Financial Mindset

Emily Blunt just took home a cool $15 million for her role on Disclosure Day— hot off the back of a $12.5 million payday for reprising her role as Emily Charlton on The Devil Wears Prada 2. But she could have been earning a much more modest income had she pursued her original dream career.  That’s because growing up, Blunt didn’t want to be an actress at all. She had her sights set on a far less glamorous job: Translating. “Before I was going to be an actress, I wanted to work for the UN and be a Spanish translator,” she recently told BBC Radio 2. “I’ve always loved languages,” Blunt added. “My mother is an incredible linguist, so I think I grew up being quite inspired by her.”  As well as inventing an entire alien language made up of creepy clicking noises and hums for her most recent role in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day, she also had to learn Russian and Korean. And before that, Blunt learned how to talk about river ...

As of 9 a.m. Eastern Time on June 30, oil is trading at $75.02 per barrel, based on the Brent benchmark we’ll explain in a bit. That’s $1.02 above the previous morning’s level and about $7.24 higher than where it stood a year ago. Oil price per barrel % Change Price of oil yesterday $74 +1.37% Price of oil 1 month ago $95.04 -21.06% Price of oil 1 year ago $67.78 +10.68% Will oil prices go up? No one can say for sure where oil prices will go next. Many forces shape the market—but at the core, it’s still about supply and demand. When risks like a potential recession or war ramp up, oil prices can change direction quickly. How oil prices translate to gas pump prices When you buy gas at the pump, you’re covering more than the cost of crude oil. You’re also paying for every step in the process, including refineries, wholesalers, taxes, and the markup your local gas station adds. Even so, crude oil has the biggest influence on what...

President Donald Trump is officially a crypto billionaire, with proceeds from his memecoin and family crypto company accounting for the bulk of his digital assets fortune. But the commander-in–chief has also shown an appetite for blockchain-related stocks and more exotic cryptocurrencies, according to a filing from the Office of Government Ethics released on Tuesday.  Trump’s business entities generated more than $635 million in royalty income from his memecoin and almost $600 million through World Liberty Financial—a crypto company he cofounded with his three sons, longtime business associate Steve Witkoff, and Witkoff’s two sons. And the president pocketed nearly $197 million through DT Marks SC, a company that owns 38.5% percent of Stablecoin Holdco, a Miami-based stablecoin venture.  Trump also has exposure to more niche digital assets through his crypto businesses. The entity connected to World Liberty Financial received more than $33 million in annual income from Bi...

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...