Financial Mindset

Under the second Trump administration, the United States has seen mass deportations and a sharp escalation in immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security says the crackdown pushed nearly 3 million people out of the country in Trump’s first year back in office. For the first time since the 1960s, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. is declining; because most farmworkers are foreign born , those losses are already beginning to strain American farms . We are social scientists who study immigrant communities in Idaho and the challenges farmworkers face . We also run an annual survey exploring public opinion on a range of policy issues, including immigration and economic conditions. Amid the government’s heated rhetoric , our data shows public opinion on immigration in one of the country’s reddest agricultural states is diverging from national politics and may even be at odds with federal policy. Immigrant labor in agriculture According to th...

Michael Dell is having a banner year. His eponymous company is a key supplier in the data center buildout, selling Nvidia-based servers, racks, cooling and support to CoreWeave and xAI, while working with Nvidia , Google and OpenAI on systems that companies can use to run advanced software. Dell blew past revenue expectations last month, and Michael Dell’s net worth skyrocketed to $217 billion off the back of his company’s surging stock price, making him the fifth-richest person in the world..  But there’s a quieter story beneath the revenue growth: Dell’s gross margin dropped by 26% since the company first reported AI optimized server revenue at the end of February 2025, even as AI now brings in 10 times the consumer revenue of laptops and computers.  The company acknowledged in its most recent earnings call that AI servers drove the 18.1% gross margin now that AI makes up 37% of Dell’s total revenue, suggesting that AI-optimized servers have low...

The canal mania of the 1830s. The British railway bubble of the 1840s. The dot-com crash of 2000. Each began with a genuine technological breakthrough that attracted more capital than commercial returns could ultimately justify. Each ended in a recession. The Bank for International Settlements — the Basel-based institution that coordinates the world’s central banks and serves as the global financial system’s most authoritative watchdog — sees the $1 trillion AI investment boom in the same lineage. And it’s not subtle about the comparison. “The scale and pace of the current AI investment boom, accompanied by expectations of large productivity payoffs, bear resemblance to these precedents,” the BIS writes in its Annual Economic Report 2026, released Sunday. “These episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions.” A bet that’s already outrunning the balance sheet The five largest hyper...

The United States and Iran on Monday separately announced they will send delegations to Qatar this week, though Tehran insisted it has not agreed to meet with the U.S. “at any level” after  attacks across the Persian Gulf over the weekend challenged negotiations to end the war. U.S. President Donald Trump said the Islamic Republic had requested a meeting with U.S. counterparts and that they planned to convene Tuesday in Doha, Qatar. But one of Iran’s senior negotiators denied talks had been scheduled. And the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Tehran was sending its delegation to Qatar, a key mediator in the negotiations, to discuss terms of the interim deal without involving the U.S. The U.S. president has tried to preserve a fragile interim deal, but hostilities mounted in recent days in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil had been shipped before war began. After four days of trading strikes, both sides appeared to pau...

South Korea’s Samsung Group and SK Group are poised to announce as much as 2,000 trillion won ($1.3 trillion) of investments over the next decade as part of President Lee Jae Myung’s flagship industrial strategy,  Korea Economic Daily  reported Monday.  The two groups are expected to unveil the package when their leaders present the plans at the presidential office on Monday, the newspaper said without saying where it obtained the information. Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. are each expected to build four to five semiconductor fabs in the Gwangju area, the newspaper said. Samsung is also expected to build chip packaging plants in South Chungcheong province while SK Hynix will expand NAND plants in North Chungcheong province, the newspaper added.  President Lee will introduce the “Three Mega Projects for the Great Leap Forward” initiative at a 2 p.m. event, South Korea’s presidential office said on Sunday. Presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-j...

In a setback for Warner Bros.′ revamped DC movie operations,  “Supergirl”  was absolutely no match for  “Toy Story 5”  at the box office, opening a distant second to the Pixar blockbuster. After a near-record debut for an animated movie, “Toy Story 5” remained No. 1 at the box office with $70 million in domestic ticket sales and another $89.1 million overseas, according to studio estimates Sunday. The Walt Disney Co. release has in two weeks quickly amassed $585 million globally, making it one of the biggest hits of the year. “Supergirl,” however, failed to lift off. It opened with $38 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters. It added $30 million in overseas markets. Craig Gillespie’s superhero spinoff is the second big-screen release from James Gunn and Peter Safran , who were  tapped to lead DC Studios in late 2022 . Their first release, 2025’s  “Superman,”  grossed $618 million worldwide, a strong-enough start for Gunn and Safran. Bu...

Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Tom Barkin warned that inflation is too high, though he sees tentative signs that price pressures may moderate soon.  “Those numbers are too high,” Barkin said Sunday in an interview with Bloomberg on the sidelines of the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado. A report released Thursday showed the personal consumption expenditures index — the Fed’s preferred metric — rose 4.1% in the year through May, the most since April 2023. While the war in Iran drove up the price of oil and other goods, the increase in price pressures has been more widespread.  “It’s hard to have confidence that you’re headed back to 2% without any more influence from the fed funds rate or the labor market or some other feature that creates disinflation the other way,” Barkin added.  The Richmond Fed chief was heartened by a rapid decline in gasoline prices in his district as the price of oil fell following a recent ceasefire agreement bet...