Financial Mindset

Iran’s supreme leader vowed Thursday in a defiant tone to protect the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and missile capabilities, which U.S. President Donald Trump has sought to curtail through airstrikes and as part of  a wider deal  to cement the war’s shaky ceasefire. In a statement read by a state television anchor,  Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei  said the only place Americans belonged in the Persian Gulf is “at the bottom of its waters” and that a “new chapter” was being written in the region’s history. Khamenei has not been seen in public since taking over as supreme leader following the killing of his father in the war’s opening airstrikes. His remarks come as  Iran’s economy is reeling  and its oil industry is  being squeezed  by a U.S. Navy blockade halting its tankers from getting out to sea. The world economy is also under pressure as Iran maintains its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of all crude oil is ...

For more than 50 years, OneUnited Bank has operated on the belief that financial empowerment in Black communities requires more than products and services—it requires confronting the systems that keep wealth out of reach. Now, the nation’s largest Black-owned bank is extending that mission into addressing how to close the racial wealth gap. On May 5, OneUnited launches  Who’s Your Ma Honey? , a 10-episode podcast and video series that the Boston-based bank frames as both a cultural reckoning and a direct extension of its community development work. The show streams on YouTube , Apple Podcasts, Spotify , and Audible, and invites high-profile guests to surface buried experiences of shame—then reframe them as the origin story of their resilience and success. The concept lands with particular weight coming from OneUnited. The bank, a designated Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), has financed nearly $1 billion in loans —the majority in low-to-moderate income communit...

Making his first appearance before Congress since the Trump administration went to war in Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced withering questioning from skeptical Democrats Wednesday over a costly conflict being waged without congressional approval. The war has cost $25 billion so far, according to Pentagon numbers presented to the House Armed Services Committee during the contentious hearing that was ostensibly focused on the administration’s  2027 military budget proposal , which would boost defense spending to a historic $1.5 trillion. While Republicans focused on the details of military budgeting and voiced support for the operation, Democrats pivoted to the ballooning  costs of the war , the huge drawdown of  critical U.S. munitions  and the  bombing of a school that killed children . Some lawmakers also questioned President Donald Trump’s dealings with allies and  his shifting justification for the conflict . Hegseth dismissed the criticism ...

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that the invention of the Watt steam engine — which improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine — made coal a more effective energy source. Jevons called it “a confusion of ideas” to assume the efficiency born from this invention would reduce coal consumption. That efficiency actually dramatically increased consumption even as the total amount of coal required for a particular task fell. There’s now a term for this seemingly contradictory idea: the Jevons paradox. In a note on Tuesday, Apollo Global Management’s influential chief economist Torsten Slok applied the Jevons paradox to the AI age. In this scenario, labor is playing the role of coal, meaning as AI adoption increases, the technology will beget more jobs, not fewer. Slok calls this the Jevons employment effect. As the cost of professional work falls as AI makes tasks more efficient, the market for those tasks will actually expand. The total number...

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady shares highlights from a conversation with Michael Rogers. The big leadership story: Budget airline execs ask the Trump administration for help. The markets: Mixed globally after the S&P 500 hit another record high. Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune . Good morning. What does it mean to be agile during these volatile, fast-moving and often dangerous times? Fortune co-hosted a CEO dinner with BCG in Chicago on Thursday where we talked about opportunities in AI, along with the realities of driving change in a more complex threat environment. Here are some highlights from the group discussion and my on-the-record conversation with Admiral Michael Rogers, former head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, who’s now a senior advisor at Brunswick Group. As he put it: “We have to optimize ourselves to deal with a high level of uncertainty, a high level of complexity and a low tolerance for failure by the peop...

China has blocked Meta’s deal to acquire AI startup Manus. The National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top macroeconomic regulator, unceremoniously posted on Monday that it had “decided to block the foreign acquisition of the Manus project and require the parties to unwind the deal.” The move is a headache for Meta, for whom the Manus acquisition, reportedly valued at around $2 billion, was a key element of its new AI strategy. It’s also not clear how Meta can “unwind” the deal: Manus employees had already joined Meta’s AI team, and backers like Tencent and Hongshan Capital had already received their cut of the deal, according to a report from Bloomberg . The blocked deal also shows how quickly the U.S. and Chinese AI ecosystems are decoupling, as both Washington and Beijing now seek to maintain control of strategic technologies and prevent them from leaking to the other.  “The transaction complied fully with applicable law. We anticipate an appropriate resol...

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on the lessons from this weekend’s shooting. The big leadership story: Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is inheriting a messy China business. The markets: Edging up after Iran reportedly proposed a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune . Good morning. The world is more dangerous for leaders, across multiple dimensions. The attempted shooting attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday and the Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman’s home earlier this month are further proof of that. Researchers tracked more than 2,200 direct threats to CEOs across different channels in the five weeks following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson in late 2024, more than the entire year that preceded it. Spending on physical security is up and the geopolitical landscape is obviously more risky with the war on Iran. Now add AI, which has made it dramatically cheaper t...