than 5% to trade as high as $71,794 in New York before paring some of the gain. Smaller tokens including Ether and Solana also rose. 

Bitcoin had earlier on Monday been fluctuating around a two-week low, sliding as far as $67,371 — its lowest level since March 9. The token has been volatile since the conflict in Iran began in late February, at one point jumping to a high of nearly $76,000 before tumbling once more as tensions in the region escalated.

“Currently, the situation in the crypto market does not appear as severe as it did at the end of February, when sentiment was at the same level,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro. 

Bitcoin initially climbed after the U.S. president said he would delay strikes on Iranian energy facilities and infrastructure for five days. Risk assets rallied more broadly, with the S&P 500 gaining 1.5%, while Treasury yields and the dollar declined as traders pared back some of their more hawkish Federal Reserve bets.

Flows that have been supporting Bitcoin’s price over the last fortnight had weakened going into Monday, with inflows into U.S. exchange-traded funds tied to the cryptocurrency turning negative. 

“A potential catalyst to stabilize the markets for now would be some sort of de‑escalation in the Middle East, or at minimum a resumption of normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz,” analysts on Laser Digital’s derivatives trading desk wrote in a note on Monday.

“This could set off a chain of oil price stabilization, followed by rates consolidation and improved risk sentiment,” they added. “Minus this, crypto markets are likely to stay heavy.”

Trump on Monday said representatives from Iran reached out to start talks with the U.S. because they were eager to make a deal after his threat to strike energy facilities. But Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, on Monday said in a social media post that the US president’s claims were fake news “used to manipulate the financial and oil markets.”

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Iran’s economy was already crashing before the U.S. and Israel launched a war against the Islamic republic three weeks ago, and the relentless bombing since then has wreaked even more havoc.

In fact, high inflation triggered mass protests in December and January, prompting the regime to massacre tens of thousands of its own citizens. President Donald Trump warned Tehran against further violence and began a military build-up that led to the current conflict.

Inflation has worsened and apparently is so bad now the government issued its largest-ever currency denomination: the 10 million rial note (equivalent to about $7).

The new currency went into circulation last week, according to the Financial Times, and comes just a month after the prior record holder, the 5 million rial, came out.

As prices continue to spiral higher while the war boosts demand for cash, long lines formed to withdraw the fresh banknotes, and supplies quickly ran out.

Iran’s central bank said electronic payments are still the main methods for transactions, though the 10 million rial bill will “ensure public access to cash,” the FT reported.

But doubts about the viability of electronic payments have grown during the war as the U.S. and Israel target the regime’s levers of control.

In addition to bombing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitary forces, a data center for Bank Sepah was also hit on March 11. Sepah is the country’s largest bank and is responsible for paying salaries to the military and IRGC.

“Iran is already in the middle of a severe cash liquidity crisis,” Miad Maleki, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Treasury Department official, said on X earlier this month. “As of Jan 2026, banks were running out of physical banknotes daily, with informal withdrawal caps of just $18–$30/day. Cash in circulation surged 49% YoY due to panic hoarding. The regime simply cannot pivot to cash payments, there isn’t enough physical currency in the system.”

Meanwhile, a currency collapse that began after last year’s U.S.-Israeli bombardment has fueled crippling inflation. The rial lost 60% of its value in the months after the 12-day war, and food inflation soared to 64% by October. It accelerated further to 105% by February, vaulting overall inflation to 47.5%.

The exchange rate fell as low as 1.66 million rials per $1 last month, though it strengthened to about 1.5 million rials as the U.S. temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil.

Heightened demand for cash further stresses a financial system that was considered dubious even before the current war started three weeks ago.

The failure of Ayandeh Bank late last year forced the regime to fold it into a state-run lender, underscoring how fragile the sector was as bad loans piled up to politically connected cronies.

“This was largely theater. In reality, Iran’s entire banking system is insolvent, its balance sheets sustained by fiction rather than assets,” Siamak Namazi, who was a U.S. hostage in Iran from 2015 to 2023, wrote in a report for the Middle East Institute in January.

During his captivity, he learned from imprisoned former officials and business elites that politically connected borrowers bribed assessors to inflate the value of properties, which were used to obtain massive loans.

Instead of repaying the loans, borrowers just gave their properties to the bank, which sold them to other banks at a paper profit, according to Namazi. Those banks knew the properties were overvalued “garbage,” but played along in the scheme by dumping their own toxic assets in exchange and booking fictitious gains.

“The result is a closed-loop Ponzi scheme, sustained by mutual deception and regulatory complicity,” he added. “This practice has metastasized over the past 15 years and is far more extensive than this simplified description suggests. And this is only the banking system. Much of the rest of Iran’s economy is afflicted by similarly entrenched corruption and mismanagement.”

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Panic buying is back in Japan. 

As the U.S.-Israeli-Iran conflict rattles oil markets, Japanese consumers are stockpiling toilet paper—a product with no connection to the disruptions whatsoever, but that has caused enough problems for the country that the Japanese government has urged citizens to stop buying ahead of time. Still, social media posts depicting empty toilet paper abound.

But why would people panic buy goods unrelated to or not affected by the conflict? Panic buying behaves much like a bank run. Nobody knows exactly where it starts—some single, bleating data point that says this store is going to run out of toilet paper, or this bank is going to run out of money. 

Back in the olden days that data point, a verifiable person, would run and holler at their neighbors; “Hey Johnny, take your money outta the bank! They’re about to run out!” and Johnny would go a-running. Now someone posts on social media that COVID-19, tariffs, or the war with Iran is going to nuke toilet paper stock, and strangers across the country start loading up their carts. 

Pandemic-era panic buying is making a comeback

This was the situation with the great panic of COVID-19. On March 12, 2020, toilet paper sales surged 734% compared to the same day the year before, making it the top-selling grocery item in the world that day. By the time the Great Toilet Paper panic of 2020 was over, 70% of the world’s grocery stores would have run out at some point—a record.

The shortage was so severe it caused a measurable shift in American bathroom habits: Bidet sales spiked and, for many households, stuck. But researchers who studied the episode afterward found no actual supply chain disruption for toilet paper. Production was steady and distribution was intact. Rather, the shortage was almost entirely a creation of panic and hype.

Now the panic buying is back—this time in Japan—and in some ways it makes even less sense. During COVID, supply chains across every sector were under strain, so the instinct to stockpile had, at least, a logical ambiance. Today, the disruptions are due to tightening in oil markets tied to the conflict in Iran, and little to do with consumer packaged goods. But Japan has its own deep history with toilet paper panic, and that history has its own logic.

Japan’s history with toilet paper panics

The original Japanese toilet paper crisis came in 1973, also triggered by turmoil in the Middle East over oil. It began when Yasuhiro Nakasone, then the minister of international trade and industry, called on the public to conserve paper products. The announcement was meant to signal some austerity. Instead, it sparked rumors that paper supplies were running out—and Japanese consumers, particularly women managing household budgets, began buying enormous quantities of toilet paper. Academics have described the panic as a response to the growing instability of the middle class, a fear their livelihoods were held up by smoke and mirrors.

Since then, Japan has raced for its toilet products every time a crisis rolls around. The devastating earthquake and tsunami of 2011 triggered the same kind of hoarding behavior, though apparently there were some actual disruptions in affected regions. Now, the cycle is repeating itself.

What makes toilet paper the perennial target? It’s bulky and distinctly finite—when it’s gone from the shelf, it’s conspicuous. And unlike food, which you consume and replace in a rhythm, toilet paper occupies a kind of psychological category all its own, a symbol of long-term stability and responsibility. 

“The importance of toilet paper…runs deep into the soul of modern culture,” anthropologist Grant Jun Otsuki wrote about the COVID shortage in 2021. “The mere thought of the disappearance of toilet paper from the world spurs some to act so quickly and decisively to secure their own supplies.”

So far, the panic doesn’t appear to have spread far beyond Japan—except, perhaps, to neighboring Australia, where Perth has reported some early signs of stockpiling. As if the hollering from across the water finally reached the next set of ears.

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Oil and natural gas futures prices—despite trading 60% higher since before the Iran war—remain well below the physical supply shortages facing Asia and spreading around the world that will take many months to replenish, the chairman and CEO of Chevron said March 23.

The large CERAWeek by S&P Global conference is attracting many of the world’s energy leaders from around the world in Houston this week and a top theme is the potential disconnect between energy markets and the greatest global energy supply shock ever with the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which typically funnels nearly 20% of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas each day.

“There are very real physical manifestations of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that are working their way around the world through the system that I don’t think are fully priced in,” said Chevron CEO Mike Wirth.

Asia already is facing major supply shortages that cannot be undone just by the releases of strategic, emergency supplies. That is why many Asian countries have implemented energy conservation mandates, work-from-home efforts, school closures, and more. Wirth also cited the huge supplies of fertilizer for agriculture and helium for semiconductors that flow through the strait offshore of Iran.

“The fundamentals are very tight out there,” Wirth said. “The markets are trading on scant information.”

“Physical supply changes don’t respond immediately,” he added. “Even when strait reopens at some point, it will take time.”

Oil prices dipped notably March 23 when President Donald Trump said he would delay any attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure by five days to allow for greater negotiations, pushing back his March 23 deadline for Iran to reopen the strait. Iran has in turn said it would attack more energy facilities in neighboring Gulf countries if the U.S. followed through on Trump’s threats, further escalating the war. And, later in the day, Iranian officials said no negotiations have taken place, accusing Trump of pushing “fake news” to lower prices.

Iran accused of ‘economic terrorism’

Iran’s counteroffensive strategy of attacking the oil and gas supplies of its neighbors is a form of unprovoked terrorism that will not be accepted, said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates minister of industry and advanced technology, and group CEO of ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

The UAE has cut its oil production by more than 50% this month, while Iraq and Kuwait have made even deeper reductions. Al Jaber canceled his scheduled appearance in Houston because of the war, but he provided a video message. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser also canceled his trip.

“Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz is not an act of aggression against one nation. It’s economic terrorism against every nation,” Al Jaber said. “And no country should be allowed to hold Hormuz hostage. Not now, not ever.”

He accused Iran of “choking the throat” of the “global economy.”

Kicking off CERAWeek, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas executive, said the Iran war is a “conflict that we simply couldn’t kick down the road one more administration.”

Wright called the war “short-term disruption now, but to end a multi-decadal problem.”

The International Energy Agency agreed this month to release 400 million barrels of oil from emergency storage, including 172 million barrels from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Wright said the U.S. began withdrawing oil from the SPR on March 20 and that the U.S. will release at least 1 million barrels each day from the SPR for the next few months. The total global release would equate to nearly 3 million barrels daily, he said.

Still, that does not offset more than 11 million barrels of oil that remains offline, even with Saudi Arabia and the UAE redirecting as many barrels as they can through the Red Sea and other outlets.

“Oil remains the most important energy source in the world,” Wright said. “No oil, no modern world.”

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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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Behind the nation’s greatest college basketball teams is a steady flow of donations from billionaires with varying industry backgrounds and connections to the schools. 

Among them are the cofounder of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest investment firms; the owner of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and a Houston hospitality mogul whose name is flashed on an entire arena. Several powerhouse teams bankrolled by billionaires are favored to advance far in this year’s March Madness tournament. 

Considering the global sports entertainment industry is estimated to be worth more than $3 trillion, it’s no wonder America’s wealthiest are eager to throw money at the nation’s best college athletics programs. 

This year’s March Madness tournament is particularly flush with billionaire money. The Big Ten alone sent six teams to the Sweet 16, meaning the financial stakes for some of the country’s wealthiest athletic boosters have never been higher. This year’s men’s tournament is expected to have more than $270 million in payouts, with each of the 135 available units (games) valued at roughly $2 million, paid out to conferences over six years (that’s about $350,000 per year).

That money flows directly to conferences, not schools. That’s why wealthy alumni and other billionaire boosters step in to fill the gap, pouring hundreds of millions into facilities, NIL deals, and recruiting budgets that tournament checks can’t offer.

Fortune has compiled a sampling of billionaire donors to schools participating in this year’s Sweet 16. Note, this list is not exhaustive.

David Rubenstein is backing Duke

Rubenstein, cofounder of The Carlyle Group, grew up in Baltimore and earned his undergraduate degree from Duke University in 1970, where he has made generous donations over the decades. 

He cofounded The Carlyle Group in 1987 with just $5 million in capital, but grew it to one of the world’s largest private equity firms with $477 billion in assets under management. Rubenstein is worth an estimated $4.2 billion.

Rubenstein has donated more than $60 million to his alma mater, including a $10 million gift to Duke Athletics in 2012. He said he made the donation because of Duke’s “success in so many sports over so many years, [and] because of the program’s commitment to academic achievement and excellence.”

The Carlyle cofounder has made several other multimillion-dollar donations to Duke over the years, including a $20 million scholarship endowment for first-generation students in 2017 and a $25 million gift to support the arts. The billionaire also served on Duke’s board of trustees from 2005 to 2017, including a term as chairman.

Duke, the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament’s East Region, faces St. John’s on Friday at 7:10 p.m. EST on CBS. The Blue Devils are favored to advance.

Jerry Jones credits the University of Arkansas for his success

Jones, the longtime owner of the Dallas Cowboys, has a deep connection to one of this year’s Sweet 16 schools. He’s a University of Arkansas alum and played for the Razorbacks football team in the 1960s before he went on to become a successful oil businessman and the owner of the Dallas Cowboys in 1989. Jones is currently worth an estimated $19.4 billion, with the Cowboys worth approximately $13 billion.

In 2015, Jones donated $10.65 million to Arkansas’ athletic program, which he credited for his success. The gift supported Arkansas’ Student-Athlete Success Center.

“My experiences at the University of Arkansas as a student-athlete under the legendary Coach Frank Broyles helped shape me as a man and guide me on my future career path,” Jones said at the time of the donation. “I would not be where I am today without those life lessons learned as a student-athlete at the University of Arkansas.”

Arkansas faces No. 1 seed Arizona on Thursday at 9:45 p.m. EST on CBS. The Razorbacks are considered a significant underdog, but freshman star Darius Acuff Jr. has made them one of the tournament’s most exciting teams to watch.

Tilman Fertitta supports his hometown

Fertitta is the definition of a hometown billionaire backer. The CEO of Fertitta Entertainment and owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets, he is Houston’s richest sports owner with an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion—a fortune built on hospitality, gaming, and entertainment through his Landry’s restaurant and hotel empire with more than 600 dining, entertainment, and gaming locations nationwide.

In 2016, Fertitta pledged $20 million to the University of Houston’s athletics program to renovate the school’s on-campus basketball arena. This was the largest individual athletic donation in UH history at the time. Fertitta attended UH, although he left before finishing his degree. But the school awarded him with an honorary doctorate in August. 

“This gift is personal,” Fertitta said when he made the 2016 donation. “It represents a commitment from my family and me to support the University of Houston in its quest to strengthen our nationally competitive institution, both in academics and athletics.”

“Upgrading our athletics facilities shows we are serious about competing at the highest levels of collegiate sports for many years to come,” he continued.

The arena was subsequently renamed Fertitta Center. He made an additional $50 million pledge to UH’s medical school in 2022. 

Houston, the No. 2 seed in the South Region, faces Illinois on Thursday at 10:05 p.m. EST on TBS. The Cougars are favored to win.

Larry Ellison is behind Michigan’s makeover

Ellison cofounded tech giant Oracle and is currently one of the world’s wealthiest individuals with a net worth of nearly $200 billion.

He also reportedly underwrote the richest recruiting flip in college football history. Ellison reportedly helped the University of Michigan fund a name, image, and likeness sports package to poach quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood from Louisiana State University in November 2024. While Ellison didn’t have a prior connection to the Wolverines, his wife, Jolin, is a Michigan alumna.

Michigan, the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region, faces Alabama on Friday at 7:35 p.m. EST on TBS. The Wolverines, who are favored to win on Friday, have three projected first-round NBA draft picks on their roster.

Daniel Gilbert funds alma mater, Michigan State

Gilbert founded Rock Financial in 1985, which would eventually become mortgage behemoth Rocket Companies. The fintech and homeownership services company has a $40 billion market cap, and Gilbert has an estimated net worth of $29.4 billion. He also owns the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.

Gilbert donated $15 million to his alma mater, Michigan State University, in 2016 for use toward the school’s basketball program. Both he and his wife, Jennifer, attended Michigan State and said that, at the time, the school had “played a large role in both of our lives.”

Michigan State, the No. 3 seed in the East Region, faces UConn on Friday at 9:45 p.m. EST on CBS. UConn is slightly favored to win.

Jimmy Haslam has donated $50 million to University of Tennessee

Haslam is a University of Tennessee alum and the owner of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, a franchise he purchased in 2012. He and his family built their fortune through Pilot Flying J, the nation’s largest truck-stop chain, which they sold to Berkshire Hathaway in a deal that totaled $13.65 billion over several years. Haslam is worth nearly $10 billion today.

The Haslam family has donated $50 million to the University of Tennessee, one of the largest gifts in school history, supporting academics and athletics at the Knoxville campus. The family’s name adorns Haslam College of Business at UT.

Tennessee, the No. 6 seed in the Midwest Region, faces Iowa State on Friday at 10:10 p.m. EST on TBS. Iowa State is currently favored to win.

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Sending your resume into the void has never felt more useless.

Employers cut 92,000 jobs in February alone. Unemployment among entry-level employees peaked last July at 13.3%, the worst entry-level market in 37 years. Two-thirds of companies have put hiring on pause while they wait to see where AI can fill the gaps, and in the meantime, 1.17 million jobs have been cut since last year.

So you do what everyone does: You turn to AI to write a cover letter that slightly exaggerates the role you held in your junior year of college. That’s totally fine, since three-quarters of resumes never reach a human’s eyes anyway. This means you’re using AI to write something that gets read by AI, fulfilling some twisted ouroboros that Socrates and the lot would have had a doozy explaining to their students.

For Wharton Business Economics Professor Judd Kessler, there’s a simple alternative: Toss the fake enthusiasm and pick up the phone. The University of Pennsylvania professor and author of Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want instead thinks the cover letter’s days are numbered.

“I expect that in the not too distant future, cover letters are gone,” Kessler told Fortune. “Either cover letters will be required and everybody will have AI write good ones and they’ll be ignored, or employers will stop asking for them because they realize they’re not looking at them and they’re not adding value.”

Kessler says job hunting is starting to look a lot like the good ol’ days: It’s all about who you know. At the heart of his argument is the concept of a hidden market: any system that has to allocate something valuable without simply letting the highest bidder win. Think of Taylor Swift pricing concert tickets at $99 when millions of fans would pay 10 times that, or a university with 50,000 applicants for 2,000 freshman seats. Price alone can’t decide who gets what, so other rules take over—rules like knowing a roadie who can get you behind the stage, or having an alumni vouch for you. These are all signals in a hidden market.

And the labor market is one of the biggest hidden markets of all.

“We want to allocate scarce resources, and we don’t want to let price do the job on its own,” Kessler said. “We find it more efficient to have a search process where we identify the best person for the role.”

In this dynamic, signals like the cover letter used to matter, because it meant candidates were spending the time and making the effort to show their enthusiasm.

“It was a costly signal that a job candidate could send that they were really interested in a particular role,” Kessler said. “And it was costly because writing a good one was hard and took time, and you couldn’t do it for every firm.” The signal was hard to ignore: This candidate was serious; after all, they wrote a cover letter. 

The AI ouroboros

That all changed when AI made it a quick snap to fake enthusiasm in three frivolous paragraphs.

“Generative AI comes, and something that used to take a few hours to do well now takes a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes,” Kessler said. “And all of a sudden that signal that used to be costly is now very cheap. Economists would call it cheap talk: You can make it look like you are really motivated to join that firm, that the job was designed for you, but you can create that signal very cheaply.”

