Financial Mindset

President Donald Trump in a Saturday evening social media post claimed that Mideast allies have reached the parameters of a deal to end the Iran war and said that he would hold off on ordering new strikes in the five-month old conflict for now. Trump added that the emerging deal “would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.” “Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL,” Trump said. He added that Israel has agreed to join the U.S. in the commitment to try to complete the agreement with Iran that would bring about an end to the war. Earlier, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader, in a phone call with Trump raised concerns about the U.S. potentially escalating the  conflict with Iran , according to a person fam...

President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and the surge in baby boomer retirements could soon redefine what it means to have a healthy labor market. Americans have long been conditioned to expect that robust gains in the Labor Department’s monthly payroll report will result in lower unemployment. When hiring is weak or negative, the labor market can’t absorb enough new workers, sending the jobless rate up. For years, monthly job gains of around 125,000 to 150,000 were considered necessary to offset entrants into the workforce. But when the labor pool is shrinking, the math looks different. In fact, a  report from Dallas Fed economists  earlier this year found that the breakeven rate of employment growth, or the number of net new jobs needed each month to keep the unemployment rate steady, actually went slightly negative during the summer and fall of 2025. That means payrolls can be stagnant or shrink, and the unemployment rate will hol...

Michigan on Saturday joined Minnesota in reporting cyberattacks on nine of the state’s water systems but an official said all systems were operating “safely.” Earlier this week, authorities said cyberattacks targeted over 30 water systems in Minnesota. The source of the attacks is being investigated, but they came amid warnings that Iranian hackers have been focused on such systems. The reports in Michigan surfaced after the state received a federal cyber alert Tuesday about attempts to tamper with operational technology at water systems. Soon after, the state received “a small number of reports from Michigan communities indicating activity consistent with what federal agencies described,” said Dale George, the director of communications at the state’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. He later said nine systems were impacted. “All systems continued to operate safely, issues were addressed by local operators, and there are no known impacts ...

President  Donald Trump  on Saturday sharply criticized U.S. Attorney  Jeanine Pirro’s assessment  that damage to  the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool  was the result of shoddy construction and not the work of vandals, as he claims. Pirro’s office, in a  court filing  on Friday,  moved to drop criminal charges against a former Olympian, David Hearn, who had been accused of deliberately damaging the pool after it underwent a renovation ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration last month. Trump, in a posting on social media, acknowledged that there “may have been some contractor difficulty” in the installation of a new pool liner. But he continues to insist “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool ,” Trump added in his post. The dismissal was an embarrassing setback for a Justice Department that had previously echoed Tr...

This year’s World Cup was the most profitable in FIFA’s history, just as Gianni Infantino promised. FIFA’s own figures put the 2026 tournament’s revenue at roughly $9 billion to $13 billion, well above the $11 billion FIFA had forecast before the event. Revenue across FIFA’s full 2023–2026 cycle, which includes the Club World Cup and Women’s World Cup alongside the men’s tournament, is on track to top $15 billion, which Infantino called proof the tournament had “opened a lot of doors, a lot of opportunities, a lot of possibilities.” That’s roughly double the $7.5 billion FIFA brought in during the 2022 Qatar cycle. Now Infantino wants more. FIFA is reportedly studying whether to expand the 2030 World Cup from 48 to 64 teams. The vehicle is a plan called FIFA Forward Enterprise, announced nine days after that record-setting tournament closed, and it’s why the European contingent, which has won more World Cups than a...

It was just another sunny summer day in Haarlem, Netherlands, when an unusual request landed in Dutch antiquarian bookseller Pieter de Vries’ inbox. A woman named Natalia, identifying herself as being with a company called “ 2077AI ,” was looking to source what she described as a “fairly large order” of books. Attached was a spreadsheet listing more than 3,000 ISBNs along with instructions to match titles, prepare quotes and estimate shipping costs directed to China. De Vries barely looked at it, dismissing the message as spam or phishing without reading past the first few lines. It wasn’t until weeks later, when a Dutch journalist investigating the procurement request contacted him, that he learned of the request’s connection to artificial intelligence. “I was shocked!” said de Vries, who provided Fortune with the email and subsequent spreadsheet containing 3,001 titles, mostly published between 2020 and 2021 by academic publishers like Emeral...

Amazon’s stock price jumped more than 9% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the retail-and-AI giant reported second-quarter results buoyed by its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which is racing faster ahead than it has in more than four years. The cloud unit posted $42.2 billion in revenue in Q2, up 37% from $30.9 billion a year ago, marking AWS’ fastest growth in 18 quarters, and what Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called its fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. AWS added more than $4.6 billion in revenue quarter over quarter, and AWS operating income hit $16.6 billion, up 64% from $10.2 billion a year ago, on a 39.4% margin, up from 32.9% in the same period a year ago. AWS’s backlog—customer agreements representing future revenue—grew to $496 billion.  “AWS is now a $169 billion dollar annualized revenue run rate business, which, for perspective, would place it 24th on the Fortune 500 list if it was a standalone company,” Jassy said during Thursday’s ear...