Financial Mindset

America’s electric grid is buckling under extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and an AI buildout that is quietly rewriting U.S. power demand—and General Motors wants to turn that crisis into a business. At a San Francisco event Tuesday called GM Empower, the automaker is pitching itself not just as an EV seller but as a de facto distributed utility, stitching together hundreds of thousands of battery-powered cars, new grid-scale storage, and a unified charging platform into what amounts to a virtual fleet of power plants. The bet puts GM on a collision course with Ford’s newly branded Ford Energy unit as both Detroit rivals race to repurpose underused EV capacity for a more urgent problem: keeping the lights on in the AI era.  GM’s case rests on three planks. A quarter-million cars as power plants The first is its existing fleet. GM says more than 250,000 of its EVs on U.S. roads can already charge bidirectionally—pulling electricity from the grid...

AXA is launching a new Hong Kong–based platform for high‑net‑worth individuals, doubling down on the city just as it overtakes Switzerland as the world’s largest cross‑border wealth hub. On Monday, the French insurer unveiled AXA Global Private, a hub that combines life insurance products with wealth management and succession services for rich families in Asia. The platform will also bundle niche coverages often demanded by the wealthy, such as kidnap‑and‑ransom, art collection, and family‑office insurance.  “After COVID when the border reopened, we saw mainland Chinese customers coming back to Hong Kong, but these were high‑net‑worth customers, rather than the mass affluent,” says Sally Wan, CEO of AXA Greater China and the newly appointed head of AXA Global Private. “They were looking for diversification and protection, especially for family business and legacy planning.” Wan says wealthy families increasingly use participating life policies for estate planning and effi...

Israel said Sunday that Iran launched missiles at it in the first such bombardment since a fragile ceasefire took effect in early April, complicating mediation efforts for a deal to end  the war. Iran’s state broadcaster confirmed the launches. Tehran had warned of retaliation after Israel struck Beirut’s southern suburbs without warning earlier Sunday in defiance of Washington’s request days ago to stand down. Israel called it retaliation for the Iranian-backed  Hezbollah  firing at northern Israel earlier in the day. “Should these acts of aggression be repeated, the responses will be broader in scope and will encompass all American and Zionist targets throughout the region,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said in a statement that also referenced attacks on Iran’s coast and vessels around the Strait of Hormuz. Israel’s military said it intercepted the missiles, and less than an hour later it said people could leave shelters but stay near them. Sirens...

Governor JB Pritzker  issued  an order pausing state tax incentives for data centers in Illinois after the state legislature stalled his plan to keep data-center energy costs from affecting local residents’ bills. Pritzker, a Democrat seeking his third term, said his  order  was in response to the legislature’s failure to raise data centers’ electricity rates, given their high energy usage, which he asked them to do in February. He plans to push the issue during the veto session in mid-November.  “Data centers are asking just too much for too little in return, whether it’s electricity or clean water,” Pritzker said in a video posted on X . “We can’t let them cause our utility bills to go up.”  Ohio paused tax incentives for data centers on Wednesday. Governor Mike DeWine ordered a halt to a program offering tax breaks while a committee studies the economic impact of the projects.  Read More:  Ohio to Halt Data Center Tax Credits a...

Talks to extend the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran are dead in the water, but traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is anything but. The number of ships transiting the contested waterway remains just a fraction of pre-war levels, but fresh reports indicate activity is busier than previously thought. In the last two months—roughly the time that the ceasefire has been in place—U.S. forces have counted nearly 1,000 commercial vessels going in and out of the strait, sources told Bloomberg , adding that most were large cargo and container ships. That translates to about 17 ships per day. While that is well below the daily rate of more than 100 ships before the U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran on Feb. 28, that’s significantly more than other reports show. For example, U.S. Navy data published by the Joint Maritime Information Center tallied 558 cargo ships and oil tankers crossing the strait during the three-month period from March 1 to June 3. And maritim...

US oil drilling has expanded for six straight weeks, the longest uptrend in almost four years, after the Iran war pushed crude prices higher.  The number of rigs drilling across US oil fields rose by two this week to 431, according to data released by Baker Hughes Co. on Friday. The last such streak for domestic exploration was in mid-2022, when energy demand began to recover from pandemic-era lockdowns. The trend suggests shale drillers are responding to sustained gains in oil prices as overseas refiners snap up US cargoes to replace oil supplies disrupted by the conflict that’s  nearing  the 100-day mark. Benchmark US crude futures have surged 35% since the war erupted in late February, averaging almost $98 a barrel during the past six-week period. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com from Fortune | FORTUNE https://ift.tt/CwdM8XU via Financial Mindset

The strangest political convergence of 2026 just got stranger. Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — essentially endorsing the populist logic that Sen. Bernie Sanders articulated just days earlier, and validating the fears that have been building inside his own MAGA base for months. “You make them a partnership in this revolution,” Trump told reporters Friday . “It would be a beautiful thing.” The MAGA revolt no one saw coming For months, Trump tried to hold two contradictory positions simultaneously: champion of AI deregulation and defender of American workers threatened by AI disruption. That tension is snapping under pressure from an unlikely combination of forces — his own base, a Vermont socialist and Silicon Valley CEOs who read the writing on the wall before their own allies did. Steve Bannon’s  War Room  has been running episode after episode at...