The research backs him up. Kessler pointed to a study by economists Jingyi Cui, Gabriel Dias, and Justin Ye that tracked what happened when a major job platform introduced an AI cover-letter writing assistant. Letter quality improved because they were better targeted, and well-targeted letters led to more interviews. But as the tool spread, “employers stopped relying on cover letters in their hiring decisions,” Kessler said. “The cover letters got better, and they became a less useful tool overall.”

“In the old days, there used to be a few good cover letters, and that was how you could identify the best-fit candidates,” he said. “Now, all the cover letters pass some threshold. They become a prerequisite rather than a differentiator.”

Once every application looks polished, none stand out—and the rational employer either outsources the reading to AI or stops reading altogether. “That’s when you would hand it off to AI to be responsible,” Kessler said.

Kessler has watched it happen in his own hiring. Despite selecting research assistants at Wharton for the last 15 years, “all of the best cover letters have come in the last 12 months,” he said with a laugh, all of which suddenly reference his research papers.

“That used to be a way that I could tell who was actually motivated,” he said. “But now everybody does that, and my guess is it’s not because everybody has read that research. Everybody has figured out that AI can write a good summary of what I work on and weave that into a narrative. And that means I can’t use the cover letter as a good indication that somebody’s motivated to work with me.”

Instead of relying on an AI-written CliffNotes summary of his own research, Kessler now points to other hidden market signals: “Do they take my course? Do they come to office hours? Do they try to meet with me in person? Those are the signals I start to rely on more, because the cover letter is insufficient.”

A return to the coffee chat

The cover letter is dead, Kessler says and as a result, the signals are going old school: reaching out and classic networking.

“For the specific signal of ‘I really want to work at this firm,’ which is a signal that the applicant themselves can send, it’s going to be more things that cannot be replicated with AI,” he said.

“It’s going to be doing in-person networking with members of the leadership team at the firm, taking people that work at the firm out to coffee, going to the coffee chat that the firm has. And those are real costly signals, because they can’t be replicated with AI,” he added. “When I choose to go talk to people at a firm, I’m using hours that I can’t spend talking to people at another firm.”

While the coffee chat isn’t new, Kessler said the return to meeting people and showing other signals spells the cover letter’s inevitable end.

“I often describe this as the age of the cover letter being over,” Kessler said. “AI killed the cover letter.”

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In the time it takes to walk from your car to your desk, President Donald Trump added $1.7 trillion to stocks and pushed the price of oil down by $17, or approximately 15%. By the time you got your coffee, Iran had reportedly called him a liar, and half those gains vanished.

This is the average Monday morning for a very market-oriented executive in the fourth week of war.

At approximately 7 a.m. ET, Trump posted in all-caps on Truth Social that the U.S. and Iran held “very good and productive conversations” over the weekend toward “a complete and total resolution” of hostilities in the Middle East. He ordered the Pentagon to pause all strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days. 

Washington had kept Israel informed of the talks, Reuters reported, and Israel is expected to follow the U.S. in suspending strikes on Iranian power plants.

That came after Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran Saturday night, calling on the regime to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face bombardment of its power grid. Now, it appears he’s buying time for the workweek, and leaving the weekend as a buffer before any next move.

S&P 500 futures swung nearly 4% off their lows, Brent crude collapsed from $109 to a low of $92 before partially recovering, and West Texas Intermediate touched $88.70, its lowest point since the war began.

Iran’s state media reported that the talks never happened, citing an unnamed “senior security official” in a post on Telegram. The official called it a ploy to manipulate markets and said there’s no communication lines between the two countries. As of time of writing, no official from Iran has publicly confirmed or denied Trump’s claim. 

Trump told Fox Business that talks did occur Sunday night, involving special envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, facilitated by Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. Iran wants a deal “badly,” he said.

“We have major points of agreement—I would say almost all points of agreement. Perhaps that hasn’t been conveyed,” he added, also joking that Iran needs “better public relations people.” 

Wall Street has a word for all of it, coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong last May: TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out. The acronym describes Trump’s habit of making catastrophic threats that cause market panic, then reversing course before economic pain can set in. The trade has minted money for investors who bought every dip, confident that Trump’s tolerance for damage had a ceiling. 

The pattern was seen in his trade war last year as he announced prohibitively high tariffs only to reach a deal later. It played out in Greenland too early this year, when Trump spent weeks threatening to seize the island only to settle for a vague base agreement.

The Iran war is, theoretically, supposed to function differently: after all, it takes “two to TACO,” since Trump cannot just unilaterally end the war the same way he could unilaterally pull back sanctions.

Oil analyst Rory Johnston wrote on Monday that though the “base case” was that Trump would try to back out and declare victory, it won’t be that simple to bring down oil prices.

“Hormuz flow still hasn’t resumed and every day we’re shedding more oil from the system,” he wrote on X. “That’ll catch up—can’t jawbone 10 to 15 million barrels per day stock draws.” 

It is unclear who Trump is even negotiating with on Iran’s side. He told Fox Business he’s dealing with the man who’s “most respected” in Iran, though “It’s a little tough — we’ve wiped out everybody.”

U.S.-Israeli forces have killed most of Iran’s top brass, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, security chief Ali Larijani, and other senior leaders. When asked a few weeks ago whom Trump wanted to see replace the ayatollah, Trump said “everyone we had in mind is dead.”

The Jerusalem Post has reported that Trump’s actual interlocutor is Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. 

Trump also said on Fox Business Monday that he and new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei—son of the late Ali Khamenei—would together be in charge of the Strait of Hormuz.

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The ‘Gen Z stare’ became an internet meme last year—used to describe a blank, expressionless look from a generation often glued to their phones. But it’s not just a phenomenon among today’s young people—even Mark Zuckerberg once had his own version of it.

On a recent episode of The Social Radars podcast, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham recalled meeting the Facebook cofounder around 2007—and being struck by his lack of social skills.

“[Zuckerberg] has this weird thing where if he didn’t have anything to say, he wouldn’t fill the gap with passing conversation,” Graham said. “He had no concept of small talk.”

The silence coming from the twentysomething Harvard dropout, Graham added, was more jarring than expected: “It was surprisingly disconcerting. I didn’t realize how important small talk was until I met the lack of it. But he would just stare at you if there wasn’t anything [to say].”

In the 1990s, Graham cofounded the software company Viaweb, which Yahoo acquired in 1998 for $49 million. In 2005, he co-founded the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has helped launch billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, and Reddit. While his exact net worth is not public, Graham has likely earned substantial income through his investments.

Even Mark Zuckerberg agrees he came across ‘as robotic’ before finding success

Now 41, Zuckerberg’s communication skills have in fact visibly evolved. From delivering Harvard’s commencement address in 2017 to testifying before Congress multiple times, he’s grown into a far more polished public speaker—and it’s worked to his advantage. Zuckerberg himself now has a net worth of $210 billion.

Graham quipped his first meeting with Zuckerberg was before he “had learned to imitate a normal person,”—but the tech founder himself has acknowledged he has struggled with communication as he’s taken his social media platform from a Harvard dorm room idea to one of the biggest companies in the world with a $1.5 trillion market cap.

“Look, historically I’ve had a very hard time expressing myself,” Zuckerberg told NBC News in 2019. “I just come across as robotic.”

He echoed that sentiment years later on Threads, saying that feedback about his awkwardness initially made things worse—but he’s improved with time: “Being awkward and getting negative feedback on how I came across definitely made me more careful and scripted,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2024.

Fortune reached out to Y Combinator and Meta for further comment.

Communication is more than a nice-to-have—it’s a skill that billionaire CEOs like Richard Branson and Jamie Dimon say is table stakes

Graham’s observations about a young Zuckerberg—and his evolution—underscore a broader point: communication, even seemingly trivial small talk, can shape how ideas are received and careers unfold. While Zuckerberg had a breakthrough product and early momentum to offset his social awkwardness, many Gen Z workers don’t have that cushion—and are struggling with communication in today’s tech-driven workplace.

About 38% say networking makes them anxious, according to a survey conducted by Strand Partners for LinkedIn, with many young people avoiding it altogether because they don’t know where to start. But the stakes go beyond just missed opportunities: communication gaps are among the reasons some employers have already begun giving the pink slip to recent Gen Z hires.

Strong communication has long been a hallmark of effective leadership. Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, has called it the “most important skill any leader can possess.”

“Communication makes the world go round. It facilitates human connections, and allows us to learn, grow and progress,” Branson wrote in 2015. “It’s not just about speaking or reading, but understanding what is being said – and in some cases what is not being said.”

And in the age of AI, those human skills are becoming even more valuable than ever. 

“AI can’t replace genuine human connection,” said Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place To Work. “It can’t listen, care, or inspire people. That’s what leaders do. Technology can help us work smarter, but only people can build trust.”

It’s a view shared by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who said that soft skills like communication matter more than ever.

“My advice to people would be critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ [emotional quotient], learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write,” Dimon told Fox News late last year. “You’ll have plenty of jobs.”

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The U.S. government is insolvent. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.

Importantly, the $47.78 trillion in reported liabilities does not include the unfunded obligations of social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare — those are disclosed separately in the off-balance-sheet Statement of Social Insurance (SOSI).

The government’s consolidated balance sheet position, excluding the SOSI, deteriorated by nearly $2.07 trillion between FY 2024 and FY 2025, reaching a staggering negative $41.72 trillion. Total liabilities are now nearly eight times the value of reported assets. The largest drivers were a $2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable (now $30.33 trillion) and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable (now $15.47 trillion).

The Off-Balance-Sheet Iceberg

The off-balance-sheet picture is even more alarming. The 75-year unfunded social insurance obligation surged by $10.1 trillion in a single year, rising from $78.3 trillion in FY 2024 to $88.4 trillion in FY 2025 — driven primarily by a $6.9 trillion jump in projected Medicare Part B shortfalls and a $2.5 trillion increase for Social Security. The Treasury’s Statement of Long-Term Fiscal Projections shows the 75-year fiscal gap widening from 4.3% of GDP in FY 2024 to 4.7% in FY 2025.

