Financial Mindset

Russia has provided Iran with information that could help Tehran strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region, according to two officials familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter. The officials, who were not authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, cautioned that the U.S. intelligence has not uncovered that Russia is directing Iran on what to do with the information as the  U.S. and Israel continue their bombardment  and Iran fires retaliatory salvos at American assets and allies in the Persian Gulf. Still, it’s the first indication that Moscow has sought to get involved in the war that the U.S. and Israel launched on Iran a week ago. Russia is in the rare club of countries that maintains friendly relations with Tehran, which has faced years of isolation over its nuclear program and its support of proxy groups that have wreaked havoc in the Middle East, including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis...

The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply.   Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp. said it was lowering production at both its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas, to maritime traffic following Iranian threats to shipping. That’s clogged up exports from the world’s top oil-producing region and helped drive prices in London to the highest close in more than two years at almost $93 a barrel, sending consumers searching for alternatives and threatening to push global inflation higher.    Kuwait’s oil cutback sta...

The Strait of Hormuz isn’t completely closed as several daring ship captains have risked attacks from Iran to transport cargoes through the narrow Persian Gulf waterway, with some claiming to be Chinese. Tanker traffic has largely come to a standstill since the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran, which has retaliated by lobbing missiles and drones at Gulf neighbors as well as the ships ferrying energy to destinations around the world. About 20% of the world’s oil and liquid natural gas pass through the strait, and the sudden traffic halt has sent prices soaring. But that spike also promises a massive payday for any ships willing to make their deliveries. Freight rates have soared to record highs, and a very large crude carrier heading from the strait to China can earn about $500,000 in revenue per day . Over the past week, at least 10 ships have changed their transponder signal to say “Chinese Owner,” “All Chinese Crew” or “Chinese Crew Onboard,” according to MarineTraffic ...

President Donald Trump  said Saturday that the United States and Latin American countries are banding together to combat violent cartels as his administration looks to demonstrate it remains committed to  sharpening U.S. foreign policy focus on the Western Hemisphere  even while dealing with five-alarm crises around the globe. Trump encouraged regional leaders gathered at his Miami-area golf club to take military action against drug trafficking cartels and transnational gangs that he says pose an “unacceptable threat” to the hemisphere’s national security. “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” Trump said. “We have to use our military. You have to use your military.” Citing the U.S.-led coalition that confronted the Islamic State group in the Middle East, the Republican president said that ”we must now do the same thing to eradicate the cartels at home.” The gathering, which the White House called the  “Shield of the A...

The cycle started this week with Qatar ceasing most of its liquefied natural gas output. Then Iraq and Kuwait began shutting down production from their oilfields. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia may soon follow suit. It’s not because these oil and gas fields are under military threat (though some of them may be). The problem is the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz because of the war in Iran. The tightening of that chokepoint gives many of the Gulf energy producers few export outlets for their barrels. That sets off a chain reaction—with domestic storage filling up and then forcing the shuttering of production. That shuttering, in turn, could create long-term trouble. Oil and gas wells don’t operate like light switches. The shutdown process can trigger equipment failures and geological breakdowns and, even in best-case scenarios, it can take several weeks to resume the full flows of hydrocarbons. The “silent killer” of global energy isn’t just the war; it’s the ir...

As Professor Joseph Stiglitz sees it, AI is not just another technology wave—it’s a force that can erode jobs and hard‑wire a new era of inequality. That is, unless governments and institutions deliberately push it in a different direction.  AI lets firms strip labor out of production, concentrate profits at the top, and push the risks of transition onto workers and the public—exactly the trajectory the Nobel laureate warns about in his 2024 book, the recently reissued The Road to Freedom : Economics and the Good Society. Now, the economics professor argued in a recent interview with Fortune , AI is emerging as a textbook case of how technology can turbocharge inequality. “If we don’t do anything about managing AI, there is a threat that it will lead to more inequality,” Stiglitz said. “And since inequality is such a bad, serious problem in our society, that is a great concern to me.” Stiglitz has spent his career watching capitalism fail the people it was supposed to serve. He...

Who should control AI? Are the corporations that release the powerful technology the arbiters of their fate? Or should that power be vested in the hands of the government? Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense company Anduril—which aims to modernize the U.S. military—thinks the answer is straightforward: give the power to the government. In a recent interview with the New York Post , the billionaire founder weighed in on a burgeoning debate around who gets to determine how AI is used by the government. For the billionaire, it’s up to the government, and therefore, the people, to make specific use decisions. Otherwise, tech companies could imperil democracy. “We need to stick to a position that this is in the hands of the people,” he said. “Anyone who says that a defense company should be going beyond the law, beyond what legislators and elected leaders say in terms of who they’ll work with and not, you are effectively saying you do not believe in this democratic experiment, that yo...