Financial Mindset

Oil prices dropped back to where they were in the early days of  the Iran war , and U.S. stocks raced to  another record  Friday after  Iran said the Strait of Hormuz is open  again for commercial tankers carrying crude from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide. The S&P 500 leaped 1.2% to an all-time high and closed out a third straight week of big gains, its longest streak since Halloween. A freer flow of oil could take pressure off prices not only for gasoline but also  for groceries and all kinds of other products  that get moved by vehicles. It could even ultimately help people pay less on credit-card interest and mortgage bills. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged as many as 1,100 points before paring its gain to 868, or 1.8%. The Nasdaq composite climbed 1.5%. The U.S. stock market has jumped more than 12% since hitting  a bottom in late March  on hopes the United States and Iran can avoid a worst-case scenario for the g...

The common milestones of the American dream once came in rapid succession. Couples would get married, buy a home, and have kids. But low inventory, skyrocketing mortgage rates, and stagnating wage growth have scrambled those milestones for some. The National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) 2026 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report, a survey of 6,103 primary residence buyers from July 2025, found that many Gen Zers—which the NAR defines as those ages 18 to 26—are skipping the chapel and walking straight into a realtor’s office. More than half of Gen Zers today, 53%, are buying homes alone. That figure is more than double the rate at which millennials were buying homes solo at the same age. An NAR study from 2013, the first year NAR released their generational trends report, found that singles comprised just 22% of homebuyers 32 and younger. Out of those Gen Zers purchasing a home, 35% are single women and 18% are single men. “Gen Zers are absolutely crushing it when we t...

Anthropic, the high-flying AI company, is facing a backlash from some of its most prolific users over a perceived decline in the performance of its Claude AI models. The issues have left the company—recently valued at $380 billion and reportedly en route to an IPO—scrambling to respond to user revolt and online speculation about its motives and its ability to serve its newest wave of customers. Anthropic’s popular Claude AI model has seen a significant decline in performance recently, according to many developers and heavy users, who say the model increasingly fails to follow instructions, opts for sometimes inappropriate shortcuts, and makes more mistakes on complex workflows. The complaints appear to be connected to recent changes Anthropic quietly made to the way Claude operates, reducing the model’s default “effort” level in order to economize on the number of tokens, or units of data, the model processes in response to each request. (An Anthropic spokesperson has said pu...

Curtis Campbell knows exactly what kind of company people think H&R Block is. It is the place you go in late winter or early spring when your W-2s, 1099s, deductions, and deadlines are piling up, your refund feels urgent, and your anxiety is rising. It is familiar, local, and useful, but not the kind of company that usually comes to mind when people think about product velocity, AI deployment, or a culture of experimentation. Campbell wants to change that. The new CEO, who previously served as H&R Block’s president and chief product officer, is trying to turn the 70-year-old tax preparation giant into something more expansive: a year-round financial platform powered by software, data, and AI, while preserving the human trust that has long set the company apart. That means reimagining H&R Block not just as a seasonal tax brand, but as a business that can advise creators, serve small businesses, help customers manage money, and use technology to automate the most tedious p...

As recently as a few years ago, Dell appeared to be a name destined for the business history books. The stock lost nearly a third of its value in 2022, and it was hard to see the once iconic PC-maker’s place in a post-PC world. Then something extraordinary happened. In the span of two years, Dell quietly built a $25 billion AI infrastructure business from scratch, posted total company record revenues of $113.5 billion, and it is now guiding Wall Street toward $50 billion in AI server sales next year alone. Recently Fortune visited Dell’s CFO in New York to find out more about how the company pulled off something almost no company of its size has managed to do: Reinvent itself in real time. David Kennedy is a 27-year veteran of Dell, and was confirmed as CFO in November 2025 after serving as interim. In a conference room overlooking the chaos of 34th Street, Kennedy walks me through the recent record performance posted by the Round Rock, Texas-based giant ( No. 44 on the Fortune 500)...

AI may be restoring the importance of the liberal arts degree, at least according to the cofounder of one of the industry’s biggest players. Jack Clark, a billionaire cofounder of Anthropic and a former journalist who majored in English literature with creative writing, said his literary education and knowledge of “the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future,” helped him become an influential figure in the world of AI. “I’m a literature graduate and I don’t think you’d put that as a cofounder of a frontier AI company but what turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future,” he said during the Semafor World Economy Summit Monday. “That’s turned out to be, like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn’t have predicted,” he added. For young people trying to figure out where they fit in the increasingly AI-fueled economy, their best bet may be learnin...

Early on April 13, the oil tanker Rich Starry—loaded with Iranian crude and headed for China—made a dramatic U-turn. Instead of exiting the Strait of Hormuz, as it had planned, the ship joined a stationary flotilla of about 800 other vessels, including 400 oil and gas tankers, most of which have remained idle and stranded since late February. “We have not seen any transits from tankers since the U.S. blockade began this morning,” said Claire Jungman, director of maritime risk and intelligence for Vortexa, while noting the abrupt turnaround of the Rich Starry. As peace talks between the U.S. and Iran fell apart over the weekend —although back-channel communication continues—President Donald Trump decided the U.S. would initiate its own blockade over the watery chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically flows. Instead of Iran letting through almost 10% of the normal traffic through a financial tolling system, traffic has for now been r...