If the $88.4 trillion in 75-year off-balance-sheet obligations were added to the $47.8 trillion in official balance sheet liabilities, total federal obligations would now exceed $136.2 trillion — roughly five times U.S. annual GDP.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.

What $136 Trillion Looks Like in Your Living Room

Not only has the financial press ignored the consolidated financial statements, but most members of Congress and members of the general public will not read the consolidated financial statements. Documents like the consolidated financial statements are not the kind of thing you want to read before driving. If that’s not bad enough, most people cannot relate to the trillion-dollar numbers in the financial statements. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate them into terms that people will understand.

Most people cannot relate to trillion-dollar figures on a government ledger. So consider this: divide every number by 100 million — drop eight zeros — and federal finances look like a household budget in freefall.

That household earns $52,446 and spends $73,378 — running a $20,932 annual deficit. Its total liabilities and unfunded promises amount to $1,361,788 against just $60,554 in assets, leaving it $1.3 million in the hole. Uncle Sam, by any accounting standard, is insolvent.

Congress has clearly lost control of the nation’s finances. America is facing a fiscal catastrophe. The reckoning, long deferred, is becoming impossible to ignore.

Two Bills That Could Change Everything

Addressing this crisis — and preventing recurrence — requires two specific legislative actions.

First, Congress should pass the bipartisan H.R. 3289 — Fiscal Commission Act, sponsored by Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), and 41 co-sponsors. Such a commission would force a public reckoning with the facts, the trade-offs, and the hard choices that restoring fiscal health requires.

Second, Congress should call an Article V Convention limited to proposing a fiscal responsibility amendment to the U.S. Constitution. H.Con.Res. 15, sponsored by Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), would do exactly that. 

Modeled on Switzerland’s Debt Brake, such an amendment would mandate a balanced budget over the business cycle and prohibit federal spending from growing faster than the U.S. economy.

These two bills represent the most credible path forward — if Congress has the will to act.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Face-faced college graduates are watching the American Dream be swept out from underneath them, and entering a gloomy entry-level job market pillaged by AI automation. However, not every company is reeling back hiring young professionals in favor of the tech tools; Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says his business is actually ramping up its recruiting of the digitally-savvy generation. 

“The kids coming out of college right now learned how to program with AI,” Huffman said recently during the Sourcery with Molly O’Shea podcast. “They’re really good at it, and so I think we will go heavy on new grads, because they’re so much more AI native.”

While some CEOs marvel over the abilities of chatbots and AI agents, recent graduates are actually ripe for the new tech-driven world of work: the digital natives grew up with the internet, and spent most of their higher education in the ChatGPT era. They’re deeply familiar with the technology and are much more apt to leverage it in their work. And the cofounder of the $26.7 billion social media empire says that propensity is actually a gift: older generations are more resistant to automating their craft, even if it’s for the better. 

“It’s the old people like me, it’s like I didn’t want to give [coding] up. I finally did,” the 42-year-old millennial CEO explained. “The younger people don’t have that baggage. They just write with AI.”

Reddit CEO says not hiring Gen Z grads is a costly mistake

Tech workers may be nervous that their AI use will lead to their inevitable displacement—but Huffman was resolute that the tech won’t reduce the company’s engineering headcount. 

A Reddit spokesperson also underscored to Fortune that its emerging talent team focuses on recruiting young professionals, also offering new grad opportunities and internships developing essential skills like machine learning, data science, and computer science.

While the tide seems to have shifted away from tech companies recruiting college talent before graduation, Huffman warned that could be a costly mistake. The billionaire says employers need to hire graduates “right out of the gate,” or risk having to pay them 100 times more down the line. 

“There are so many reasons to hire new grads,” Huffman continued. “If you don’t hire them as new grads, you will never see them. They will never be on the job market again. They’re too valuable to ever let them be on the job market.”

CEOs say Gen Z workers are essential to innovation and succession

As companies enforce sweeping layoffs and reel back hiring, entry-level graduates are contending with a fierce labor market. 

The proportion of unemployed Americans who are first-time workers hit a 37-year high in 2025, hitting a peak of 13.3% in July before tapering down to 10.6% last month. And some CEOs even believe the percent of unemployed college graduates could skyrocket within just a couple of years. 

However, there’s a vocal cohort of leaders who won’t leave Gen Z out in the cold—and in fact, their inexperience is sometimes seen as an asset. Echoing Huffman’s point that Gen Z doesn’t come with “baggage,” Ricardo Amper, the founder and CEO of $1.25 billion software company Incode Technologies, believes Gen Z’s naivety is exactly what businesses need to innovate. They aren’t held back by preconceived notions of work or a professional mindset shaped by decades of career experience. 

“My belief [is] that coming out with a fresh mind, first principles, is important. That’s why young people are particularly helpful in tech, because they’re less biased,” Amper told Fortune earlier this year. “I think too much knowledge is actually bad in tech: you’re biased.”

Even if employers believe that AI agents can take over the jobs of their young employees, automating their roles could do long-term damage.

Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky, has warned against shutting Gen Z professionals out of the workforce because the consequences are stifled innovation and a lack of talent ready to step into millennial’s and Gen Xer’s positions. 

“[AI] can do a lot of lower-level, more entry-level position jobs. But if no young people can get jobs, then you have no one in the future to do the highly strategic leadership positions,” Chesky told ABC News in a 2025 interview. “So we need to make room for people early in their careers, even if AI can do the interns’ work.”

Plus, some CEOs like Mark Cuban even argue that it’s an opportune time for Gen Z to seize the moment. Older generations less skilled with AI will need to learn how to implement the tools effectively—and that’s where young digitally-savvy workers step in. 

“Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies,” Cuban advised young workers during the TBPN podcast in 2025. “Learn to customize a model, walk into a company, show the benefits. That is every single job that’s going to be available for kids coming out of school.”

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Markets rebounded Monday after President Donald Trump retreated from his threat to destroy Iranian energy infrastructure and revealed talks with the regime, but the world is unlikely to revert to its prewar status quo, according to a geopolitics expert.

In a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, Eurasia Group Chairman and former State Department official Cliff Kupchan predicted the Iranian regime, dominated by successive layers of hardliners, will remain hostile to the U.S.

“The end of the war, therefore, is unlikely to usher in a stable peace,” he warned. “That reality means the Strait of Hormuz will become a source of geopolitical risk for a long time—a live wire down the middle of the global economy.”

Even if Tehran eventually negotiates away its uranium enrichment program and longer-range ballistic missiles, it will still have drones, mines and fast attack boats that can threaten tankers, Kupchan pointed out.

And Iran wouldn’t have to use its diminished capabilities very often to scare investors. In fact, despite the U.S. and Israel decimating its military with thousands of airstrikes, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been able to keep the Strait of Hormuz largely closed with occasional attacks on ships.

That threat has effectively bottled up about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas, and prices have soared, though they pulled back somewhat on Monday. Still, the genie is already out of the bottle.

“From now on traders will act based on the knowledge that Iran might at any time attack, and that new perception will create new risk premia in critically important sectors,” Kupchan said.

Indeed, Brent crude oil prices are still above $100 a barrel after tumbling 10% Monday. He expects them to trade in the $80 range for several months due to the lingering risk as well as the time needed to restore output. Oil giants like Saudi Arabia and Iraq slashed production as their exports have been throttled by the Hormuz closure.

Likewise for the LNG market, which suffered a major shock last week when Iran struck a top natural gas field in Qatar that will take years to repair. Meanwhile, the Gulf is also a major source of fertilizer, aluminum, and helium, meaning shortages will curb crop yields, industrial output, and semiconductor supplies, respectively.

The new risk environment will cause prices to stay higher globally and further stoke inflation, Kupchan added. At the same time, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will struggle to rehabilitate their images as safe places to invest, affecting the AI and defense sectors too.

“Capital is a coward, going only where it feels safe,” he noted. “Once unimaginable images of office and hotel towers burning after Iranian strikes will pierce investor sentiment.”

To be sure, the U.S. will likely help allies rebuild after the war and increase regional integration, but the Gulf will need a long time to become a global safe haven for capital again, Kupchan wrote.

There are indications, however, that the Iran war will persist or eventually reignite if there’s a ceasefire. Thousands of Marines are still headed for the Middle East for a potential ground assault on Iran’s main oil-export hub, Kharg Island, or perhaps coastal areas to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The UAE also hinted at an increasingly hardened position toward Iran that aligns more closely with the U.S. and Israeli stance.

“Our thinking does not stop at a ceasefire, but rather turns toward solutions that ensure lasting security in the Arabian Gulf, curbing the nuclear threat, missiles, drones, and the bullying of the straits,” Anwar Gargash, a senior UAE diplomat, wrote on X over the weekend. “It is inconceivable that this aggression should turn into a permanent state of threat.”

Even NATO, which nearly collapsed earlier this year as Trump threatened to seize Greenland, will eventually come around to support the Iran war, despite several members rejecting U.S. demands to provide naval escorts, Secretary General Mark Rutte said Sunday.

That’s after Iran launched ballistic missiles at a U.S.-U.K. base 2,500 miles away on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The attack was unsuccessful, but it demonstrated that Iran’s missiles have much longer range than previously known and could theoretically reach most of Europe.

“If Iran would have the nuclear capability, including, together with the missile capability, it will be a direct threat, a existential threat, to Israel, to the region, to Europe, to the stability in the world,” Rutte told CBS News. “So the president doing this is crucial, and I’ve seen the polling, but I really hope the American people will be with him, because he is doing this to make the whole world safer.”

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A landmark free trade deal between the European Union and four South American countries will begin on May 1 after more than a quarter-century of negotiations and new global economic uncertainty unleashed by tariffs, critical mineral controls and the war in Iran.

