Financial Mindset

The US has allowed the sale of Iranian oil and petrochemical products that have been loaded onto tankers, its latest effort to counter rising oil prices due to the Middle East war. The Department of Treasury issued a general license for energy that’s already on vessels as of Friday, with such purchases authorized through April 19. The measure follows similar moves for Russian oil on the water in a bid to ease an unprecedented fuel supply crunch caused by the war. For now, the vast majority of Iran’s oil is bought by Chinese customers — mainly independent refiners known as teapots. While the US waiver would widen the pool of potential buyers, any new customers would still face the challenge of structuring deals while other restrictions on Iran, including its access to international financial markets, remain in place. The US and Israeli war on Iran has led to a virtual halt in shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of global oil typically transits, with only a trickle of Ir...

The U.S. war on Iran has laid bare a dichotomy in the world’s most advanced military: high-tech weapons and AI have delivered stunning blows at unprecedented speed, while defending against the swarm of missiles and drones launched in retaliation have come at unsustainably lopsided costs. Led by a massive air campaign, the U.S. has claimed more than 7,000 strikes on key sites, with Israel conducting a comparable number of sorties, as AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude recommend targets “ much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought. ” The relentless bombardment has decimated Iran’s military and leadership. But helped by the mass production of cheap drones, the forces that are left still retain enough combat power to attack Gulf neighbors and scare away commercial tankers from the Strait of Hormuz, keeping 20% of the world’s oil bottled up. Iran’s retaliatory barrage has also forced the U.S. and its allies to draw down expensive stockpiles of interceptors. The tactic highlights t...

The Justice Department filed a new lawsuit Friday against Harvard University, saying its leadership failed to  address antisemitism on campus , creating grounds for the government to freeze existing grants and seek repayment for grants already paid. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, is another salvo in a protracted battle between the administration of President Donald Trump and the elite university. “The United States cannot and will not tolerate these failures,” the Justice Department wrote in the lawsuit. It asked the court to compel Harvard to comply with federal civil rights law and to help it “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.” The lawsuit also asks a judge to require that Harvard call police to arrest protesters blocking parts of campus and to appoint an “independent outside monitor,” approved by the government, to ensure it complies with court orders. Harvard did not immediately respond to a req...

China is becoming a “factory to the factories,” ramping up its exports of industrial components like smartphone parts, processors, memory chips and lithium-ion batteries, destined for final assembly in economies like Southeast Asia. “We may buy fewer ‘Made in China’ goods going forward, but more products will have internal components manufactured in China,” says Jeongmin Seong, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the consulting firm’s research arm.  China’s exports of consumer goods declined by 2% last year, yet exports of intermediate goods rose by 9%.  Trade between the U.S. and China declined by 30% last year, due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on Chinese goods. Yet “China stepped up to diversify its trading partners, and mostly with emerging economies,” explains Seong, who is also the author of a new MGI report on global trade. Those new trading partners, mostly manufacturing hubs, had more need for cheap machinery and components from Chin...

Federal agents on Thursday arrested Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, a prominent Silicon Valley executive deep in the AI ecosystem who co-founded Supermicro in 1993 and is a close confidante of CEO and chairman Charles Liang. According to a stunning release from the Department of Justice, an indictment was unsealed in Manhattan federal court on Thursday charging Liaw, 71, and two others with allegedly working in secret to divert billions in Supermicro AI servers to China in violation of U.S. export control laws. The two alleged co-conspirators charged alongside Liaw include Supermicro’s Taiwan general manager Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, who remains a fugitive, and a third-party fixer named Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, who was also taken into custody on Thursday.  The DOJ claims during 2024 and 2025, Liaw took a direct hand in the alleged conspiracy, working with Chang to allegedly find Chinese buyers who wanted the servers, which are packed with highly coveted GPU chips. The pipeline they allege...

Straight‑A report cards have never been more common for America’s teens—but the payoff is not what parents think. A new National Bureau of Economic Research study finds that when teachers hand out “easy A” grades, their students are more likely to skip class, score worse on future tests, and earn less money years later. For a typical high school class, the researchers estimate grade inflation can shave about $213,000 off the group’s future earnings, or roughly $150 a year for each letter grade quietly nudged up. The findings arrive as President Donald Trump pushes a crackdown on grade inflation on college campuses, tying federal funding to whether universities hold the line on grading. Gen Z is already the first generation to score lower than their parents on some measures of cognitive performance, as reading habits erode and schools lean harder on grades instead of learning. The study, entitled “ Easy A’s, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation ,” found that for each ind...

China won’t help the United States reopen the Strait of Hormuz as  requested by President Donald Trump , but it is probably welcoming the  delay in Trump’s highly anticipated trip  to Beijing as the U.S. risks getting bogged down in the Middle East, analysts say. The latest developments are unfolding as Trump’s Iran war, in its third week, is faced with mounting pressure as oil has stopped moving through the strait and U.S. allies have refused to step up to secure the strait. That has produced concerns that China, the United States’ biggest geopolitical rival, could stand to benefit from a war that some say was ill-considered. “President Trump’s request to delay his long-awaited summit with President Xi Jinping underscores how significantly he underestimated the fallout from Operation Epic Fury,” said Ali Wyne, senior research and advocacy adviser for U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group. “A show of U.S. force that was meant to intimidate Beijing has i...