Financial Mindset

When Silicon Valley and the Holy See agree, it is worth asking what they know that governments do not. On Monday, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, calling for AI to be disarmed and regulated in the service of humanity. Standing beside him at the Vatican was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, who acknowledged that AI companies operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.” Separately, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has stated that “the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves” — and that AI leaders, including himself, should not be the ones deciding the technology’s future. This is the architects of the most capable AI systems in existence telling the world they cannot govern themselves alone. The question is no longer whether global AI governance is necessary. It is whether it will be designed before a crisis makes the answer obvi...

In the days before the Memorial Day weekend, rates on 30 year Treasury bonds hit their highest level in 19 years at 5.2%, and the benchmark 10-year reached 4.7%, the top reading since mid-2007. If those kinds of yields take hold, the scenario for federal interest expense posited in the CBO’s “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036,” released in February, descends from dire to near-disastrous . Takeaway: America’s track to fiscal safety has lost all margin for error, and nothing demonstrates that better than the long-term impact of loftier than expected rates. America’s got so little room to maneuver that even yields that modestly exceed the CBO’s “baseline,” as the numbers compound in the years ahead, deliver a huge extra blow by crowding out big chunks of revenue that would otherwise go towards funding such essentials as Defense, Social Security and Medicare. The CBO forecasts that yields on the 30 and 10-year Treasuries will res...

The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 11 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released this week. Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it’s long been considered  the leading cause of preventable death . The  preliminary findings  from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were based on survey responses from more than 24,200 adults. In the survey, CDC officials defined current cigarette smoking as smoking at least 100 cigarettes in a lifetime and now smoking every day or some days. In the mid-1960s, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans, public education campaigns and changes in the social acceptability of lighting up in public. In 2024, the percentage of current adult smokers fell below 10% for ...

David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs, is taking a highly contrarian view of the looming SpaceX IPO that’s generating more excitement than any debut in stock market history. And that’s across the spectrum, from institutions anticipating their biggest payday ever from underwriting the shares, to the funds clamoring to get the way-underpriced allocations that should “pop” big the first day of trading, to the Elon Musk fans clamoring to pile in after the bell rings at the Nasdaq market site, probably in mid-June. Trainer’s got a different take: SpaceX is really skewering investors by raising tens of billions that instead of building profits will going to paying down debt, and “fund an increasingly costly AI race” that SpaceX claims it will totally dominate while in fact, it will encounter powerful competition, and intense pricing pressure, from the likes of Amazon , Google and Microsoft . Put simply, Trainer brands SpaceX proje...

Salesforce really wants to counter the narrative that an AI-related “saaspocalypse” has endangered its growth.  So, alongside its record first-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Wednesday, the cloud software giant commenced its largest-ever accelerated share repurchase at $25 billion. In doing so, the company juiced its earnings per share but cut its full-year cash flow growth outlook roughly in half to account for the debt issued to fund the block share repurchase.  The $25 billion accelerated share repurchase (ASR) is part of a $50 billion stock buyback authorization the Salesforce board approved in February 2026. In the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Salesforce returned $27.5 billion to shareholders, including $27.1 billion in the mega-share block purchase plus $365 million in dividends. The ASR included upfront delivery of 103 million shares and drove Salesforce’s diluted share count down 10% year over year.  Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Wednesday’s...

Forget your salary—this space founder says a simple kids’ marshmallow experiment can reveal whether you’re destined to stay middle class for life.  The classic psychology experiment sees four-year-olds given one marshmallow and a choice: eat it now, or wait until the researcher returns and get two. Most kids can’t resist. And according to Dylan Taylor, philanthropist and CEO of Voyager Technologies, that same impulse is exactly what keeps most people stuck financially in adulthood. “It’s this deferred gratification,” Taylor, who made his first million before hitting 30, explains to Fortune . “It’s like, do you have the mental discipline to defer your gratification?” In his view, grown adults face the same choice every time they sign a car lease or tap a credit card for something they can’t yet afford. “I see a lot of those things—cars and planes and boats and all that stuff…. I support all that stuff when you can afford it, but most people ...

Twenty years ago, betting on New York as a serious technology hub felt contrarian to the point of naivety. Silicon Valley had the engineers, the venture capital, the density of ambition, and most importantly, the shared belief that this was where the future was being built. New York had finance, fashion, and media. The conventional wisdom was that you couldn’t build the next great technology company from a city that didn’t think of itself as a technology city. We met the way builders in New York tend to find each other: less by design and more because we were both doing interesting things in the same small room. This was a moment when people were openly debating whether Silicon Alley was dead. We built anyway. Matt was incubating and backing businesses like Resy, betting that New York’s density and culture were features, not bugs. Patrick was creating new companies at Thrive.  Thrive Capital went on to become one of the anchors of New York’s venture...