The European Commission said Monday that the start date for the EU-Mercosur free trade deal was triggered by Brussels receiving a “note verbale” from Paraguay that it had approved the deal, which is a key part of the 27-nation EU’s strategy to slash economic dependencies on China and the United States.

Parliaments in Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina have ratified the deal that links more than 700 million people and accounts for 25% of global gross domestic product. Bolivia, the newest Mercosur member, didn’t participate in negotiations but will be able to join the deal in the coming years.

“The priority now is turning this EU-Mercosur agreement into concrete outcomes, giving EU exporters the platform they need to seize new opportunities for trade, growth and jobs,” said European trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.

Fierce opposition by farmers and environmentalists delayed the deal in December. It then hit another snag after EU lawmakers voted to send the deal to the bloc’s judiciary. The EU executive responded by saying it would provisionally enact the deal — effectively sidestepping the European Parliament.

That means trade will begin in May and halt only if the European Court of Justice rules against it.

French President Emmanuel Macron called that move “a bad surprise.” France and Poland had led a campaign to halt or temper the deal with clauses protecting consumers and agricultural producers.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has shrugged off such criticism of a deal she describes as vital for the EU’s survival in a newly disordered world.

“This is about resilience, this is about growth, and Europe shaping its own future,” she told a news conference in February. Recently, she has not taken questions about the issue.

Von der Leyen is in Australia this week for talks aimed at a potential free trade deal, defense cooperation and critical mineral supplies.

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The U.S. economy was supposed to start the year with a bang, fueled by an unusually large jump in tax refunds from President Donald Trump’s tax cut legislation. Yet spiking gas prices are on track to eat up those refunds, leaving most Americans with little extra to spend.

“Next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time,” Trump said in a prime-time speech in December that was intended to address voters’ concerns about the economy and stubbornly high prices.

But that was before the Iran war, which began Feb. 28. Oil and gas prices have soared since then, with the nationwide average price of gas reaching $3.94 Sunday, up more than a dollar from just a month earlier.

Gas prices are likely to remain elevated for some time, even if the war ends soon, because shipping and production have been disrupted and will take time to recover. Economists now expect slower growth this spring and for the year as a whole, as dollars that are spent on gas are less likely to be used for restaurant meals, new clothes, or entertainment.

Lower and middle-income households are likely to be hit particularly hard, because they receive lower refunds, while spending a greater proportion of their earnings on gas.

“The energy shock is to going to hit those who have the least cushion,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy at the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative and a former economist in the Biden White House. “And it doesn’t look like those tax refunds are going to be here to save them.”

Neale Mahoney, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, calculates that gas prices could peak in May at $4.36 a gallon, based on oil price forecasts by Goldman Sachs, followed by slow declines for the rest of the year. The notion that gas prices decline much more slowly than they rise is so ingrained among economists that they refer to it as the “rocket and feathers” phenomenon.

In that scenario, the average household would pay $740 more in gas this year, nearly equal to the $748 increase in refunds that the Tax Foundation has estimated the average household will receive.

Through March 6, refunds have risen by much less than that, according to IRS data: They have averaged $3,676, up $352 from $3,324 in 2025. Still, average refunds could rise as more complex returns are filed.

Other estimates show similar impacts. Economists at Oxford Economics, a consulting firm, estimate that if gas prices average $3.70 a gallon all year, it will cost consumers about $70 billion — more than the $60 billion in increased tax refunds.

The gas price spike comes with many consumers already in a precarious position, particularly compared to 2022, when gas prices also soared because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At that time, many households still had fattened bank accounts from pandemic-era stimulus payments and companies were hiring rapidly and sharply lifting pay to attract workers.

Now, hiring is nearly at a standstill and Americans’ saving rate has steadily fallen in the past few years as many households borrow more to sustain their spending.

“When you start looking across the perspective from a consumer side, you’re seeing people who have maxed out their credit cards, are using ‘buy now, pay later’ to purchase their groceries,” said Julie Margetta Morgan, president of The Century Foundation, a think tank. “They’re making it work for now, but that can fall apart quite quickly.”

The impact will likely worsen the “K-shaped” narrativ e around the U.S. economy, analysts said, in which higher income households have fared better than lower-income households. The bottom 10% of earners spend nearly 4% of their incomes on gasoline, Pantheon Macroeconomics estimates, while the top 10% spend just 1.5%.

For now, most analysts still expect the U.S. economy to expand this year, even if more slowly, given the gas price shock. Higher gas prices will likely worsen inflation in the short run, but over time weaker spending will also slow growth.

American consumers and businesses have repeatedly shaken off shocks since the pandemic — soaring inflation, rising interest rates, tariffs — and continued to spend, defying concerns that the economy would tip into recession. Many economists note that the proportion of their incomes that Americans spend on gas and other energy has fallen significantly compared with a decade ago.

Data from the Bank of America Institute, released Friday, showed that spending on gas on the bank’s credit and debit cards shot 14.4% higher in the week ended March 14 compared with a year ago. Before the war, such spending was running 5% below the previous year, a benefit to consumers.

Spending on discretionary items — restaurant meals, electronics, and travel — is still growing, the institute said, evidence of consumer resilience. But there is little sign it is accelerating, as many economists had hoped.

“The longer these gasoline prices persist, the more that will gradually sap consumer discretionary spending,” said David Tinsley, senior economist at the institute.

Other analysts expect growth will slow because of the war. Bernard Yaros and Michael Pearce, economists at Oxford Economics, forecast that the U.S. economy will grow just 1.9% this year, down from an earlier estimate of 2.5%.

“We had anticipated a lift in spending from a bumper tax refund season,” they wrote, “but the rise in gasoline prices, if sustained, would more than offset that boost.”

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The head of the International Energy Agency said Monday that the global economy faces a “major, major threat” because of the Iran war.

“No country will be immune to the effects of this crisis if it continues to go in this direction,” Fatih Birol said at Australia’s National Press Club in Canberra on Monday.

The crisis in the Middle East, he said, has had a worse impact on oil than the two oil shocks of the 1970s combined, and a worse effect on gas than the Russia-Ukraine war.

Israel launched a new wave of attacks early Monday against Tehran. U.S. President Donald Trump also warned the United States will “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Tehran doesn’t fully open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. That prompted Iran to say it would respond to any such strike with attacks on U.S. and Israeli energy and infrastructure assets.

Trump is facing increasing pressure at home to secure the strait as oil prices soar.

One major fear is that the war could knock out oil and gas production in the Middle East for a long time, which would mean high prices could last a while and cause inflation to rip higher around the world. The U.S. stock market has a history of bouncing back relatively quickly from past conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, as long as oil prices don’t stay too high for too long.

Iran on Monday renewed strikes on its Gulf neighbors and threatened to start hitting their power plants.

“The situation is very severe,” Birol said in Australia.

The oil crises of 1973 and 1979, he said, lost together 10 million barrels per day, causing “major economic problems around the world, the recessions. And today, only as of today, we lost 11 million barrels per day — so more than two major oil shocks put together.”

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, the gas markets, especially 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).”

Birol said 40 energy assets in nine countries across the region were “severely or very severely damaged.”

“Some of the vital arteries of the global economy, such as petrochemical, such as fertilizers, such as sulfur, such as helium — their trade is all interrupted, which would have serious consequences for the global economy,” he said.

He said the International Energy Agency, “in order to comfort the markets,” earlier released 400 million barrels of oil, “which is historic. We have never released so much oil to the markets. … The single most important solution to this problem is opening up the Hormuz Strait as things stand now.”

The official added that he was consulting with governments in Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East about the prospect of releasing further stockpiled oil.

“We will see, we will look at the markets,” he said. “If it is necessary, of course, we will do it, but we will look at the conditions, we will analyze, assess the market and discuss with our member countries.”

___

AP writer Foster Klug contributed to this report from Tokyo.

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Arrivals and departures were temporarily paused at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Monday morning after air traffic controllers evacuated the tower due to a burning smell coming from an elevator, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the issue, and the agency said it was determined that no fire had occurred. The delay lasted less than an hour, and no injuries were reported.

During the pause, FAA staff relocated to a backup tower at the airport, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport. They later returned to the primary tower.

Earlier this month, four airports serving Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Richmond, Virginia, halted all flights for over an hour because of a strong chemical smell that was impeding air traffic controllers. Federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the source of the strong odor was traced to a circuit board that overheated and was replaced.

The temporary pause at Newark Liberty was not related to a fatal accident at New York’s LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night. In that episode, two people were killed and several others were seriously injured when an Air Canada regional jet struck a fire truck on a runway while landing, officials said.

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Two people were killed and several others badly hurt when an Air Canada regional jet struck a fire truck on a runway while landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, officials said.

The pilot and copilot were killed in the late Sunday night collision, which crushed the nose of the aircraft, while around 40 passengers and crew members were taken to area hospitals, some with serious injuries. Most have since been released from treatment, authorities said Monday.

Two Port Authority employees who were traveling in the fire truck also suffered injuries that were not believed to be life-threatening, aid Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport.

In the moments before the crash, an air traffic controller could be heard on a radio transmission giving clearance to a vehicle to cross part of the tarmac, then trying to stop it.

The airport was shut down and air traffic was diverted, and on Monday morning operations also were halted at Newark Liberty International Airport in neighboring New Jersey. Air traffic controllers evacuated the tower because of a burning smell from an elevator, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The shutdowns happened during long waits for travelers due to the busy spring break travel season and a shortage of Transportation Security Administration officers because of a lack of routine funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

Pilot and copilot were based out of Canada

The pilot and copilot who died were both based out of Canada, Garcia said during a news conference.

The airport will remain closed until at least 2 p.m. Monday to facilitate the investigation, which is being led by the National Transportation Safety Board.

“Two pilots were killed and dozens injured in this tragedy. Our thoughts are with the victims, their families, and everyone affected,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul posted online.

The fire truck was traveling across the runway to respond to a separate incident aboard a United Airlines flight, whose pilot had reported “an issue with odor,” said Garcia, who deferred additional questions about the sequence of events leading up to the crash to the NTSB.

