Financial Mindset

“There’s no point in living longer if you’re not healthy.” So says Prem Kumar Nair, CEO of Asia’s largest private health group, IHH Healthcare, as he grapples with an Asia that’s wealthier, longer-lived, and far more willing to spend money on the finer things in life. “As populations grow more affluent and people indulge in good food and wine, we’re seeing a rise in lifestyle diseases: diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol,” he points out in an interview with Fortune. Asia is getting older. One in four people in the region will be older than 65 by 2050, according to the Asian Development Bank . Asians generally have longer life expectancies than those outside the region—but longer lives aren’t the same as healthier ones. A Stanford study published in April found that population aging accounted for 33.6% of the increase in disease burden across mainland China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.  IHH is stepping in with “Healthspan”, a new preventive health...

Learning to read and write cursive was once a rite of passage for practically every American schoolchild. Until the early 20th century, children in the U.S. were generally taught to write in cursive or script , rather than the print writing typically taught to young children today. Some people at the time thought a person’s character could be evaluated based on the quality of their cursive. In the first half of the 20th century, penmanship was often taught as a distinct subject in American elementary schools, where children could spend as much as 45 minutes a day on handwriting instruction and practice. Students during these years generally learned print in kindergarten, first and second grade. Cursive was typically introduced in third or a later grade, in part because some child development researchers at the time believed that writing in print was easier for young children to learn and aligned with the fonts they found when reading. I am a product of this system...

Both major U.S. political parties regularly tout their commitment to working-class Americans and claim to be the party of the working class. However, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans nominate many candidates who spent substantial time in working-class jobs. This near-absence of people from working-class jobs in the halls of power matters. According to research in the U.S. and in other democracies , safety net programs are stingier, business regulations are flimsier and protections for workers are weaker than they would be if people from working-class jobs went on to hold office at higher rates. Working-class people can sometimes influence policy in other ways , but the fact that so few former workers hold elected office means that working-class interests often fall by the wayside in the world’s political institutions. We research the causes and effects of the shortage of politicians from working-class jobs . We define working-class jobs as manual labor jobs, like...

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has sent subpoenas to major Wall Street banks regarding the hedge fund Situational Awareness, according to people familiar with the matter. The information being sought is related to the trading activity of the hedge fund, which came under pressure and was forced to exit many of its positions last month, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. The New York Times earlier reported on the SEC’s subpoenas.  Read More:  The 24-Hour Race to Salvage Situational Awareness’ AI Bets A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment. An SEC inquiry doesn’t mean that a firm or individual is the focus of an investigation and a probe by the regulator can end without an enforcement action. The fund began liquidating some of its equity positions as it faced a barrage of margin calls during last month’s AI stock rout. Ken Griffin’s Citadel stepped in to buy the bulk of its public stock bets. “...

The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges. Unless challenged  or revised, the State Department is expected to announce in the coming weeks the revocation of so-called B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 whose holders have  sought asylum or are now seeking asylum, according to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials. The action will be taken in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security. “We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” said State Department spokesman Tommy...

President Donald Trump is moving toward levying a new tariff on China that would penalize the world’s second-largest economy for flooding the global market with underpriced goods, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations still being finalized, said Trump is considering setting the new tariff at 7.5%. It’s a level administration officials believe would not endanger  the one-year trade truce  between Washington and Beijing or a planned White House meeting between Trump and Chinese President  Xi Jinping  expected to take place  in late September . The move, if finalized, appears to be a calibrated effort by the White House to work around a  Supreme Court decision earlier this year  that struck down Trump’s plan to implement a sweeping, high-tariff scheme not seen since the 1930s. After that decision, the Trump administration announc...

On Dec. 13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing. Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates. But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since Dec. 1. “We were able to find the vehicle on Flocks, actually get the actual plate, learn that it was a car rental,” said the Providence police chief. Police tracked the car thanks to Flock and traced him to a storage unit in New Hampshire less than a week after the shooting. Somewhere in Florida, at almost the same time, a different man was looking into Flock-collected data, but for an entirely different reason. O...