There were 72 passengers and four crew members aboard the aircraft, a Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada, according to a statement from the airline. The flight originated at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, the major airport serving Montreal.

Photos and videos from the scene showed severe damage to the front of the aircraft, with cables and debris hanging from a mangled cockpit. Nearby, a damaged emergency vehicle lay on its side.

Stairways used to evacuate passengers from the aircraft were pushed up to the emergency exits on the jet, a Bombardier CRJ. The impact left the jet with its crumpled nose tilted upward.

Air traffic controller tried to stop vehicle after giving clearance

The air traffic controller tried to warn the vehicle.

“Stop, Truck 1. Stop,” the transmission says. The controller can then be heard frantically diverting an incoming aircraft from landing.

Air traffic controllers are not impacted by the partial government shutdown that has caused long delays at airport security checkpoints in recent days. They have been affected by past shutdowns.

As passengers straggled out of the airport into the dark early Monday, some described having arrived at LaGuardia hours before their flight, hoping to beat the lines.

Arturo Davidson said his Miami-bound flight was on the tarmac Sunday night when fellow passengers saw the collision or its aftermath and reactions rippled through the cabin.

The passengers were soon told there had been an accident. About 20 minutes later, they were informed the airport was closing and they must return to the terminal, he said later Monday, gazing at a departure board filled with cancellations.

“I don’t think we’re going at two,” he sighed, referring to the time Monday afternoon that officials gave as the earliest for reopening LaGuardia.

One of the nation’s busiest airports

LaGuardia was 19th busiest in 2024 out of more than 500 U.S. airports, with over 16.7 million passengers boarding there, according to a 2025 FAA database.

The airport, which opened to commercial traffic in 1939, covers 680 acres (275 hectares) and borders Flushing and Bowery bays in Queens. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey describes it as “one of the nation’s leading domestic gateways for business and leisure travel” in its 2024 Airport Traffic Report.

LaGuardia is one of 35 major airports across the country equipped with an advanced surface surveillance system that uses radar and data from locator systems on planes to alert controllers to potential conflicts on runways, according to the FAA.

There are three different models of Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting trucks, according to a video put out last year about the unit by the Port Authority. One carries 1,500 gallons (5,678 liters) of water and firefighting chemicals. Two others carry 3,000 gallons (11,356 liters) of water. One of those models is also equipped with a turret that can extend 65 feet (20 meters) to penetrate inside an aircraft and discharge firefighting chemicals.

It’s still too early to tell what went wrong, and investigators from the NTSB will now start collecting facts, interviewing people, downloading recordings and reviewing data from flight recorders, aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said.

“It might be easy enough just to say, ‘Oh, the controller made a mistake.’ But there’s got to be deeper questions,” he said.

___

The story has been updated to correct that the Port Authority video on trucks was put out last year, not last month.

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As of 9 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil sold for $101.44 per barrel (using Brent as the benchmark, which we’ll get into momentarily). That’s $10.64 lower than yesterday—but approximately a $29 rise over the past year.

Will oil prices go up?

It’s impossible to predict the future of oil prices. Several factors determine the movement of oil, but it ultimately boils down to supply and demand. Again, when threats of economic downturn, war, etc. are high, the oil trajectory can turn rapidly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

When you pay for gas at the pump, you’re paying for more than just the crude oil itself; you’re also springing for links along the chain, such as the refineries and wholesalers—not to mention taxes and local gas station markups.

Still, the crude oil aspect affects the final price most dramatically, as it typically accounts for more than half the price per gallon. When oil prices spike, so do gas prices. And frustratingly, when oil prices drop, gas prices tend to take their time drifting down to the lower price (sometimes referred to as “rockets and feathers”).

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In case of emergency, the U.S. has a store of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its primary purpose is energy security in case of disaster (think sanctions, severe storm damage, even war). But it can also go a long way toward softening crippling price hikes during supply shocks.

It’s not a long-term answer—more of an immediate relief to assist the consumer and keep critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are both major energy fuels. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible—which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

When examining oil’s performance, there are generally two major benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Between the two, Brent better represents global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. And, it’s often the best way to track historical oil performance. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark across several decades, oil has been anything but steady. It’s seen spikes due to factors such as wars and supply cuts, and it’s also seen crashes from global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as lower demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with increased global demand, but it soon plummeted alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

All to say, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Natural gas prices in Texas plunge deep into negative territory and producers are burning it off
• ‘Almost exactly offsetting the boost’: Higher gasoline prices this year could wipe out tax refunds
• U.S. allows sale of stranded Iran oil to cap fuel-price rises

Frequently asked questions

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Around the boardroom table, Carmen-Maja Rex’s colleagues slip easily between French and English. When the Airbus CHRO takes her seat, the discussion naturally settles into English without anyone flagging the switch. For a company founded in France, built partly in Germany, assembling aircraft across Europe and flying them globally, English has quietly become the default working language. The same takes place just a few hundred kilometers away at Sodexo’s headquarters just outside of Paris. CHRO Heather Jacobs is American, and most of her conversations in the boardroom are in English, despite the company having roots in the French city of Marseille.

English is now the most widely spoken language in history, with around 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, and fluency in it has quietly become an unwritten yet essential requirement for many senior roles at multinationals. This expectation can disadvantage those who are not native English speakers, and now sits against a wider political backdrop in which leaders such as Donald Trump have designated English as the U.S.’s official language, promoting warnings from scholars about how easily the ‘speak English’ rhetoric can slide into exclusion. 

The OECD examined 11 million online job postings in 2021, across the EU and the U.K., and found that 22% explicitly required English proficiency. German was the next most frequently requested language, appearing in 1.7% of listings, often in tourism-related roles. French was required in only 1.1% of postings, while Italian was required in only 0.4%. 

In Europe’s boardrooms, the growing dominance of English isn’t just a matter of habit; it’s also driven by global business demands, with effects that reach into areas such as rules and safety. It also shapes who fits in, who advances, and how companies operate. The question now is whether AI is reinforcing English as a ‘superior’ language of leadership, or simply making it easier for organizations to maintain a common corporate language—and whether businesses could realistically return to a more localised way of functioning.

A language born of power, not policy

Although English is mandated as the common corporate language in many Fortune 500 Europe headquarters across the region, its dominance is, in many ways, a historical “accident”. Nina Bellak, PhD, Senior Lecturer at the University of Vienna, links the power of English in boardrooms to postwar history. “There’s this power dynamic at a national level between the colonizer and colonized, and it’s a very similar dynamic at a corporate level,” she says. Explaining that English became far more prominent post World War as U.S. economic and political power expanded across the continent. 

Over the following decades, English gradually displaced local languages such as French and German as the dominant working language. Many Fortune 500 European companies have mandated English for simple operational reasons, ranging from safety standards to international financial reporting. Airbus’s decision to mandate English as its working language goes back to the company’s birth in the 1970s, says Rex. “This was very surprising, especially in those days in France—there were not many French companies [that agreed] on English [becoming] the common language,” she adds. The reasoning was largely practical: aviation safety, where English is the global standard. 

Similarly, in the early 2000s, Siemens began using English more consistently after listing on the NYSE, particularly for financial communications, says Nanda Burke, global head of talent and organization at Siemens. In other cases, companies adopted English more organically. For example, at the Swiss electrification and automation company ABB, English became the common corporate language following the merger of Swedish firm ASEA and Swiss company Brown Boveri in 1988. With neither Swedish nor German able to claim precedence, English emerged as neutral ground—less a deliberate strategy than a diplomatic necessity, according to Carolina Granat, ABB’s chief human resources officer.

Beyond industry factors, the prevalence of English within Fortune 500 companies in Europe also reflects its widespread use across countries. In the Netherlands and countries in Scandinavia for example, English classes are compulsory at schools and so individuals pick up the language at a much younger age, hence often functioning as a natural second language. Kaija Bridger, EVP people & communications at elevator engineering company, KONE, says that, in Finland, where the company is headquartered, the country’s small domestic market has caused people to look outward and so most senior leaders operate comfortably in English. “Finnish wouldn’t be the most dominant language to begin with,” she says, adding that one newly employed executive member recently asked for support in learning Finnish. 

Lost in translation

Research suggests this English-first narrative hides a more complex reality. Bellak finds that many multinationals claim to have an official corporate language policy, but day-to-day language choice is messy, hard to regulate and often up to the individual. 

Whilst many companies have officialized English as the common corporate language, local languages remain critical on the ground. At Siemens, day-to-day meetings are conducted in English, although local languages are highly present, and “that is a strength,” says Burke, who is not fluent in German but has been learning “not because it was required but because I now live part-time in Munich and genuinely want to understand and speak the local language.”

At KONE, which operates in 70 countries, Bridger describes the company as a “global company with very local operations”. While English is essential for regional and global roles, local languages dominate among technicians in the field. “Let’s say, all of a sudden, the escalator stops working. Someone needs to be pretty close by and [a technician] needs to be able to fix the lift. That’s where we come to the language and proximity of the business…and that’s where local language plays a huge role,” she adds. Similarly, Sodexo’s Jacobs explains that despite English being the corporate language, “local languages naturally dominate in the markets where we operate”, such as India and mainland China. At the company’s headquarters, more than 25 nationalities are present and so “you hear a little bit of everything,” she notes. While many of these firms have formally mandated English, in practice, they rely on a multilingual ecosystem to function.

KONE

Behind every official language policy, the question arises: whose voices carry furthest when English becomes the default? Whilst most Fortune 500 Europe companies have not officially stated that English is a necessity, it’s almost assumed that at the C-Suite or senior level, individuals can converse in English. “If I think about the C-suite, senior leadership and even middle management roles…If there’s an English language requirement, the idea really is that the person is proficient enough,” says KONE’s Bridger. 

Fluency, status and who gets ahead

Nevertheless, companies remain careful not to treat polished English as a proxy for leadership potential. “Talent is about capability, impact, and values-driven leadership, not accent or fluency,” says ABB’s Granat. Where certain language requirements do matter, most companies take responsibility for removing barriers: localizing job postings, adapting assessment processes and providing learning opportunities so that employees can build language confidence, not only in English but also in the local language of the host country when it is required or encouraged. “Within my first month of being with Sodexo, I had a full week outside of the office [in Southwest France], not just [to learn the] language, but it was about cultural adaptation as well,” Jacobs adds. 

Although many companies invest in language training for employees—including English courses for staff outside English-speaking countries—employees can still experience a sense of status loss. Associate Professor at BI Norwegian Business School, Guro Refsum Sanden, uses this term to describe how non-native speakers of the common corporate language sometimes feel a subjective drop in their professional esteem, as if their competence is being judged through their language skills rather than their actual expertise. This can leave even highly skilled non-native English speakers feeling inadequate when required to operate in a foreign language. By contrast, native English speakers may gain status simply because they remain fluent in the corporate language, even when they are no more professionally capable than their peers—a form of “unearned status”, Refsum Sanden calls it. 

Language isn’t just a communication tool—whether English or the local language of the host country—it is a tool that enables people to integrate and signal whether they ‘belong’ in boardrooms as well as society. Native English speaker Brady Dougan spent eight years as CEO of Credit Suisse and left without ever speaking German; he later called it one of his regrets,  and his inability to speak German was criticized in the Swiss media. In 2015, Anshu Jain, the Indian-born British co-CEO of Deutsche Bank opened the bank’s annual meeting in German before switching to English. However, less than three weeks later, Jain resigned as co-CEO after losing investor confidence. 

Not speaking the native language didn’t directly cost Dougan and Jain their jobs; however, it drew criticism and made it harder for them to connect with local investors, clients and customers. English can evidently get senior leaders into the boardroom; whether they can retain the role without speaking the local language is less certain.

The translator in the room 

That’s also the limit of what AI can currently change. Translation tools, meeting summaries and captions have the ability to smooth over gaps in fluency and assist non-native speakers in writing emails, translating, and functioning more confidently in English-first settings. Airbus’ Rex notes that “AI is supportive in order to build bridges,” and adds that the company has rolled out Gemini globally, resulting in improved translation efficiency. Similarly, Jacobs notes how AI has improved translation processes at Sodexo, making communication faster and more accurate for mandatory learning and employee engagement surveys. 

Yet CHROs broadly agree that even the best AI tools require careful handling to preserve the essence of communication and that AI is nowhere near ready to replace human leadership and interaction. Refsum Sanden warns that the more organisations lean on AI to translate and generate text, the greater the risk that it will “converge” the way people communicate, eroding differences and nuances in local languages. If multilingual companies come to depend on those systems, technology will start to dictate what is considered ‘appropriate’ language in the boardroom and even language included in emails and chat—potentially narrowing, rather than enriching, the range of voices and communication styles that make it into the corporate conversation. 

Executives from KONE, Sodexo and ABB all describe English as the practical “common denominator” that enables cross-border collaboration. Global companies will always have to balance the ‘local’ with the  ‘global’ and KONE’s Bridger doesn’t see that basic tension changing anytime soon. The local side is driven by the markets companies operate in and the customers served, whereas the global side brings scale, shared platforms and processes so that local teams do not need to reinvent the wheel. This is also dependent on population, country and market size. Bridger notes that Finland is a “small nation and [the language] is one of the hardest languages to learn.” Hence, native Finnish speakers at times are empathetic and remain open-minded towards language as a whole.

It’s hard to imagine multinationals operating without at least one shared language to connect their multicultural and multilingual operations. Whether local languages can retain space in multinational boardrooms? “We’re not really there right now,” says Sodexo’s Jacobs, noting that English has effectively become the universal language at the senior level—and that won’t change unless something else emerges to replace it. 

Whilst English has slipped into Europe’s boardrooms as a common bridge over the last few decades, it now carries political and technological weight. President Trump signed the historic executive order designating English as the official language of the United States on March 1st 2025, marking the first time the country has ever had a national language. A symbolic move highlighting how closely language, power and identity are intertwined.

English may remain the boardroom default for the foreseeable future, but it is up to companies to define how tightly they choose to hold onto it—and who that choice leaves out.

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Good morning!

Seven years after Tulsa Remote began paying workers $10,000 to move to their Oklahoma city, the experiment has become a case study in how relocation incentives can bolster a local economy and widen the workforce employers can tap. More than 4,000 workers relocated, contributing some $878 million in economic impact.

That success paved the way for Tulsa’s next act: helping employers tap global talent. Since launching in 2022, the Tulsa Visa Network has helped nearly 100 people from 34 countries secure visas, offering a practical model at a moment when costly H-1B visa fees and a more complicated immigration environment are forcing many employers to rethink how they recruit internationally.

Stan Khrapak, who leads the Tulsa Visa Network, says his program has seen steady demand this year from both individuals seeking visa support and small to midsize companies trying to navigate an increasingly complex system. Roughly half of those the program has helped are in STEM, he says, though the network is also supporting hiring in fields like finance and accounting.

Justin Harlan, managing director of parent program Experience Tulsa, says Tulsa Remote has attracted professionals whose remote jobs strengthen the community without displacing local workers—and that the Visa Network is built on the same premise.

“It’s highly skilled folks coming in [for roles] that companies often have a hard time filling at a local level, and it makes it very hard to argue whether this is adding something to the community.” 

The bigger lesson for HR leaders is that Tulsa’s strategy is not really about cash incentives alone. It is about designing an employee experience that makes people want to live somewhere, stay, and build a life there, Harlan adds.

The Experience Tulsa program has expanded its offerings well beyond the original $10,000 and visa assistance. Participants now receive a $200 monthly health and wellness stipend, access to a free coworking space, and a remote-work certification course developed in partnership with NYU.

The organization also hosts community building events such as movie nights and dance lessons. That, Harlan says, is where many employers still fall short. Companies, especially those with hybrid or remote workforces or those trying to attract global talent, need to think intentionally about how employees experience life outside the office.

“Oftentimes, HR departments will give that lip service or do the quick and easy things that we’re accustomed to,” Harlan says. “But when companies do go out of their way to go above and beyond, I think it’s noticed and can make a big impact in terms of the quality of life that somebody has.”

Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com

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The U.S.’s eye-watering debt burden poses an “existential threat to the future of our nation,” the chairman of the House Budget Committee has warned, as the country’s borrowing figure tipped over $39 trillion.

Texan Republican Jodey Arrington highlighted last week that it had taken the U.S. nearly two centuries to build a debt pile worth $1 trillion, whereas a mere matter of decades later, the Treasury is forking out that figure every year merely in service payments on the debt.

For the fiscal year 2025, the Treasury paid $1.22 trillion in interest on the debt, and for FY2026, the government has already paid out $520 billion. By 2036, that figure is expected to hit to $2.1 trillion annually, according to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office.

Indeed, U.S. debt didn’t reach the $1 trillion mark until the early 1980s, hitting $1.1 trillion under President Ronald Reagan.

As Arrington points out: “It took roughly 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion. Now we add that in a matter of months. Every child in America today carries a $530,000 share of this debt—a crushing legacy we must reverse. Compounding the problem, we now spend more than $1 trillion a year just on interest to service our debt—more than the entire defense budget and triple the amount when Biden took office.”

Arrington isn’t alone in his concern over the nation’s financial trajectory. Figures on the private side of the economy like Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio have warned over a reckoning caused by debt, and U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has also expressed the need for an “adult conversation” about the issue.

There is a range of opinions on which methods should be employed to wrangle borrowing and its associated interest costs. For example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has advocated for a federal unified budget deficit at or below 3% of GDP, which at the moment sits at around 6%. This idea has been backed by the likes of Representatives Bill Huizenga and Scott Peters, the co-chairs of the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum—indeed, the entire steering committee for the forum has backed the notion and introduced a resolution to that effect.

Arrington has called for a harder-line approach. The resolution for a deficit of 3% of GDP is defined more loosely as a target: Arrington wants to open up a conversation about adding fiscal responsibility to the country’s very constitution.

He said last week: “Here’s the sad, sobering, and stunning truth: despite the urgency of our fiscal crisis, Congress is paralyzed—unable to meet the urgency of the moment. So, if Washington won’t act, then it’s time to look beyond our nation’s capital. The Founders gave us another path in Article V of the Constitution, empowering the states and the American people to step in and demand fiscal discipline.

“I’m calling on Congress to convene an Article V Convention. It’s time to restore sanity in our nation’s capital and reverse the curse looming large over this country.”

An Article Five Convention allows amendments to the Constitution, for example, targeting borrowing and government spending. If two-thirds of state legislatures apply, then Congress must call a convention, with a further three-quarters of states required to back the amendment for it to become a legal requirement.

Other approaches

In recent memory, presidents have attempted to rectify the U.S. fiscal position. President Obama oversaw the creation of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles (or Bowles-Simpson) Commission. The ensuing report made several recommendations: Cutting discretionary spending, reforming tax law, and reshaping healthcare spending.

President Trump has suggested some unusual methods to rebalance the books. For example, he has touted a “Gold Card” plan, a visa policy which would charge rich immigrants $5 million for a green card, plus a route to citizenship.”

“A million cards would be worth $5 trillion, and if you sell 10 million of the cards that’s a total of $50 trillion. Well, we have $35 trillion in debt, so that would be nice,” Trump said last year.

Likewise, tariffs were introduced as a way to offset some of the revenue loss from the likes of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Indeed, while Trump’s tariff plans have proved unpopular with foreign governments, economists nonetheless welcome the “peculiar” methods to increase America’s income. As Wharton professor Joao Gomes previously told Fortune: “You can also not deny that [Trump and his administration] bring strange forms of revenue that do change the debt picture.”

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Good morning. In today’s Fortune:

• The war: Oil is at $113 and markets are in meltdown as Trump threatens to escalate the war in Iran tonight if Tehran doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In response, Iran has threatened to start taking out its neighbors’ water supplies. The damage to the oil market is greater than that of 1974 and 2022 put together, the IEA says.
• Exclusive: Supermicro’s dark history of smuggling chips to Iran.
• AI isn’t replacing as many jobs as you’d think.
• Tim Cook’s likely successor at Apple.
• Aye, robot! Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI agent for himself.

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Good morning. Adobe CFO Dan Durn isn’t waiting to see how agentic AI plays out—he’s already running the experiment inside his own finance organization.

Durn, who oversees finance, technology, security, and operations, has turned Adobe’s back office into a live proving ground for autonomous AI agents. The results include contract review time cut in half, more than 300,000 emails auto-responded to in a single year, and finance teams surfacing investor insights in minutes instead of hours.

At Adobe (No. 201 on the Fortune 500), the push is deliberate. If finance doesn’t adopt AI, it risks becoming a “rate limiter of growth”—a back-office bottleneck in a company moving fast on product innovation, Durn told me. Inside finance, he breaks AI deployment into three buckets. For a closer look at how Adobe’s finance chief is rewiring the function, and what it signals for CFOs navigating the same pressure, read more of my interview with Durn here.

The rise of AI is also rapidly reshaping corporate leadership. Even long-tenured leaders face increasing pressure from investors to move aggressively on AI. Recent leadership changes, including the announced retirement of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, highlight how little patience markets now have for perceived hesitation. At the same time, Adobe reported that annualized revenue from its AI-first products more than tripled year over year in its first quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended Feb. 27.

The make-or-break moment for CEOs is contributing to an era of rapid turnover among chief executives, Fortune’s Claire Zillman writes. In 2025, companies in the S&P 1500 named 168 new CEOs, the highest total in more than 15 years, according to Spencer Stuart, a global executive search and leadership advisory firm.

“CEO tenures are getting shorter and fewer incoming chief executives have prior CEO experience, the data shows, making the two-time CEO exceedingly rare,” Zillman writes. “All told, corporate America has turned into a CEO meat-grinder; it’s chewing up and spitting out leaders at a pace not seen in a decade and a half.” You can read more here.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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What if one of the more overlooked pressures on corporate America’s future leadership pipeline is not burnout, return-to-office conflict, or employee disengagement, but inherited wealth?

That is one of the more consequential questions embedded in the Great Wealth Transfer, and one I explore in a new piece. As trillions of dollars move from older Americans to their heirs, fewer people may feel compelled to endure the long climb to senior leadership at large firms.

This is not because the next generation will simply stop working. The evidence suggests that, on average, inherited wealth reduces labor supply only modestly. What it does change is career optionality, giving people more freedom to reject bureaucratic institutions, slow promotion cycles, and systems built around indefinitely deferred reward.

The timing is striking. Younger workers are already revising the meaning of ambition. Just 6% of Gen Z respondents in a Deloitte survey said reaching a leadership position was their primary career goal.

Korn Ferry points to a related shift. When wealth creates a greater financial cushion, employees may not leave outright, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors the path to the C-suite has long required.

That could leave corporate America with fewer people willing to make the compromises the climb still demands, with real implications for succession at the top.

Read the full piece here, including what the CEO of Edward Jones thinks about whether the Great Wealth Transfer could reshape the future of C-suite ambition inside corporate America.

Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

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The Great Wealth Transfer is usually framed as a consumer, housing, or wealth management story. But it may also become a story about power inside corporate America. If financial security arrives before the corner office does, why would the most talented people keep climbing the corporate ladder?

For decades, big companies could count on one thing. Enough ambitious people would tolerate the grind because the ladder promised money, status, and security. But as trillions move from older Americans to their heirs, that bargain may begin to change.

The point is not that inheritance will produce a generation of idlers. It is that it may produce a generation less willing to accept the old terms of advancement. Research suggests that, on average, unearned wealth reduces labor supply only modestly while easing capital constraints and making entrepreneurship more viable. But it does give people more latitude to reject low-agency roles, inert bureaucracies, and systems organized around indefinitely deferred reward.

That matters because the Great Wealth Transfer will not be evenly distributed. Market intelligence firm Cerulli projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with more than half originating from households that make up roughly 2% of the total. The people most likely to receive meaningful inheritances may overlap disproportionately with the talent pools from which major companies have historically drawn future leaders. That may create an opening for broader leadership paths, but only if companies build them deliberately.

This pressure arrives just as younger workers are revising the meaning of ambition. Deloitte’s 2025 global survey found just 6% of Gen Z respondents named reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal. For many high-achieving younger professionals, the goal is no longer rank for its own sake, but a more exacting mix of agency, growth, coherence, and impact.

That shift is not merely cultural. Traditionally, companies held leverage because employees needed the next promotion to secure their financial future. The wealth transfer begins to alter that equation. Korn Ferry points out that when wealth arrives, employees often enter a kind of “semi-retirement” mindset. They do not quit immediately, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors required to reach the C-suite.

That presents a specific problem for corporate America. Large firms still rely heavily on internal cultivation for top leadership. Their senior ranks are built through years of exposure to operating complexity, institutional memory, and the disciplines of organizational life. If even a modest share of high-potential talent becomes less willing to spend 15 or 20 years enduring slow promotion cycles, internal politics, and bureaucratic drag, the leadership pipeline narrows, particularly among those whose financial security gives them greater career optionality.

Few executives are better positioned to see that tension than Penny Pennington, CEO of Edward Jones, who sits at the intersection of wealth management and the corner office. When asked whether the prestige and drive of becoming CEO begin to fade when wealth arrives before the career payoff, she challenges the premise that the climb was ever only about money. “I fundamentally believe in the human desire to prosper and to have well-being in a holistic way,” she tells Fortune. Ambition, she argues, does not disappear with financial security. But it does need to be attached to purpose. In her own career, that meant moving away from banking and corporate finance in search of work with deeper meaning, helping people live more prosperous lives.

What may change, she suggests, is the path upward. It may run through a giant company, a small business, a mechanic’s shop, or a startup. In that sense, inherited wealth may change the route people take more than the desire to keep climbing. Some heirs may have true walk-away money. Others may simply inherit enough to reduce stress, fund a home purchase, or create room to choose differently. Either way, they are less captive to traditional institutions.

That changes tolerance for corporate red tape, slow promotions, and compromises that once seemed unavoidable. If financial security is partly solved, friction stops looking like the price of advancement and starts looking like a test of whether an organization deserves your time.

The Great Wealth Transfer is unlikely to destroy the C-suite pipeline. But it could reshape it enough that companies will have to earn ambition in the years ahead, not merely reward it later.

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Much of the global worry over the closed Strait of Hormuz has focused on crude oil and natural gas, yet the waterway is also a channel for other key Gulf-produced commodities like fertilizer and helium. About a third of the world’s helium and half of its urea, a vital nitrogen-based fertilizer, passes through the strait. 

“Up to 15% of goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz are non-energy materials,” Sugoutam Ghosh, a supply chain management expert from the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), tells Fortune. “These include critical commodities serving as inputs for multiple industries—and any shortage would have cascading impacts on global agriculture and manufacturing.” 

Southeast Asia is particularly vulnerable to an interruption in these supplies. Agriculture is the backbone of many ASEAN economies like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where smallholder farms of rice, maize, and oil palm provide employment and food security. Farming contributes about 10% of Southeast Asia’s GDP and a third of its jobs.

“Fertilizer shocks are not just input-market issues. They’re also social and political ones,” warns Imelda Bacudo, an Indonesia-based agri-food systems expert with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “The risk is not only lower yields, but also reduced farmer incomes, higher rural vulnerability, and eventually, higher food prices for consumers.” 

Many crops grown in Southeast Asia depend on fertilizer, even if the region doesn’t produce that much of it. According to a report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a 50% reduction in fertilizer use can reduce palm oil yields by up to 40%. 

When it comes to fertilizer, experts think that countries can manage a supply shock in the short-term, whether by tapping stockpiles or turning to alternate products. But a prolonged closure would spell trouble for farms—and, in turn, for consumers.

An extended disruption “will have a negative flow-through effect on the next season’s crops,” warns Paul Teng, a visiting senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Some farmers may even reduce their plantings, as they did during the early days of the Ukraine conflict.”

Helium, semiconductors and manufacturing

The supply chain upheaval also extends to helium, a key industrial gas used in cooling and leak detection. In particular, it cools magnets used in chip fabrication and MRI systems. 

“A shortage of helium would pose a risk to both the semiconductor and healthcare sectors,” says Ghosh from SUSS, adding that substitutes are “highly challenging” to find.

“Gases such as nitrogen or argon could be used in older fabrication facilities, but they’re unsuitable for high-precision processes in advanced fabs,” he explains.

Older semiconductor fabrication facilities, such as those in Malaysia or Singapore, also lack advanced helium recycling capabilities. They can recycle just half of their helium, whereas high-end plants, like those operated by TSMC or Samsung, can reuse as much as 90%. 

Chipmakers have responded by looking for alternate sources of helium, particularly from other large exporters like the U.S. and Russia, yet SUSS professor Tay Huay Ling says these measures simply “mitigate risk without eliminating it.” Actions like building stockpiles don’t address the underlying overreliance on imported helium. 

Over the longer term, companies and governments could try to reduce their reliance on supply chains that travel through chokepoints. Industries can also invest in processes that reduce the use of these critical components: Firms that rely on helium can invest in recycling machinery, while the agriculture sector can turn to fertilizer alternatives like green ammonia. 

Bacudo, from the FAO, sees a “real opportunity” for multilateral organizations like ASEAN, which can work together to hedge against some of these supply chain disruptions. 

Still, Asian industries that rely on inputs from an unstable Middle East will need to manage a volatile commodity market. Even if the Iran war ends soon, shortages are likely to continue for months. 

“This crisis looks less like a temporary shock, and more like confirmation of a more fragile era for critical inputs,” Tay, from SUSS, says.